Dancy also questions (2000, 21 23) whether Frankena himself in his classic paper "Obligation and Motivation in Recent Moral Philosophy" (1958) understands the distinction he draws there between what he calls exciting or motivating reasons and justifying reasons, in quite the way the explanatory/justifying distinction is now understood.
The article also posed serious journalistic questions: What makes an academic feud news, and what is the paper's obligation to try to figure out who is right?
I was completely stunned, however, by your description of the paper's obligation in this case as "presenting both the good and evil that armed conflict can bring".
Explaining grants of anonymity in ways friendly to the source, to get the source to speak at all or for any other reason, should not trump the paper's obligation to report truthfully and accurately.
Mr. Keller's assessment of the privacy considerations and the paper's obligation to serve the public interest in a nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court seemed to the public editor to be worth sharing with a broader audience.
When a young reporter called my wife from a mourning Newtown neighborhood and shakily related how a man had yelled at her, called her names, and told her to get out, her editor reminded her of the paper's obligation to inform tens of thousands of readers of the who, what, when, where, and why of the story.
Insurers whose business models involve large amounts of short-term paper, or other obligations that are maturing soon, also risk being caught short if the credit markets stay frozen.
This paper analyses the obligations that would be placed on real airlines under an initial draft "Strawman" proposal that was originally formulated as a starting point for discussions within ICAO, and the extent to which such a proposal would succeed in keeping emissions at or below the desired level.
Painful though it may be, the paper has an obligation to follow the story where it leads, even to the pope's door.
