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Hello, George Bernard Shaw, that great upender, wrote in his place, Caesar and Cleopatra,

when a stupid man is doing something he's ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

But for Horatio Nelson and so many others duty has provided a purpose for life and a reason to die.

Thank God have done my duty, when Nelson's final words.

The idea that others have a claim over our actions has been at the heart of the

history of civilized society, but duty is an unfashionable or difficult notion now,

perhaps because it seems to impose an outside authority over self-interest,

and perhaps we're more interested in rights than duties today.

But duty has always meant doing what's best for others rather than oneself, or has it?

And how did it become such a powerful idea that people readily gave their lives

for it? With me to discuss the concept of duty are A.C. Graling, reader in philosophy at

Birkbeck London University, and she Hobbs lecture in philosophy at the University of

and University of Warwick and Annabel Brett, Fellow of Gonville and Keys and Lecture in History at the

University of Cambridge.

Angie Hobbs, we have to be careful about talking about duty in the ancient world as I understand it because the Greeks had an exact word for our concept of duty.

Yet their ideas are still the basis for our own. Could you unravel that?

Yes, I think if we start by looking at the

Homeric poems, we clearly have notions of obligation. Whether they translate into

duty is something I'm sure we'll return to. We have a society with clearly marked

social strata and clearly defined functions and roles and people have obligations to fulfill according to their particular roles and

...