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An obligation is a course of action which someone is required to take, be it a legal obligation or a moral obligation. Obligations are constraints; they limit freedom. People who are under obligations may choose to freely act under obligations. Obligation exists when there is a choice to do what is morally good and what is morally unacceptable. [1]
In philosophy, moral responsibility is the status of morally deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment for an act or omission in accordance with one's moral obligations. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Deciding what (if anything) counts as "morally obligatory" is a principal concern of ethics .
Legal positivists believe that "so long as [an] unjust law is a valid law, one has a legal obligation to obey it". [2] Positivists disregard the morality of valid laws and treat law as the sole source of authority on what is valid. Natural-law theorists see a direct connection between validity and morality. [3]
In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek: δέον, 'obligation, duty' + λόγος, 'study') is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action. [1]
These obligations may be of either a legal or moral character. The notion of positive and negative rights may also be applied to liberty rights. To take an example involving two parties in a court of law: Adrian has a negative right to x against Clay, if and only if Clay is prohibited to act upon Adrian in some way regarding x.
The Church considers that: "The natural law expresses the original moral sense which enables man to discern by reason the good and the evil, the truth and the lie: 'The natural law is written and engraved in the soul of each and every man, because it is human reason ordaining him to do good and forbidding him to sin . . .
Furthermore, a promise to perform a moral obligation—the classic example is of a promise to support a person injured while coming to the rescue of the promisor—is enforceable provided the promissee was harmed in conferring a benefit on the promisor and the promise is not disproportionate to the benefit.
Elizabeth Anscombe criticised modern ethical theories, including Kantian ethics, for their obsession with law and obligation. [86] As well as arguing that theories which rely on a universal moral law are too rigid, Anscombe suggested that, because a moral law implies a moral lawgiver, they are irrelevant in modern secular society. [87]