Did Rand Implicitly Implement the Concept of Duty in Her Moral System? Written June 14, 2007 Rand explicitly denounced the notion of duty in her formulation of ethics. But I here hope to show that she implicitly relied on duty in spite of her explicit rejection of the concept. And the essence of my argument is this: Ethics is a system of justification. We use ethics to justify our actions (and the drives behind our actions). There exist but two mutually exclusive standards for justification. And