The term moral obligation has a number of meanings in moral philosophy, in religion, and in layman's terms. Generally speaking, when someone says of an act that it is a "moral obligation," they refer to a belief that the act is one prescribed by their set of values.
Moral philosophers differ as to the origin of moral obligation, and whether such obligations are external to the agent (that is, are, in some sense, objective and applicable to all agents) or are internal (that is, are based on the agent's personal desires, upbringing, conscience, and so on).
Obligation being a set code by which a person is to follow. (Obligations) can be found by an individual's peers that set a code that may go against the individual's own desires. The individual will express their morality by the person following the set code(s) through seeing it as good to appease society.
Famous quotes containing the words moral and/or obligation:
“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“No obligation to do the impossible is binding.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)