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Many argue that “civic duty” explains why Americans engage in politics, but what does civic duty mean, and does it mean the same thing across communities? Why are people from marginalized social groups often more likely than their more privileged counterparts to participate in high-cost political activities? In The Obligation Mosaic, Allison P. Anoll shows that the obligations that bring people into the political world—or encourage them to stay away—vary systematically by race in the United States, with broad consequences for representation. Drawing on a rich mix of interviews, surveys, and experiments with Asian, Black, Latino, and White Americans, the book uncovers two common norms that centrally define concepts of obligation: honoring ancestors and helping those in need. Whether these norms lead different groups to politics depends on distinct racial histories and continued patterns of segregation. Anoll’s findings not only help to explain patterns of participation but also provide a window into opportunities for change, suggesting how activists and parties might better mobilize marginalized citizens.
Do citizens of a nation such as the United States have a moral duty to obey the law? Do officials, when interpreting the Constitution, have an obligation to follow what that text meant when ratified? To follow precedent? To follow what the Supreme Court today says the Constitution means? These are questions of political obligation (for citizens) and interpretive obligation (for anyone interpreting the Constitution, often officials). Abner Greene argues that such obligations do not exist. Although citizens should obey some laws entirely, and other laws in some instances, no one has put forth a successful argument that citizens should obey all laws all the time. Greene’s case is not only “against” obligation. It is also “for” an approach he calls “permeable sovereignty”: all of our norms are on equal footing with the state’s laws. Accordingly, the state should accommodate religious, philosophical, family, or tribal norms whenever possible. Greene shows that questions of interpretive obligation share many qualities with those of political obligation. In rejecting the view that constitutional interpreters must follow either prior or higher sources of constitutional meaning, Greene confronts and turns aside arguments similar to those offered for a moral duty of citizens to obey the law.
The principal aim of this book is to develop and defend an analysis of the concept of moral obligation. What it seeks to do is generate new solutions to a range of philosophical problems concerning obligation and its application. Amongst these problems are deontic paradoxes, the supersession of obligation, conditional obligation, actualism and possibilism, dilemmas, supererogation, and cooperation. By virtue of its normative neutrality, the analysis provides a theoretical framework within which competing theories of obligation can be developed and assessed.
"The Obligation" is a modern parable about a young Capitol Hill staffer who discovers that the seasoned congressman he works for is guarding an ancient secret. An obsession over a mysterious inscription launches his introduction to a worldview that will challenge everything he thought he knew about space, evolution and humanity. Under the guidance of the congressman, the young man is propelled on a journey of mind and spirit that takes him from Washington to California to Arizona and back to the floor of the House of Representatives. Along the way, he meets six extraordinary individuals who help him understand the secret of the Obligation. The journey is filled with emotions, ideas and insights that lead the young aide to not only understand the reason why we yearn to explore outer space, but also see the larger responsibility we have to each other and to the planet that gave us life.
The last hasidic rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto explores many facets of spiritual growth and character development.
In precarious and tumultuous times, schemes of social support, including cash transfers, are increasingly indispensable. Yet the inadequacy of the nation-state frame of membership that such schemes depend on is becoming evermore evident, as non-citizens form a growing proportion of the populations that welfare states attempt to govern. In Presence and Social Obligation, James Ferguson argues that conceptual resources for solving this problem are closer to hand than we might think. Drawing on a rich anthropology of sharing, he argues that the obligation to share never depends only on membership, but also on presence: on being "here." Presence and Social Obligation strives to demonstrate that such obligatory sharing based on presence can be observed in the way that marginalized urban populations access state services, however unequally, across the global South. Examples show that such sharing with non-nationals is not some sort of utopian proposal but part of the everyday life of the modern service-delivering state. Presence and Social Obligation is a critical yet refreshing approach to an ever-growing way of being together.
Drawing on philosophical reflection, spiritual and religious values, and somatic practice, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh offers guidance for moving amidst the affective dynamics that animate the streets of the global cities now amassing around our planet. Here theology turns decidedly secular. In urban medieval Europe, seculars were uncloistered persons who carried their spiritual passion and sense of an obligated life into daily circumambulations of the city. Seculars lived in the city, on behalf of the city, but—contrary to the new profit economy of the time—with a different locus of value: spirit. Betcher argues that for seculars today the possibility of a devoted life, the practice of felicity in history, still remains. Spirit now names a necessary “prosthesis,” a locus for regenerating the elemental commons of our interdependent flesh and thus for cultivating spacious and fearless empathy, forbearance, and generosity. Her theological poetics, though based in Christianity, are frequently in conversation with other religions resident in our postcolonial cities.
Against an ever-expanding and diversifying ‘rights talk’, this book re-opens the question of obligation from not only legal but also ethical, sociological and political perspectives. Its premise is that obligation has a primacy ahead of rights, because rights attach to practices and modes of being that are already saturated with obligations. Obligations thus lie at the core not just of law but of community. Yet the distinctive meanings, range and situations of obligation have tended to remain under-theorised in legal scholarship. In response, this book examines the sense in which we are multiply ‘bound beings’, to law and legal institutions, as much as we are to place, community, memory and the various social institutions that give shape to collective life. Sharing this set of concerns, each of the international group of scholars contributing to this volume traces the specificity of the binding force of obligations, their techniques and modes of expression, as well as their centrally important role in giving form to lawful relations. Together they provide an innovative and challenging contribution to legal scholarship: one that will also be of relevance to those working in politics, philosophy and social theory.
A History of the Order of the Engineer Engineering is more than number crunching. It is a matter of life and death. In 1907, when engineering errors led to a Canadian bridge collapse that killed seventy-five men, the profession's moral obligations were stark and obvious. Engineers increasingly realized that technical expertise was not enough, and in 1925, a group of Canadian engineers formally and publicly promised to uphold the highest ethical standards. To remind themselves of their pledge, they fashioned iron rings to be worn on the outer finger. Unfortunately, for decades engineers in the United States had no similar institution. Then, on a summer day in 1970, 170 engineers, students, and teachers met on the campus of Cleveland State University for the first ceremony of what would become the Order of the Engineer. Today, the stainless steel rings worn by the Orders members are recognized throughout the world as the outward sign of an inward commitment to ethical engineering. This is the story of the Orders origins and expansion.
C. Stephen Evans defends the claim that moral obligations are best understood as divine commands or requirements; hence an important part of morality depends on God. God's requirements are communicated in a variety of ways, including conscience, and that natural law ethics and virtue ethics provide complementary perspectives to this view.