Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   D   —

DARWIN, Charles   (1809-1882)
English naturalist and primary creator of the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. He was one of the most important and most influential of all scientists in history. Marxism, of course, enthusiastically embraces evolutionary science, and sees in its materialist explanations for the origin of species some important additional verification of its whole philosophical outlook.
        See also: EVOLUTION.

DAVIS, Angela   (1944-   )
Prominent African-American revisionist who was a long-time member of the so-called Communist Party USA, and then later split off with a CPUSA faction to form the Committees of Correspondence.

“DAYS OF RAGE”
A violent demonstration, or riot, organized and led by the “Weathermen” (later Weather Underground Organization) faction of the Students for a Democratic Society in Chicago on October 8, 1969, and two days later. This demonstration was against the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam and was timed to coincide with the Chicago Seven trial. The organizing slogan was “Bring the war home!”, and the organizers hoped to create massive chaos in Chicago with many thousands of protesters causing widespread havoc. They expected this to start to “wake up” the American population to the vicious imperialist war going on, and to be the first step in a growing series of destructive and chaotic demostrations by students and others which would eventually force the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam. One of the organizers, Bill Ayers, said much later that

“The Days of Rage was an attempt to break from the norms of kind of acceptable theatre of ‘here are the anti-war people: containable, marginal, predictable, and here’s the little path they’re going to march down, and here’s where they can make their little statement.’ We wanted to say, ‘No, what we’re going to do is whatever we had to do to stop the violence in Vietnam.’” [From the documentary The Weather Underground, produced by Carrie Lozano and directed by Bill Siegel and Sam Green, 2003.]

The organizers expected many thousands of protesters to come, but only two or three hundred actually showed up. Nevertheless they went ahead, first by rampaging through the afluent Gold Coast neighborhood, smashing the windows of a bank and many cars. After a few blocks they ran into a police barracade which they charged. More than a thousand police counter-attacked, and at least twice the cops purposefully ran squad cars directly into groups of protestors. The whole riot lasted only about half an hour, during which 6 Weathermen were shot by the police and a large number were injured. 68 rioters were arrested and 28 police were injured.
        Shortly before that demonstration/riot, the Weathermen had blown up a statue honoring the police. Two days later, they staged another violent demonstration of about 300 people which broke through police lines and smashed the windows of cars and stores in the downtown Chicago Loop area. Within 15 minutes more than half of the crowd had been arrested, including most of the leaders of the Weathermen.
        While the motives of the protesters (opposing the imperialist war and attempting to stop it) were admirable, this sort of “propaganda by the deed” turned out to be highly counter-productive. It did not serve to turn the American masses against the war; on the contrary, it served more to turn many of them against the students and the anti-war movement. It is not that violence is necessarily wrong, but people should be smart enough to only use it when there is good reason to believe it will advance a good cause. The Weathermen were so out of touch with the masses that they could not understand this. They were even quite out of touch with the thinking of most of the members of SDS itself, which is why they expected so many more members to show up at the demonstration. And, finally, this sort of pointless hooliganism, along with the destructive penetration of the Progressive Labor Party into SDS, ended up destroying that important organization, and seriously harming the student, anti-war, and revolutionary movements as a whole.

DEATH SPIRAL (In Insurance Industry)
See: INSURANCE DEATH SPIRAL

DEBS, Eugene Victor   (1855-1926)
Originally a conservative American labor leader who became quite radicalized by his experiences seeking fairness and justice for railroad workers. He resigned from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and in 1893 founded the American Railway Union, an industrial-style union along the lines of the later CIO. While in jail for 6 months in 1895 for leading a strike, he read the Communist Manifesto for the first time and his thinking began gradually shifting toward socialism. As the new Socialist Party of America took shape Debs became a prominent leader, and then a leader of the left wing of the Party. He ran for President on behalf of the Socialist Party five times. In 1912 he won amost a million votes, about 6% of the total cast. In 1905 Debs also took part in organizing the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
        When World War I started in Europe Debs took a strong stand against American participation, and this firm opposition to the war continued after the U.S. entered it. In one of his speeches he said:

“I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world wide war of the social revolution. In that war, I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.” [Quoted in the Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990), p. 186.]

