Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers an account of the trajectory of obligations that can inform their present situation. It addresses the positive work that obligations do in maintaining communal and individual flourishing. The chapter argues that while rights rely for their protection on the operation of multiple obligations, it is a deeper sense of obligation, one grounded in individual and collective needs, that offers a better way of understanding the potential that obligations have in sustaining communal well-being. Rights are deeply reliant on obligations since obligations and practices of obedience structure the operation and effectiveness of rights themselves. The ecological aspect refers to the ways in which obligations are relationally and reflexively situated within wider social structures. A structural substitution occurs in which religious dogma is replaced by other forms that are similarly, if less apparently, marked by the continuity of the priority of obligations.