Duty is one of those words that has more or less vanished from our culture. It—the word, and perhaps the thing as well—exists only in specific ghettos like the armed services. We often prefer to use ‘care’ or ‘carer’ for people who would once have thought that what they were doing, in, say, looking after incapacitated relatives, was a duty. To call the act of changing someone’s soiled underclothing a work of caring can make you feel as if you should be doing it because you want to do it, whereas the idea that you’re doing it because it’s your duty makes it more impersonal and therefore—to my mind, anyway—a lighter burden. It leaves you free to dislike what you are doing while still feeling that you are doing the right thing in doing it.

John Lanchester, Family Romance

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