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Duty and virtue are no longer the common coin of daily conversation. Both terms strike many of us as old-fashioned and heavy handed. Yet we incessantly talk about what ought and ought not to be done, and about the sorts of persons we admire or despise. As soon as we talk in these ways we discuss topics traditionally dealt with under the headings of duty and of virtue. If we no longer use these terms, it may be because we associate them with heavily moralistic approaches to life, with obsolete codes and ideals, with ‘Victorian’ values and attitudes, rather than because the concerns our predecessors discussed in these terms have vanished from our lives.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1993
References
1 For recent comments on the traditional links between duty and virtue see Schneewind, 1990, 42–63; on the recent denial of these links see Onora O'Neill, 1992.
2 Claims about the impossibility of an objective account of the good are particularly prominent in the work of leading theorists of justice, including in particular that of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin.
3 Prominent writers who make some or all of these claims include Alasdair Maclntyre, Michael Sandel, Bernard Williams and Carol Gilligan.
4 See Fishkin, 1982.
5 The locus classicus is in the Schematism chapter of The Critique of Pure Reason, esp. A133–6/B172–51 (Kant, 1929).
6 See Campbell, 1975.