For those not in the know, Senator Mike Duffy’s $90,000
expense claims, considered invalid by audit, were to be secretly paid for by
personal cheque from Prime Minister Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel
Wright. Given that the highest-ranking official
behind the “Harper Government” has now stepped down, Duffy is left to once
again to ponder his accountability, a matter in which Harper and his
subordinates allegedly take pride. Here is what R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943),
the English philosopher and historian would say to Duffy on his “dues” and “duty”.
17. 12. ‘Due’ and ‘duty’ first appear in English in
the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to describe various aspects
of the state of indebtedness. They
always contain a reference to the past, debitum being a past participle; a past act of incurring the debt; logically
past; it need not be also temporally past.
17. 13. They are
medieval words, and in the Middle Ages the idea of debt was associated less
with the expectation of a money payment than with that of a payment in kind;
or, still oftener, that of rendering to a ‘lord’ a ‘service’ not necessarily
conceived as having a monetary equivalent.
17. 14. The idea of a debt incurred by one act and
discharged by another had already found a vernacular English expression in a
new sense of the Germanic verb ‘owe’.
Originally this meant ‘own’, but from the tenth century onwards it is
the current English translation for debere.
17. 15. When ‘due’ and ’duty’ first appeared in
English, therefore, they found Germanic synonyms derived from the verb ‘owe’
already established; in particular the past tense ‘ought’, where the same
reference to a logically past act of incurring debt is implied.
17. 16. Etymologically, then, ‘it is my duty to
do this’ and ‘I ought to do this’ mean the same; viz. that I am conscious
of an obligation or debt incurred in the past by an act that generated the
obligation, and to be discharged in the future by the act referred to as ‘this’.
17. 17. In modern English, consciousness of
obligation is distinguished from other forms of consciousness by the name ‘conscience’.
‘Conscience’ has a first-order
subject, viz. the obligation itself. ...[1]
[1] R.
G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or
Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism, ed. David Boucher (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 119,120. Emphasis
added.
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