When one says “duty,” there is the idea of owing something. Owing here is both a quantitative and an ethical word.

When one owes something, to what or whom does he owe it, and why? It seems clear that we either owe something to ourselves or to something else. Now if we owe something to what is not ourselves, the debt is either justified or not. If it is justified, then it means that paying it would affirm an accurate relation with what is not ourselves. I have said that pleasure is the being at one with what is not ourselves; and certainly the affirming an accurate relation with what is not ourselves is a means of being at one with what is not ourselves. So it seems that duty is quite the same as pleasure—at least if the earlier definition made sense and kept on making sense.

However, if what we “owe” to something not ourselves is not justified, then there is no reason for calling it duty. Call it compulsion, tyranny, exaction, browbeating, habit, slavishness, etc.—but you don’t have to call it duty; because it isn’t.

Furthermore, if duty is pleasure—and it is—then whatever we owe to what is not ourselves, we also owe to ourselves. For the personality wants to be in an accurate relation to what is other than the personality. If it isn’t, the personality is deprived of something. A want, as I have said earlier, is a lack. If a desire does not supply a lack, it is not a very sensible desire. So what we want is also what we owe ourselves. What we owe other things is also what we owe ourselves.

If we “owe” ourselves something unjustifiably, again, it is not a true debt. The self doesn’t want it, for it makes for an inaccurate relation with the self and all else. It is deprivation looking like pampering.