Obligations Are Possessions
metaphor
Source: Economics → Ethics and Morality
Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguisticsphilosophy
From: Master Metaphor List
Transfers
You have obligations. You owe duties. You carry responsibilities. You can give your word and take on commitments. OBLIGATIONS ARE POSSESSIONS maps the logic of ownership — having, acquiring, transferring, and losing objects — onto the experience of moral and social obligation. The metaphor makes duties into things that can be held, counted, exchanged, and discharged, giving abstract moral relationships the concrete logic of property.
Key structural parallels:
- Having an obligation is possessing an object — “She has a duty to her clients.” “He holds several obligations.” “They carry responsibilities.” The most basic mapping: an obligation is something you have, the way you have a book or a tool. It is yours, attached to you, part of your inventory. The possession metaphor makes obligation a kind of personal property — invisible, but real and countable.
- Acquiring an obligation is receiving an object — “He took on new responsibilities.” “She was given the duty.” “They assumed the obligation.” Obligations are acquired the way possessions are: they are taken, given, assigned, inherited, or picked up. The metaphor provides a clear moment of acquisition — the obligation was not yours, and now it is — that maps the social act of commitment onto the physical act of receiving.
- Fulfilling an obligation is paying a debt — “She paid her dues.” “He discharged his obligations.” “We settled our accounts.” This variant merges with the MORAL ACCOUNTING metaphor: obligations are debts that must be repaid. The fulfillment of duty is a transaction that transfers something of value back to the person to whom the obligation is owed. Until the debt is paid, you carry it.
- Transferring an obligation is passing an object — “He passed the responsibility to his colleague.” “She delegated the duty.” “The obligation was transferred to the new owner.” Obligations can change hands the way property can. This mapping enables the social practices of delegation, inheritance, and institutional succession: the obligation persists even as the person who holds it changes.
- Losing an obligation is losing or discarding an object — “He shed his responsibilities.” “She was relieved of her duties.” “They abandoned their obligations.” Release from obligation is letting go of something you were holding. The metaphor distinguishes between legitimate release (being “relieved” of duty by an authority) and illegitimate release (abandoning or shirking, as if dropping something you should be carrying).
Limits
- Obligations are not transferable the way possessions are — you can give away a book and no longer have it. But many obligations cannot be simply handed off. A parent’s duty to a child does not transfer cleanly to a babysitter. A professional’s ethical obligations persist even when tasks are delegated. The metaphor makes obligation look more portable and detachable than it often is.
- The metaphor commodifies duty — if obligations are possessions, they have the logic of property: they can be valued, traded, and optimized. This enables a calculative attitude toward moral life that treats duties as costs to be minimized and benefits to be maximized. “What do I owe?” becomes a bookkeeping question rather than a moral one. The metaphor supports a transactional view of ethics that many moral traditions (virtue ethics, care ethics, deontology) explicitly reject.
- Possessions are inert; obligations are relational — a possession sits in your pocket and makes no demands. But obligations are relationships with other people: they generate expectations, create reciprocity, and evolve over time. The possession metaphor strips the relational dimension from obligation, making it a thing you have rather than a bond you share. “He has an obligation to his family” hides the family’s active role in constituting and maintaining that obligation.
- The weight of obligation has no possessive analog — physical possessions can be light or heavy, but the metaphor does not distinguish between a minor obligation (return a library book) and a profound one (care for an aging parent). Both are “things you have.” The possession metaphor makes all obligations equivalent in kind, differing only in quantity, when they actually differ in moral weight, urgency, and emotional significance.
- Shirking looks like rational choice — if obligations are possessions, then choosing not to carry them is like choosing not to pick up a heavy object. The metaphor makes neglect of duty look like a reasonable decision about what to hold rather than a moral failure. “I decided to let go of that responsibility” sounds like decluttering, not abandonment.
Expressions
- “She has an obligation to her clients” — duty as possessed object (common legal and professional usage)
- “He took on too many responsibilities” — acquiring obligations as picking up objects (common usage)
- “Pay your dues” — fulfilling obligation as settling a debt (common idiom; also used literally in organizational contexts)
- “She was relieved of her duties” — release from obligation as having an object taken away by authority (military and institutional usage)
- “He shirked his responsibilities” — failure to carry obligations, as if dropping a load (common usage; from German Schurke, scoundrel)
- “Pass the buck” — transfer of responsibility to another person, as if passing a physical token (common idiom; origin in poker, where a buck knife marked the dealer)
- “He discharged his obligations” — fulfillment as releasing or firing off what was held (legal and formal usage)
- “She carries a heavy burden of responsibility” — obligations as heavy objects that weigh on the bearer (common usage; merges with OBLIGATIONS ARE FORCES)
- “They abandoned their duties” — leaving obligations behind as if discarding property (common usage; morally loaded)
Origin Story
OBLIGATIONS ARE POSSESSIONS appears in the Master Metaphor List (Lakoff, Espenson, and Schwartz 1991) as one of three metaphors for obligation, alongside OBLIGATIONS ARE FORCES and OBLIGATIONS ARE CONTAINERS. The three metaphors highlight different experiential aspects of being obligated: force emphasizes compulsion (you are pushed), containment emphasizes confinement (you are enclosed), and possession emphasizes ownership (you hold something that must be dealt with).
The possession metaphor connects to the broader Event Structure metaphor system through its relationship to PROPERTIES ARE POSSESSIONS and the “object case” of event structure. In the object case, attributes and states are objects that can be acquired, held, and lost. Obligations are a special case: they are possessions that come with strings attached — objects you must do something about, not merely own.
The metaphor has deep roots in legal thought. Roman law’s concept of obligatio literally means “a binding” but was treated in practice as a form of property — obligations could be inherited, transferred, and discharged like debts. Modern contract law continues this treatment: obligations are “held,” “assigned,” “assumed,” and “discharged” using the vocabulary of property transactions. The metaphor is not merely a way of talking about obligation; it is the conceptual infrastructure of legal reasoning about duty.
References
- Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991), “Obligations Are Possessions”
- Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980) — possession and object metaphors
- Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Chapter 14 — moral metaphors; Chapter 11 — the object case of event structure
- Johnson, M. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1993) — embodied foundations of moral reasoning
Related Entries
Structural Neighbors
Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.
- Birthday Paradox (probability/mental-model)
- Network Effects (network-communication/mental-model)
- Money Is A Liquid (fluid-dynamics/metaphor)
- Natural Capital (ecology/paradigm)
- Parasitism as Metaphor (ecology/metaphor)
- Regime Shift (ecology/metaphor)
- Acting Compulsively Is Ingesting A Substance Compulsively (compulsive-ingestion/metaphor)
- Scaling Is Dilution (fluid-dynamics/metaphor)
Structural Tags
Patterns: containerlinkflow
Relations: causeaccumulate
Structure: network Level: generic
Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner