Chapter 4 turns towards the role of women’s work in reproducing the household, focusing on the labour of relation-making in the neighbourhood as a means of creating economic networks through which material assistance can be sought. Commenting on anthropological literature that frames African contexts as ones of ‘mutuality’ and ‘obligation’, the chapter discusses the difficulty of finding assistance for aspirational projects (especially school fees) in an atomised neighbourhood where families compete for the prestige of economic advancement. It remarks upon the possibilities and limits of caring labour as a means through which women enter into economic relations of mutual support with others.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

If Kant’s Doctrine of Right is an integral part of his moral philosophy and thus the categorical imperative is the basis of his Universal Law of Right, then this Law of Right must be derived from the Universal Law of Morals due to the provisions of Kant’s concept of Right. This chapter shows how this works in the framework of the natural law tradition.

Hume argues that there cannot be any act of the mind by means of which we create a moral obligation at will. I argue that nonetheless, on Hume’s view, to promise is, fundamentally, to obligate myself intentionally by my utterance (though not merely by an act of mind). The convention of promises, as he constructs it, gives an individual the power to change the sentiments of the community (regarding a certain action) by speaking. Given his account of obligation, that change makes the described action obligatory. This explains why Hume initially found promises mysterious and how the convention removes the mystery. It also reveals a sharp difference between Hume’s explanation of promissory obligation and that found in present-day assurance theories, according to which the obligation cannot be created merely by an intentional act of self-obligation but depends crucially on the mental states of the promisor and the promise’s recipient.

This chapter scrutinises the framework within which Kant decides to conduct his argument against Constant. Constant argues that the would-be murderer has forfeited his right to be told the truth. Kant argues that the duty to be truthful does not depend on that kind of right; that Constant fails to distinguish between truth and truthfulness with sufficient care; and that one should distinguish the question of whether lying is permissible (licence to lie) in emergencies from the question of whether lying is ever morally required (obligation to lie). In the 1797 essay, Kant addresses the second question through the first. If there is never a licence to lie, there can be no obligation to do so.

The sense of duty is a virtue of caring, not directly about the good, or even about justice, but about doing one’s duty. Insofar as doing what one takes to be one’s duty is in fact to do what is good, the sense of duty functions as a backup for the more direct virtues of caring – generosity, compassion, and truthfulness, as well as justice. Being a virtue of caring, the sense of duty can be expressed in emotions: a feeling of satisfaction in having done one’s duties or feelings of guilt or shame at having neglected them. The sense of duty can vary, emotionally, according to how one conceives the authoritative source of duty, on a spectrum from reverence, through respect, to resentful acceptance. Example of the extremes beyond the spectrum are some Hebrew psalmists’ delight in the law of God and the contempt of the utter moral cynic.

The textbook Immanuel Kant assigned for his course on Naturrecht was Gottfried Achenwall’s Natural Law. In the Feyerabend transcript of his course (1784), Kant not only explains Achenwall’s text but also criticizes him and expounds his own alternative theory. Since it is not always obvious from the lecture notes whether Kant is explaining Achenwall, criticizing him, or presenting his own theory, one must know the basics about Achenwall’s positions when reading Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. In this essay, we introduce Achenwall and his handbook to readers of Kant’s Feyerabend lectures. We start with some background information and then discuss Achenwall’s position on freedom and obligation, natural law and right, and his theory of property and the state. We end by pointing out a few of the main points of disagreement between Kant and Achenwall that emerge from the Feyerabend lectures.

Chapter 3 focuses on notarial credit. Because notaries drafted various kinds of contracts related to individuals, families, and household wealth, scholars have emphasized the exceptional access they had to a vast array of information. With such information, especially regarding creditworthiness, notaries could overcome asymmetric information, lower transaction costs, and match lenders and borrowers effectively, precluding the role of banks until the nineteenth century. Recent historiography highlights, therefore, their role as intermediaries between investors and borrowers. In rural areas, where most individuals knew each other, were related to each other, and conducted business on a daily basis with each other, this brokerage role bore another meaning. This chapter look closely at the various types of notarial contracts and their characteristics.

We have little basis to doubt (a) that we have good reasons to worship God, (b) that God is worthy of worship, (c) that worship of God is reasonable, (d) that it is unreasonable not to worship God, and (e) that worshipping God is obligatory. But none of these normative states of affairs amounts to or entails our owing God worship. The central aim of this chapter is to show that we do not by nature owe God worship; our owing God worship could be no more than a contingent matter. That our owing God worship is contingent does not entail or even suggest that there is any imperfection or limitation in God, and there are good reasons to hold that it is an attractive view of the relationship between God and humans that our owing God worship is a matter of a special contingent relationship between God and us rather than something that holds by nature.

