"If people break those bonds we are under a lesser obligation to maintain them ourselves".
Further argument is needed to explain why being genetically related to a greater rather than lesser degree generates obligations, especially where the elements of voluntary cause are clearly not applicable (which applies as much to aunts, cousins or other members of the wider family as it does to grandparents).
You are under no moral obligation to vote for the lesser of two evils.
And, (2) I have recently completed an invited paper, now in press at the journal Annual Review in Public Health, entitled "Can We Say What Diet is Best for Health?" That was a lesser effort than the book, but with similar obligations.
A general rule seems to be then: the higher the cost to the agent, the higher the threshold, the stronger the agent-favouring option, and the lesser the probability that the agent will be subjected to the obligation to promote the overall good.
In this paper I argue that because of the important obligation to protect human research subjects' identities (and, to a lesser extent, the proliferation of publicly available datasets), few researchers are actually in a position to implement this type of mixed methodology.
His feast is given a lesser status in the calendar of the Church of England; a holy day of obligation for English Roman Catholics until the late 18th century, it is now an optional memorial for local observance.
Carrying out those "auxiliary precautions" -- the obligation of government to control itself, and to protect ourselves from the lesser angels of our own nature -- was why the Founders split power between the executive and legislative branches.
The delegation of anaesthesia to certified farmers may be a promising model to reinforce the obligation to provide local anaesthesia for disbudding and castrating calves, but to a lesser extent for castrating lambs.
