What are duties good for? Lessons from the pandemic

The concept of duty can be clarifying of social and political relations.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments suddenly realized – after decades of governing “at a distance” (Rose and Miller, 2010) – that they could in fact demand quite burdensome things of their citizens, at least when the situation required. It became clearer than it had been for decades that the line of authority – drawn by the rights and duties of citizenship – remains the fundamental thread binding societies together, even in the era of the neoliberal state.

As the Co-Duties project has shown, the pandemic also prompted people to engage voluntarily with various (and at times conflicting) ideas of what duty meant to them: from volunteering in humanitarian organisations, to supporting their local community, to accepting to share vaccines with other national societies. The very concept of doing one’s duty was suddenly more paramount in people’s minds than it had been throughout the previous decades of the “rights ascendency”.

Duties from lockdown to war

The concept of duty, so visible during the pandemic, provides a useful lens to clarify the current political moment characterized by the multiplication of crises.

For one, the question of duty is today ever present at the hard edge of military mobilization: be it those enrolling for frontline duties in Ukraine, or Palestinians collecting the bodies from terrain surveilled by snipers in Gaza. We also see the idea of duty operationalized in outbreaks of civil disobedience across Europe. Citizens are taking action beyond the frame of the officially sanctioned, breaking ‘do not assemble’ orders to mark their presence and their message visibly on the streets – for instance, to demand action against climate change.

One of the more consistent insights from the Co-Duties project has been that, when people are confronted by crisis, they care more than they usually do about what their individual actions add up to: they come to have a greater sense of their collective duties, in other words. But what is seen to be meaningful, at the collective level, will vary between individuals.

From individual to collective duties: duty as social power

All these actions are individually taken. But they are undertaken in accordance with some larger understanding or account of what “the greater good” itself requires from the individual. In legal theory one person’s “right” is another’s “duty”. But duties have a more productive effect within society at large and may best be read, socially, as a sort of penumbra: visible by what they reveal of all that is going on around them.

As our research has been showing, when people undertake a duty, their act does not simply fulfill a prior right or commitment: it also makes clearer and enables a number of other social outcomes, even if the act itself has no core “moral” truth. Placing duties into wider social structures clarifies sides taken, sacrifices made, obligations fulfilled, and value judgments made. All this is a part of what duty does, socially, and this “doing” of duties needs studying just as much as does the more frequently studied question of what duties “are”.

By studying duties in this way, we have found that duty – as a structuring norm – is self-authored, open-ended, and relational – but also messy, contested and in constant evaluation. This is because when people perform a duty they also define the nature of the relationship between themselves and something that is bigger than them.

To do your duty may therefore always be to act in a context where you have no choice: to act in a certain direction, or according to a certain prescription or command (even if, in the case of virtue duties, that command comes from within). But in doing so, you also get to chose to some extent how to act: and this brings social relations into play. Duty is also, therefore, for all that it has traditionally been theorised as a constraint, at least in some senses also a form of situated freedom.

The duty to assist persons in danger

Consider, for example, the duty to rescue at sea. While a clear and well-defined legal obligation, the wider migration politics around this duty is messy. The French legal principle of prosecuting the failure to assist people in danger, the Non-assistance à personne en danger, provides a useful lens through which to see how different forms of assistance and non-assistance to refugees have been treated in French courts.

In November 2021, 27 migrants who were seeking to cross the English channel perished at sea. Yet they might have been rescued had their calls for help been taken seriously. Five French military personnel on duty that night at the regional operational centre for surveillance and rescue of the Pas-de-Calais region, were later taken to court for having failed to send assistance upon receiving the distress calls. In other words, the social structure of the particular duty to assist migrants in danger is sufficiently messy that in France it requires further legal procedure to clarify it. The five French service personnel were prosecuted in this case not for what they did but for what they did not do: for failing to do their duty.

The principle of “non-assistance” to people in danger was also invoked in another case, this time to defend acts of solidarity that were judged as illegal by a lower court but which were claimed to have been done on the basis of a personal sense of duty. In 2016, a French agricultural worker, Cédric Herrou, gained national (and international) fame for providing assistance, including accommodation and transportation, to a number of migrants arriving in France from across the border with Italy. Throughout a string of cases which followed, he defended his ongoing support for migrants as precisely owing to his duty to provide basic assistance to people otherwise in danger, especially when the state failed to fulfill this obligation. While he was first sentenced for this, in 2017 on the account of facilitating irregular entries, a high-instance court invoked from the French national motto of “fraternité” to acquit him: providing a political (or civic) overlay to the initial (humanitarian) duty of virtue that Herrou himself invoked. The jurisprudence that was established by this case meant that any humanitarian assistance to migrants, cannot be prosecuted, (although assisting the irregular entry into the country remains prosecutable) linking personal to political notions of duty through the prism of the humanitarian imperative.

The duty of care

Or consider, as a second example, how duties are made legible, managed, and struggled over in the modern care economy. The care sector – even in Norway – has been transformed over recent decades from a rights-based state sector to a patchier neoliberal framework. The pandemic also foregrounded the conflicts of duty that citizens in a neoliberal state are presented with as a result of this recent transformation of the state’s duty of care. Covid-19 was a moment where a formal duty of care was insisted upon, by states, but also where individual expressions of duty through caring flourished, often in direct contravention of the overarching policy context. In other words, the pandemic highlighted tensions between top-down duties of care prescribed by employers, governments, and local authorities, and individual care workers’ own understandings of their duties.

For instance, many nursery teachers in Norway argued against the Private Barnehagers Landsforbund (PBL, ‘Private Nursery Association’) advice to extend nursery hours without additional resources and despite the sector already being understaffed. PBL framed its advice through narratives of heroic support for the young and vulnerable as part of national solidarity (‘dugnad’), but this clashed with the lived experiences of nursery teachers facing chronic overwork and inadequate support and therefore feeling excluded and unfairly treated themselves. Their pushback emphasized not only how they saw they might best fulfill their own duty of care but also pointed to the duties of policymakers and employers to provide the conditions necessary for meaningful care and duties towards their employees. These kinds of negotiations and conflicts between conceptions of duty are not new and have happened throughout the care sector, both during and beyond the pandemic context, where the distribution of duties of care held by different actors on different levels are grappled with and not neatly resolved. It is another reminder that the social structure of duty and duty fulfillment is far messier in reality than we tend to see.

Conclusions

It is one thing to establish (and in cases fight for) the hard-won rights of individuals. It is quite another to ensure those rights are appropriately fulfilled by society. As we have explored in this project, a whole politics of duties exists that is central to this and that scholars have only recently begun to take seriously. We conclude this project, therefore, in the knowledge that, while duties are supposed to represent unavoidable personal and political obligations and point to the specific responsibilities of actors such as states and citizens, they are equally clarifying of the moral and political horizons of “society” itself. In that sense we find them to be messy, contested, and constantly in evolution. And a fascinating insight into the political structure of modern society.

• Simon Reid-Henry is a Research Professor at PRIO and Honorary Professor at Queen Mary University of London.
• Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Sustainability at the University of Oslo.
• Kristoffer Lidén is a Senior Researcher and Research Director at PRIO.
• Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert is a Senior Researcher at PRIO.
• Audrey Geissinger is a Doctoral Researcher at PRIO and the University of Oslo.
• Sarah Wolff is a Professor at Leiden University.
• Anna-Louise Milne is a Professor at the University of London Institute in Paris.
• Kristin Bergtora Sandvik is a Research Professor at PRIO and Professor of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo.
• The authors are all members of the RCN-funded Co-Duties project at PRIO.