The bourgeoisie could not tolerate that sort of firm opposition, and Debs was arrested for sedition in June 1918 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. While in prison Debs was once again the Socialist Party candidate for President. His followers wore buttons which proclaimed “Vote for Prisoner 9653”. And many people did vote for him. He received more than 900,000 votes, almost as many as in 1912.
        When the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in Russia in 1917, Debs came out as an enthusiastic supporter of it. He was a great American revolutionary socialist leader.

DEBT
[To be added...]
        See also: CREDIT, LEVERAGE, DELEVERAGING

DECONSTRUCTIONISM
A skeptical and often anti-intellectual movement in contemporary bourgeois philosophy, founded by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and one of the trends within what is called postmodernism. The goal seems to be to disprove the possibility of any coherent meaning or theory in any sphere. There is claimed to be no privileged position—not even the scientific contact with reality!—that makes any “text” (written work) significant or true.
        The approach is to “interpret” all philosophical or other intellectual “texts” by trying to “deconstruct” (dissect) them to bring out their incoherence, inconsistencies, false assumptions, prejudices, hidden agendas and false conclusions. While critical examinations of any work are of course necessary and justified, at the hands of the deconstructionists they are almost entirely negative procedures. They rarely put forward any positive views or try to defend correct views against unjustified attacks. This is why deconstructionism is mostly a cynical, nihilist method. The tacit assumption is that nothing is really correct or valid!
        Moreover, in practice, the “texts” chosen for examination, and the deconstructionist examination of them, are both generally esoteric and extremely obscure. Strange terms and coinages are used, and it is often the case that neither the text itself nor the deconstruction of it is very intelligible. On top of this, often snide comments, puns and jokes are put forward as if they were serious, thoughtful arguments. As a result, deconstructionism itself does not deserve to be taken seriously.

DEDUCTION   (Logic)
A mode of argument, or reasoning, which starts from a set of premises and seeks to draw a conclusion from them. If the conclusion is drawn in accordance with the laws of formal logic, the argument is said to be valid. If, in addition, the premises are known to be true, the argument is said to be sound.
        See also: LOGIC—Formal

DEFLATION   (Economics)
A contraction in the amount of money and/or credit available in an economy (relative to the mass of commodities available for sale) which leads to a general fall in prices. Although there were long deflationary periods in capitalist economies in the 19^th century, during both boom periods and recessions, most contemporary bourgeois economists believe that deflation is very dangerous and self-reinforcing. For this reason they try to prevent it by moderately inflating the currency (or what they sometimes call “reflation”).
        See also: INFLATION.

“DEFLATIONARY GAP” (In Capitalist Production)
This is a term sometimes used by bourgeois economists and journalists to describe the situation where total effective demand falls short of what an economy produces. (Of course we Marxists understand that this would always be the case if it were not for the constant expansion of consumer and government debt!) But the idea here is that when there is an excess of goods on the market, the capitalists will be forced to lower their prices in order to try to sell the excess production, and will also lay off workers or cut wages in an effort to keep their profits up. Fewer employed workers, and workers with less income, in turn means a further drop in demand in sort of a vicious circle, which leads to further deflationary pressures. The so-called “deflationary gap” itself is the shortfall in effective demand which leads to this deflationary spiral.

DELEVERAGING
[Capitalist finance:] The repayment (often forced) of debt which has been acquired in order to expand the amount of money invested, or to directly expand the amount employed in the continuation or expansion of capitalist production. Leveraging means using borrowed money to speculate (“invest”) or in order for a capitalist to continue or expand production beyond what is possible through the use of his own profits. Sometimes when a loan comes due it is impossible to “roll it over” (extend it for an additional period), or to obtain an alternative loan. This is especially apt to occur during a financial crisis. In such a situation there is a forced deleveraging, or in other words a forced reduction in credit that itself has an additional negative impact on the economy. Just as leveraging can promote the more rapid expansion of the economy during a boom, deleveraging can develop into a vicious cycle which serves to more rapidly unwind an economy and bring it to its knees during and following a financial crisis.

