[Sara Hoyt] Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. 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 A. Heinlein
I found this Heinlein quote yesterday, while working on the article for PJmedia (I know most of my Heinlein quotes at a remove, because I first read them in Portuguese, so I need to check every time to make sure I don’t mangle them.) At first sight this resounds a lot with Mister Obama’s statement that "Sin is being unfaithful to my principles" -- which given the changeable nature of the left’s principles means that "sin is what I feel like it should be today."
Of course, that is not it, and if you look at it, it’s quite a different sort of thing. I’d never, at least consciously, come across that quote, but I’ve been living by it for years, partly because I absorbed its ethos from Heinlein’s books. Stuff like, if you save someone’s life you’ve assumed a Chinese obligation for that life. It was that principle that would not allow us, when we moved across the country, to do the common thing of giving away our cats, and just getting kittens after moving. Instead, we orchestrated a three part move to a new city, with cats shipped in two batches after us (and Pete, the difficult case, moving with us, in the car.)
It causes us to pay on contracts, even when it’s not convenient. It causes me to feel an obligation towards Baen, even in these days when Indie would pay me more. It causes us to drive through the night to go help a friend, even when it’s the LAST thing we want to do.
This is because we’ve assumed those obligations voluntarily, as we did the obligations for our children, the obligations for our own upkeep, the obligations to employers and friends, to neighbors and places where we shop and the obligations to this country, like my freely sworn oath to defend the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
What doesn’t it cover? Well, it’s not my duty to make the TSA’s job simpler. I might choose to do it, because the alternative is jail, but I don’t feel a DUTY to do it. It’s not my duty to pay the maximum tax I can owe. I can use deductions and loopholes (we don’t use loopholes, because we’re too poor to afford the lawyers, but you get my point.) It is not my duty to "provide for those who make less." It might be my duty to exert Christian Charity, again freely assumed, but that’s QUITE something else from giving someone a portion of my paycheck simply because on paper I have more money.