Here we find a very different account of the basis of obligation: we are obliged to perform or avoid certain actions which are incompatible with our consciences, because we will be guilty of inconsistency if we don't.
Dworkin attempts to discern the basis of obligation in friendships and families by the process of interpretation of these social practices.
What social relation could be the basis of moral obligations?
This account of the basis of promissory obligations has been extended into other contexts, including those of friendship and the family (see especially Hoff Sommers' account of filial obligations).
Even if such an assimilation were to be successful, we would still need an account of the basis of promissory obligations.
This question too is misleading, since if any of the elements of the grateful response are obligatory, then technically, it would be the benefactor's φ-ing that would be the source (cause or basis) of the obligations, not the beneficiary's response itself.
For public and private research funding, universities and NHS trusts are accountable to medical research charities, industry, and other funders on the basis of contractual obligations.
The tax system therefore was replaced by a system of service tenure, under which a large proportion of the land was held on the basis of an obligation of service to the state.
An ABC News executive said the networks decision to broadcast the speech was based purely on the basis of civic obligation and would have been made even on a night when the network had a hit show.
Finally, C. Stephen Evans, in Kierkegaard's Ethics of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (2004) and God and Moral Obligation(2013) articulates both in Kierkegaard and in its own right a divine command theory that is argued to be superior to all the main alternative non-theist accounts of the nature and basis of moral obligation.
