ETHICS AND DUTY

’Happiness results from „obedience of duty“ ’ (1)

I am not entirely sure if I agree with this philosophy. Is the happiness I seek and encounter due to obedience? Is obedience referring to that towards social norms, laws, God, my conscience?... Surely one is unable to carry out the commands of all these categories at once . For what satisfies one, dissatisfies the other. But at what point do we stop to pause and follow our will, disobeying the demands of others? To what extent do we experiment.

Liberty is the condition in which an individual has the ability to act according to his or her own will (2) but there is a vague border between human freedom and human security. In 1941 the United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously proposed a set of goals, the ’Four Freedoms’, a set of articulated points as fundamental freedoms that humans „everywhere in the world“ ought to enjoy: (3)

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

Just how often do we see the opposite of these goals in action; either imposed upon a population or practiced by a ’maniac’ individual. It makes you wonder if humans possibly do demand leadership and a certain degree of enclosure by nature. Can society really live without a Big Brother to whom our obedience of duty makes us happy, who lays down the rules and regulations? Or does experiment, rebel, revolution and thought crime (4) excite and bribe our true happiness and social development.

(1) Immanuel Kant: The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (1780)
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom
(3)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_freedoms
(4) George Orwell : Nineteen Eighty-Four