“Deleveraging is an ugly word for a painful process. But few things matter more for the world economy than whether, and how fast, the rich world’s borrowing is cut back. History suggests that severe financial crises are usually followed by long periods of debt reduction—in which credit falls relative to the size of the economy. This time, too, that process is under way. Banks have been furiously reducing leverage. Consumer credit in America has fallen for ten consecutive months, the largest and longest drop on record....
         “[In an extensive study of numerous past cases of deleveraging] the deleveraging came through a prolonged period of belt-tightening, where credit grew more slowly than output. The message from these episodes is sobering. Typically deleveraging began about two years after the beginning of the financial crisis and lasted for six to seven years. In almost every case output shrank for the first two or three years of the process...
         “Worse, there are several reasons why today’s mess could be more protracted than previous episodes. First, the scale of the indebtedness is higher.... Second, the number of countries afflicted simultaneously means that rapid expansions of exports, which have supported output in the past, are harder to achieve. Third, big increases in public debt, while cushioning demand in the short term, increase the overall debt reduction that will eventually be needed.... Investors may worry about the sustainability of public debt long before private-debt reduction is over, forcing a lot of belts to be tightened at once. The most painful bits of deleveraging could well lie ahead.” —“Economic Focus: Digging Out of Debt”, The Economist, Jan. 16, 2010, p. 76.

DEMOCRACY — BOURGEOIS
See: BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY.

DEMOCRACY — PROLETARIAN
See: PROLETARIAN DEMOCRACY.

DEONTOLOGY
1. The branch of ethics (especially bourgeois ethics) concerned with duty or moral obligation, as opposed to axiology, the branch concerned with “value”. The splitting of ethics into these two major categories (by the intuitionists, for example) is based on the idea that value and moral obligation are somehow difficult or impossible to connect, a view not shared by Marxist-Leninist ethics.
2. The ethical theory (held by Kant and many other bourgeois philosophers) that duty is the basis of all morality. Kant went so far as to claim that many acts (such as telling the truth and keeping promises) are your moral duty regardless of the consequences!
        See also: CONSEQUENTIALISM

DEPRESSION   (Economics)
Up until the Great Depression of the 1930s, the term ‘depression’ just meant the low phase of any industrial cycle. (Marx called the four phases of such a cycle the boom, crisis, depression, and recovery stages.) However, the Great Depression of the 1930s was so severe that bourgeois economists have not wanted to use the term ‘depression’ for the milder economic crises that have occurred since then. Instead, they came up with the word ‘recession’. The term ‘depression’ is now mostly avoided by bourgeois commentators, but when pressed they define it in rather crude and unscientific terms as “something comparable to the Great Depression”, that is, an economic crisis which lasts for at least several years, in which the unemployment rate approaches 25% at its peak (as it did in the U.S. in 1933), and so forth.
        According to my theory, from a Marxist standpoint a depression is simply a capitalist overproduction crisis in which all the major contradictions come to a head, while a recession is a “short-circuited” economic crisis, in which the government is able to intervene and stop the collapse, with only some of the more surface contradictions actually coming to a head. For more on this see: “Chapter 5: The Industrial Cycle has Split In Two!” of my work in progress An Introductory Explanation of Capitalist Economic Cycles at: http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/crises/Crises05.htm, and my letter “Is it a ‘Depression’?”, at: http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/ScottH/CurrentCrisis/IsItADepression.htm (Feb. 2009) in which I predict that within a few years the current economic crisis will develop into the Second Great Depression. —S.H.

