Can an action be considered moral if it is done only out of duty or obligation? According to Kantian ethics, the answer to this question is "yes." The morality of an action is based on its universal applicability. Moral acts may not make moral people, but that is not the point. It is merely the action that matters.

So if we help people out of duty, but do not truly care about them, are we then justified in a moral sense? I think that our modern conceptions may tell us that we are. We live with a sense of duality, a dichotomy of being and doing, faith and reason, spirit and body. God tells us to love our neighbor, so we act in loving ways toward our neighbor. We do not, in reality, want to love our neighbor, especially our neighbors that are not up to our standards. But to fulfill the duty, we act in ways that seem to demonstrate love.

I have trouble with morally justifying this type of thinking. If we act out of duty, let's take a look at the real motivation behind it -- fear. We would not act out of duty if the duty was not there. But since we have the duty, we fulfill it in order to avoid negative consequences. The real question should be, what would you do if you were not bound by duty to do so?

But yet, as Christians, are we not free from duty in the legal sense? True, we have a duty to love. But this is not based on fear, because "there is no fear in love...perfect love casts out all fear" (1 John 4:18). So if we love our neighbor only out of duty, are we not attempting to justify ourselves by our own righteousness under the law?

The question then remains, how do I love my neighbor when it is against my human nature? How can this love be made real when all that I am opposes it? We may say that we love the sinner and hate the sin, but we blur this line far too often.

This entry was posted by 141NYC, on Monday, February 14, 2005. You can leave your response.