For example, the Executive Branch has an obvious and imperative obligation to preserve the national security.
The discourse of wastefulness, the void that must be filled, is the basis for an imperative obligation to donate that cannot itself be realised.
But I realized that obsessing about what America had done was delaying a more imperative obligation: to minutely, painfully, collectively examine what had gone awry in my own land.
Donation of the organ to a family member might be viewed as an "imperative" obligation or it might stem from a feeling of love and compassion for the family member.
Citizens who had risen by the millions to protect Britain in the First World War created a similar imperative of obligation to the dead, a departure in a country that had, a century earlier, buried the casualties of Waterloo in unmarked mass graves.
That may sound like an unobjectionable thing for a woman to have been in that era, except that Grannis believed moral behavior was an imperative with "equal obligation upon men and women".
Courts and professional associations have consistently held that in matters of public welfare--from reporting of child abuse and gunshot wounds to exposing the conduct of impaired colleagues--physicians have an overt duty to serve the communal good, an imperative that transcends any obligation to individual patients.
In contrast, (3) is a contrary-to-duty obligation or "imperative" (a "CTD") appearing to say (in the context of 1)) what Jones ought to do conditional on his violating his primary obligation.
Thanks to the Convention, child rights are now recognised as human rights, to be ensured by adult society as a matter of legal obligation, moral imperative and development priority.
Thanks to the CRC, child rights are now at the cutting edge of the global struggle for human rights, to be ensured by adult society as a matter of legal obligation, moral imperative and development priority.
What follows, while not exactly predictable, fits squarely within the logic of classic film noir, where cold-eyed self-interest quickly becomes entangled with unruly desires and the primal imperatives of honor and obligation.