DERIVATIVE   (Capitalist Finance)
A tradable financial security whose current exchange price derives from the actual or expected price of some underlying real asset such as a commodity, ownership shares of a company, other securities (such as mortgages or corporate bonds), or a currency (such as the dollar). Examples of derivatives are: futures contracts for shares of stocks, currency exchange futures, futures on stock market indexes, options, swaps, warrants, and CDOs.
        In general, derivatives are ways of gambling over the future price of some real asset. For example, a speculator entering into a contract to buy 100 shares of stock in a company six months from now at $50/each, is betting that in six months the going price will be above $50/share, so that he will then be able to buy the stock at the $50 price and immediately sell it at the higher price, thus making a profit. (Of course if the price of the stock goes down in that six month period he will end up taking a loss.)
        Bourgeois economic theory says that it is reasonable and justified to allow this sort of gambling on the grounds that a judicious use of derivatives can serve as a form of insurance to safeguard those who currently own, or who in the future will need to buy commodities and other real assets, from unexpected price fluctuations and so forth. However, the flaw in this argument is that while this sort of thing can indeed decrease the dangers of market risk for that company, it is only possible because of the increased risks transmitted to the other speculators. Moreover, since the stock market, at least, is itself in effect a giant Ponzi scheme, allowing derivatives based on stock prices is a means which serves to amplify this Ponzi aspect. For reasons like this, derivatives serve to hugely increase the speculative and precarious nature of modern financial capitalism. There are, however, enormous profits to be made in the meanwhile, so derivatives will never be eliminated or even be completely brought under control. They will exist as long as capitalism does.
        According to the New York Times, as of July 15, 2009, the “derivatives market now represents transactions with a face value of $600 trillion”. It is not clear, however, that even this colossal sum includes all the securities which should properly be counted as derivatives!

DERRIDA, Jacques   (Pronounced in English: “der-ree-DAH”)   (1930-2004)
A French bourgeois philosopher of the postmodern school, and founder of the deconstructionist movement within it. Those into contemporary bourgeois Continental philosophy sometimes claim that Derrida was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20^th century. But none of them have been able to state (in intelligible words) just what his supposed “great contributions” were.
        One of the most characteristic traits of intellectual phonies like Derrida is that they try to hide their triviality or vacuity by being purposefully obscure. Michel Foucault, who was Derrida’s student (and who himself had little of value to contribute to philosophy) described Derrida’s method as “terrorist obscurantism” and explained it this way:

“He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That's the terrorism part.” —Michel Foucault, comment to John Searle, “Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle”, Reason magazine, February 2000, online at: http://www.reason.com/news/show/27599.html.

Many others have similarly criticized Derrida and modern French bourgeois philosophy in general for such obsurantism. Noam Chomsky, for example, said that Derrida used “pretentious rhetoric” to obscure the simplicity of his ideas and that doing so was characteristic of a broad group of people within the Parisian intellectual community.
        Some academic “leftists” consider Derrida to have been a man of the left. It is true that he was strongly criticized by various conservative bourgeois philosophers (like Searle and Quine), but Derrida himself was merely a liberal bourgeois intellectual. He opposed the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, and he initially supported the student uprising in France in 1968 (but then backed away). But he was not a revolutionary and certainly not a Marxist. The infatuation in “left” academia for phonies like Derrida only serves to discredit them!

DESCARTES, René   (1596-1650)
Usually considered to be the first “modern” philosopher, because he broke with the sterile dogmatism of the Scholastics, and introduced the “method of doubt”. Although he himself was a dualist, he played a major role in helping to inspire a materialist trend of thought.
        See also: Philosophical doggerel on Descartes.

“...Descartes’s monumental decision [was] that the body and the immortal soul should be considered separately. This allowed the bodies of both humans and beasts to be examined in wholly physical terms for the first time. Descartes saw the human body as a machine, much like a child’s mechanical toy. It was from this perspective that he proposed that all living things, their soulful nature excepted, are made of ordinary matter. In his view, living bodies were the same as inanimate objects except in the details of their incarnations. As a consequence, they obeyed the same laws.” —Stephen Rothman, a prominent (non-Marxist) American biologist, Lessons From the Living Cell (2002), pp. 22-23.

DETERMINISM
The materialist view that all phenomena have definite natural causes. Often confused with fatalism. The opposite of determinism is indeterminism.
        See also: FREE WILL, COMPATIBILISM

“DEVELOPING COUNTRIES” (or “DEVELOPING ECONOMIES”)
Bourgeois euphemisms for the poor countries of the world, which are largely kept poor because of the predations of the rich imperialist countries.
        See also: “EMERGING ECONOMIES”

DEWEY, John   (1859-1952)
American idealist philosopher, one of the main proponents of pragmatism, his version of which he prefered to call instrumentalism.
        See also: Philosophical doggerel on Dewey.

