Nature of Ethical Obligation, and Non-Obligatory Behavior of Bartleby

This paper concerns the phenomenon or matter of obligation both morally and legally, considering it through philosophical and psychological perspectives. It then examines what it might mean for a person to fall outside the almost-universal social network of obligation. In doing so, the paper specifically examines the non-obligatory aspect of behaviour of the character Bartleby, in Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener, who presents an peculiarly interesting version of a likely lack of a sense of social obligation. Bartleby appears to display an ethic of belief in a prior preferentiality of indifference, an indifference to self-determination of personal identity, which exhibits him as having an emptiness of (determinate wilful) self. We might say that the non-obligation of Bartleby is an ethic of negation of will, diluting it to mere preferring not. In that sense, Bartleby’s non-obligation can be understood as an act of lack of self-determination, that leads to his own self determinative demise.