Duty and painting oneself into a rhetorical corner

Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect

Robert Heinlein

"Duty" in the sense of an obligation is a politically contentious idea. I am personaly a fan of Heinlein's definition, but it suffers for some people's purposes from not being something that you can dictate as in "Doing [this thing I'm interested in] is your duty". The best you can do is explain to them why you think their self-respect should depend on doing it.

As a legal reality a few "duties" are required and you can be punished if you don't comply. If you are summoned for jury duty and neither provide an excuse the court finds acceptable nor show up you can be held in contempt and subjected to fines or jail time. If you are a young but adult male in the US and don't register with the selective service you can get in trouble. In the same vein, many people were punsihed during the Veitnam war era for draft dodging, which brings us to the culture wars.¹

The political right in the country largely partakes of a long standing view that military service is and should be required of men "in times of war" (which really means at the discretion of the political leadership). Some who don't go quite that far feel that there simply shouldn't be a way for a "real man" to not want to join the fight which is a slightly different take. In either case the point is that the community needs defense at times, and the costs should be widely borne.

The political left, on the other hand, mostly feels that it is the right of every citizen to question the motives behind and necessity of military action and to demur from participating if they find them unsavory or unecessary. Some go so far as to consider it an obligation to make such judgements. Some have even held unwilling particpants in military misadventures responsible for the failing of the political and military leadership under which they served.

That is a stark divide, and has been the cause of much dislike and mistrust between people on opposing political teams for the whole of my lifetime.

Then comes Covid19 and the issues of wearing masks in public, social distancing, enforced closures of some kinds of business and so on...

Suddenly there talk from the left of a duty to protect others by respecting these rules and talk from the right about their right to judge the urgency of the threat, the effectiveness of the suggested measures, and the motives of the leaders.

Laugh or cry.

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¹ There is, of course, some tension between this notion and that of religious liberty. Quackers, various Menomnites and other conciencious objectors have been a bone of contension on this matter since the beginning of the nation.