DIALECTICAL LEAPS — Popular Terms For and Conceptions Of
Here are some of the terms often heard which seem to be grasping at one or more aspects of what we Marxists mean by dialectical leaps:
        Qualitative leap
        Sea change
        Tipping point
        Inflection point
        What all these (and sometimes other) terms seem to be most centrally getting at is that in nature and all spheres of human life, we often find relatively sudden, and relatively large, changes in some process or situation. The term qualitative leap emphasizes that this often entails a fundamental change in the nature of the thing. The term sea change is more limited in that it seems only to emphasize a change in magnitude. The term tipping point once again seems to suggest some qualitative change, or else some major change in the direction of a process. An inflection point, in popular discourse, is similar to a tipping point. [In mathematics an inflection point is a point on a curve which separates an arc with a concave curve upward from an arc with a concave curve downward (or, in other words, the isolated points where the second derivative of the function equals zero.)]
        Other terms which sometimes have similar connotations are: crisis, coming to a head, snapping, bursting, explosion, etc. Many of these terms emphasize the suddenness of the change, as well as the magnitude.
        See also: CONJUNCTURE

DIALECTICS
The most abstract or general scientific principles governing the development of nature, society and thought. [More to be added...]
        See also: CONTRADICTION—Dialectical

DIALECTICS OF NATURE
        See: NATURE—Dialectics Of, and the entry below for Engels’ book by this name.

DICTATORSHIP OF THE BOURGEOISIE
Bourgeois, or capitalist, rule; domination of society by the capitalist class. There are two main forms of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, bourgeois democracy and fascism. In either case, bourgeois rule is based ultimately on force and violence directed against the lower classes, especially the proletariat, and whatever laws or rules the bourgeoisie may put in place are dispensed with whenever necessary to maintain its rule.

“Chairman Mao teaches us that there should be democracy within the ranks of the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the safeguard for the implementation of extensive proletarian democracy. Extensive proletarian democracy in turn is aimed at consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without extensive proletarian democracy, there is the danger that the dictatorship of the proletariat will turn into the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Without the dicatatorship of the proletariat there can be no proletarian democracy. There cannot even be democracy on a small scale, let alone extensive democracy. In the course of the great proletarian cultural revolution, our organs of proletarian dictatorship must resolutely and unswervingly guarantee the democratic rights of the people and guarantee that free airing of views, the posting of big-character posters, great debates, and the large-scale exchange of revolutionary experience proceed in a normal way.” — “Carry the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Through to the End”, a joint New Year’s editorial of Renmin Ribao [People’s Daily] and Hongqi [Red Flag], Jan. 1, 1967, Peking Review, vol. 10, #1, Jan. 1, 1967, pp. 13-14.

DIFFERENTIAL RENT
The differential theory of rent is that the rent on any piece of land is determined by the relative productivity of that land compared to that of the least fertile land being rented for that purpose. Thus if a plot of land is twice as productive per acre as the worst land being used, then the rent on the better land should tend toward twice as much as for the worst land. Sir William Petty was the first to put forward this idea.

DIMENSION WORD
The most general and comprehensive word in a group of words which have closely related meanings, and which therefore serves as the best key to fully understanding the others once it itself has come to be thoroughly understood. This notion of a dimension word was introduced into linguistic philosophy by John Austin in his book Sense and Sensibilia (1962). [For an example of its use in Marxist linguistic philosophy, see my work in progress, An Introduction to the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Class Interest Theory of Ethics, Chapter 2, section 2.2, at: http://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/MLM-Ethics-Ch1-2.pdf —S.H.]

DING-AN-SICH
(Literally, “thing-in-itself”.) In Kant’s subjective-idealist and empiricist philosophy, the unknown and unknowable “truer essence” of any object which lies beneath or behind the sense data which is all that we supposedly pitiful human beings (as opposed to “God”) can ever have direct contact with. In other words the mysterious “truer reality” that supposedly lies behind what we perceive as reality. This is clearly something akin to Plato’s idealist theory of “forms”, and other religious conceptions of reality.

