CO-DUTIES aims to provide novel insights into the performance of individual duties in order to better understand how voluntary engagement in democratic societies may address large-scale collective action problems.
To achieve this primary objective the project poses three basic research questions, addressing its historical, political and normative aspects in turn:
- How has the treatment of rights and duties in political and legal discourse changed in the post-1945 period such that imperfect duties of virtue, in particular, have lost their political status?
- How were each of (vertical) civic duties, (horizontal) humanitarian duties, and (mixed) associative duties, understood, framed, and enacted during and after the Coronavirus lockdowns in three liberal democracies: Norway, France and the UK?
- How can empirical understanding of this resurgence of duties inform a theoretical account of the prospects for collective action in response to “greater good” causes?
