If, however, you want to be a utilitarian you have to distinguish empirical questions from questions of obligation and value – particularly when it comes to making decisions about torture and other bads.
For instance, if some subjects have obligations of gratitude to the state, and obligations of gratitude cannot be exacted or demanded, then the question of political obligation (what obligations a subject owes to the state) and the question of political authority (what the state has a right to demand of its subjects) do not have coextensive answers (McConnell 1993: 208).
Yet as Onora O'Neill (1996: chapter 5) has argued, questions of obligations and responsibilities should be central to any account of justice.
Crescas also addresses the question of the obligation of various beliefs.
The question of political obligation, then, turns on whether there is are moral reasons to obey the mandatory requirements of a wide-ranging, morally fallible, institutionalized authority.
However other scholars understand these chapters as Crescas is that Crescas is not concerned here with finding a morsel of free choice in a highly deterministic world, but is rather addressing a very different problem: He only wants to answer the question of external obligation and the parallel issue of culpability.
By putting consent at the center of their contracts these early modern contract theorists (1) were clearly supposing that individuals had basic normative powers over themselves before they entered into the social contract (a point that Hume [1741] stressed), and (2) brought the question of political obligation to the fore.
The question of moral obligation of health providers in attending to spiritual concerns of patients and ethical boundaries of such intervention readily comes to mind.
It is a plea for an objective investigation of the ethical, focussed on the existing ethical qualities of human activities, rather than on the pieties of traditional moral philosophy: the questions of right, obligation, duty and so forth.
