Makalika- you are quite right. I am interpreting duty to mean something foisted upon us by society - such as "a duty to serve your country" by registering with the Army (I don't mean enlisting of one's own volition - I mean those papers all men had to sign before colleges would admit them). I am interpreting duty to mean an obligation imposed on you externally. I do not define helping your elderly mother as "a duty." You are (hopefully) not doing it because society says that you should. You are doing it because you love her and realize that you should take care of her in the same way that she once took care of you. This is not a duty. You do it because doing it preserves your own integrity as an individual and because you feel that it is the right thing to do. That action reflects your own value judgment as an individual rather than someone else's.

Note that a lot of us DID, in fact, write something akin to the idea that we believed in helping others. We didn't characterize it as a duty, though. We see it as the right thing to do. We see doing it as a reflection of the type of people we hope to be. It is a difference between following someone else's norms blindly and forging ahead on your own terms.

I will admit that largely this is an argument of semantics and there are many ways to define the words "duty" and "responsibility" and I am approaching it from just one perspective. But, I happen to be a pain in the ass about semantics and don't believe that any of us should be couching our life goals and ambitions within the terms of "duty" or "responsibility." We were right in not using those words. I likewise believe that if one of us had in fact used these word, Eben would have found another similarly irrelevant, but nice sounding term with which to chastise us . Sorry Eben. I realize you probably have a different, more positive paradigm through which to view these terms, but if so, I think you're quibbling with diction because the ideas that you see behind those words are in fact reflected in people's statements.

Andrew- why do you believe in altruism? Also, could you tell Santa I want a new computer this year? (I kid, I kid). And again - do you really feel a "responsibility" to do good? I don't. I am making a conscious value judgment about what is and isn't important to me in the world and I'm targeting those problems, which in my opinion are most pressing or of most interest to me. There is nothing objective about it. I feel no debt to society and I'm not entirely sure that anything about "society" per se confers any sort of responsibility on anyone to the extent that they feel that they must take on the profession of law (and 200k in debt)- especially not those people who grew up in underprivileged areas and received very few benefits to begin with.

To me, the words "duty" and "responsibility" are not related to the choices that individuals make for themselves. These are words related to the choices our government and other institutions want to guilt us into making. We make the choices that we do because we believe in them. We think they are right. They help us to go to sleep at night. At the heart of it, we do the things that make us feel best even if it means doing something to our detriment (like taking a public interest job) because the net effect on us is positive. We are capable of seeing a benefit in more than just material terms. See Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

-- KateVershov - 24 Jan 2008

Haha fear not Makalika, no one is immune

Will the first person who finds this dialogue distracting, plz delete it. I like my chitchat private.

-- AndrewGradman - 24 Jan 2008

Tangent: dangit! Gradman - I mean this in a way that will hopefully make you laugh, not offend you, but you are like a benchmark - when I noticed that your response was about a quarter of the length of mine, I felt like I'd failed Eben's challenge to write more succinctly and with brevity.

-- MakalikaNaholowaa - 24 Jan 2008