DISCOUNT RATE (Federal Reserve)
The discount rate is the interest rate that the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank) charges private banks to borrow money from it. The raising or lowering of the discount rate affects the interest rates that the commercial banks in turn charge their customers, including the prime rate. When the economy is weak or in recession, the Fed drastically lowers the discount rate in order to bring all interest rates down, which in turn usually promotes borrowing and economic expansion. Once the discount rate gets very low (not much above zero percent) there is no longer much room for this policy of lowering it to work any further. (See: “liquidity trap”.) Moreover, in a major overproduction crisis, very low interest rates no longer help much at all, since there are no profits to be made from building new factories regardless of the low interest costs of the money borrowed to build them.
        See also: FEDERAL FUNDS RATE

DISTRIBUTION
[To be added... ]
        See also: PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION

DUAL POWER
A political situation in certain places and periods of time (always quite short) in which different and antagonistic social classes each have a share of state power. In such a situation each of the contending classes works to secure total state power for itself, while attempting to deny the enemy class with any share of power whatsoever. This is why dual power is so tremendously unstable and short-lived.
        One example of dual power was the situation in Russia after the “February Revolution” (in March 1917!) overthrowing the Tsar, and lasting until the “October Revolution” (in November 1917!), when the Bolsheviks led by Lenin seized complete power for the working class. During this period of about 8 months, there was official power in the hands of the “Provisional Government”, but very extensive de facto power in the hands of the Soviets (councils) of workers, peasants and soldiers. For example, while the Provisional Government was nominally in charge of the Russian army, in reality most army units would generally only obey government orders if they were also OK’d by their local Soviet.
        It is often said that the current situation in Nepal, since the end of the People’s War in 2006, is also a period of dual power. In this case the Nepal Army is under the control of the feudal-capitalist alliance, but there still exists a separate army, the People’s Liberation Army, which is controlled by the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Similarly, the UCPN(M) is the largest party in the Constituent Assembly (which is serving as the interim parliament), though it doesn’t have a majority. Since major decisions require a two-thirds majority, there is in effect stalemate there as well as militarily. This is obviously also a very unstable situation, and one of these class forces will fairly soon overthrow the other. It is so far unclear which will triumph.

DUALISM
The philosophical theory that both matter and mind exist, but that they are “completely independent” aspects of the world, and that neither depends on the other or is an outgrowth or development of the other. Consequently this is supposed to be a middle position between materialism and idealism. However, from the Marxist, materialist standpoint dualism is itself a type of idealism, since it also denies the primacy of matter.
        One irresolvable conundrum for dualism is the simple question of how someone can raise their arm when they decide to do so. This is a clear case of a mental cause resulting in a physical or material result, and is totally inexplicable if mind and matter are imagined to be “completely independent” things! It can only be explained if we understand mental phenomena such as decisions to be a sort of abstract functional characterization of what at bottom are really ongoing physical, material processes in the brain and body.
One famous version of dualism was Leibniz’s attempt to explain both mind and matter by means of a single “substance” he called “monads”.
        Interestingly, despite its philosophical absurdity and fundamental disagreement with materialism, dualism historically played a positive role in the promotion of materialist thought! One of its earliest proponents was René Descartes, who argued that the body and “soul” should be considered independently. This allowed him to discuss the body itself in materialist terms, as a machine, and led others to do the same. Eventually scientifically inclined people came to realize that there was no further need for or even room for any such thing as a soul.
        See also: EPIPHENOMENALISM, and Philosophical doggerel about dualism.

DÜHRING, Eugen Karl   (1833-1921)
Author of an eclectic theory of socialism in opposition to that of Marx and Engels. Engels exhaustively exposed his many theoretical shortcomings in his famous book Anti-Dühring. Dühring later became an anti-Semite and racist.

DUTY   (Ethics)
In talk about morality ‘duty’ is simply the common word for moral obligation. However, ‘duty’ carries connotations that the more formal term ‘moral obligation’ does not, because of other actual or imagined “duties” we have, such as family duties, religious duties, or patriotic duties, where an extreme sense of shame is conditioned to arise in most people who fail to properly perform such duties.
        See also: DEONTOLOGY and OUGHT

Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index

MASSLINE.ORG Home Page