In international affairs, legal arguments and political actions shape each other. Unlike in domestic affairs, there is no enforcement authority, and hence there is much debate over how international law affects politics. Many existing approaches do not help us to assess what implementation efforts tell us about a state’s commitment to international law. Some study the effect of law on state behaviour but have a too static understanding of law and state preferences. Others focus on the justificatory discourse that accompanies norm implementation but do not assess individual states’ commitment to contested norms. This chapter studies what a state’s effort to implement a norm tells us about its sense of obligation towards that norm. I propose there are three signposts of obligation in the words and actions that accompany a state’s norm implementation: consistency, publicity, and engagement with the international community. I show that depending on whether the behaviour and discourse of a state displays a strong or weak sense of obligation, we can characterise a state’s norm implementation as exposing weak or strong normative influence or discursive or behavioral norm avoidance. I illustrate these different degrees with cases that involve a variety of different norms and states.

The Cambridge Platonists’ philosophy of religion might be summed up as a tension between their commitment to the fixed nature of reason and goodness on the one hand and a commitment to freedom and distaste for all forms of tyranny and imposition on the other. This last chapter contends that the Cambridge Platonists not only acknowledge this tension, but embrace it, revelling in the paradoxical way that absolute fixedness and absolute freedom come together at the highest levels of being. This is made possible by what Stephen Darwall (writing specifically of Cudworth) has identified as an early theory of ‘practical reason’. This Platonic theory of practical reason draws together all the elements of the Cambridge Platonists’ outlook considered in earlier chapters – moral realism, divine communicative intent, and participatory epistemology, illustrating the extent to which this Platonic outlook binds together not only the thought of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith but also runs through each of their views on different philosophical topics such as obligation, freedom and pedagogy.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which English infantrymen understood duty and how their perceptions of their military role drew both on military and civilian culture. It underlines the differences between officers’ and other ranks’ understanding of their obligations. The army itself defined duty, like morale, as a set of ‘moral’ criteria. Officers’ duties were defined in their commissions and the King’s Regulations; their duty, at least to their men, was of an infinite nature. In contrast, the rank-and-file’s ‘contract’ with the military was finite and secular. In 1914, regulars viewed their job with a clinical and professional eye. However, for reservists and the civilian soldiers that followed them, the idea of ‘doing one’s bit’ came to dominate their perception of duty. Importantly, though, the cultural pressure of ‘respectability’ (drawn from both the military and civil society) informed their rationalisation of service. ‘Military cultures’ were also influential, particularly those of cheerfulness and obedience, which informed men’s actions, attitudes, and performance. What is more, the need to maintain ‘good character’ also exerted its own pressures. Men’s wartime record would influence their prospects once peace returned. Significant, too, was the soldiers’ perceived duty to England. After all, they were the defenders of the homeland.

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was a profoundly important philosopher during the eighteenth century. ‘Wolffianism,’ broadly defined as adherence to Wolff’s teachings, was taught and promoted at all the major German universities for decades. Kant was educated and began his career within an environment that was dominated by discussion between proponents of and opponents to Wolff’s philosophy. This chapter contains a complete translation of Chapter 1 of Part 1 of Wolff’s ‘German Ethics’ (1720), in which Wolff gives a general overview of almost all the core features of his ‘universal practical philosophy.’ The translation contained in this chapter therefore serves as a concise introduction to Wolff’s ethics in general, and one that is especially helpful for better understanding Kant’s explicit reference to Wolff’s principle of perfection in the second Critique (see 5:40), among other things.

Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) was one of the most important German philosophers in the middle of the eighteenth century. His series of four German textbooks offered a systematic and sophisticated alternative to Wolffianism. Kant was at the beginning of his academic career when Crusius’ philosophical works were first published, so it is not surprising that Kant would come to be influenced by Crusius’ philosophy. This chapter contains a translation of selections from books 1 and 2 of Crusius’ Guide to Living Rationally (1744), capturing his theory of the will and desire, his theory of freedom, his voluntarist theory of ethics, his theory of the end of human life, and his moral proof of the immortality of the soul. The selections will help readers better understand Kant’s reference to Crusius’ moral philosophy as one based on the “will of God” (5:40), among many other things.

The following chapters examine the theoretical upshots of the positive epistemological view proposed in this book. The account developed so far delivers the result that epistemic justifiers constitute epistemic oughts. In this chapter, I discuss the worry that such accounts threaten to give rise to widely spread epistemic dilemmas between paradigmatic epistemic norms. I argue for a modest scepticism about epistemic dilemmas. In order to do that, I first point out that not all normative conflicts constitute dilemmas: more needs to be the case. Second, I look into the moral dilemmas literature and identify a set of conditions that need to be at work for a mere normative conflict to be a genuine normative dilemma. Last, I argue that while our epistemic life is peppered with epistemic normative conflict, epistemic dilemmas are much harder to find than we thought.

This chapter examines the first idea-complex of equality and obligation evident in WTO law by identifying each of its constituent elements and their inter-relationship as a coherent whole, that is, the way they align and thread together. The WTO Agreement’s focus on equality and distributive justice begets a primary emphasis in law on obligation, which in turn gives rise to a constitutive structure that is prospectively oriented and reasoned deductively.