What Is One's Duty?

About a week ago, I heard a definition of "duty" that didn't sit well with me. It said that "Duty is what others expect of you, but more importantly, it's what you expect of yourself." I'm fine with the "what you expect of yourself" part, but I don't like the part where it linked a person's duty with other people's expectations.

It's not hard to imagine how this definition could become problematic. Suppose you live in a society in which people are expected to go drinking on their 21st birthday. Does that make it your duty to go drinking when you turn 21? Or suppose you used to be a jerk, and people expect you to act like a jerk. Do you have a duty to live up to their expectations?

Of course not.

So, if your duty is not "what others expect of you," what is it?

Another definition calls duty "a moral or legal obligation; a responsibility." Checking the definitions for "obligation" and "responsibility" exposed a few circular definitions, but I think we get the idea. We have a duty to accept our responsibilities and fulfil our obligations.

But what is one's duty, specifically? What is a person morally obligated to do? What responsibilities does a person have as a citizen of their nation and as a human being?

I think that's where things get really tricky, because people have their own ideas of what people should or should not do. I might say that, out of decency, each person has a responsibility to pick up any trash they find in public areas and throw it away. That seems fair, right? If everyone pitches in and picks up the trash they find, soon enough, there won't be any trash to find. However, some might say that a person doesn't have an obligation to pick up other people's trash. It's not their garbage, and it's nt their job to pick up other people's trash, so it's not their responsibility. I can respect that. It isn't really fair to expect someone to pick up someone else's trash.

It's hard to nail down exactly what one's duty is. Not all people agree on what the laws of morality are, let alone on which laws of morality all people should be expected to keep. Then again, I'm not sure how much other people's expectations actually matter. We are not under any obligation to behave how other people expect us to behave. In fact, we're not even obligated to behave how we expect ourselves to behave. We're allowed to surprise ourselves and exceed our expectations, and sometimes it's okay to fall short of our expectations, too. Expectations often set the bar either too high or too low, so we shouldn't consider ourselves morally obligated to conform to them.

But that brings us right back to where we started. If one's duty isn't based on anyone's expectations, what is it based on? Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer to that question. I'll have to think on it more later. For now, all I can say for sure about it is that it is my opinion that one's duty is not necessarily dependant on any person's expectations.