Will you share your food (serious question)

[DLJ]

Had the question been: "Would you rescue the child?" without any of the 'obligation' baggage, my answer would have been "yes".

I recommend you get over whatever problem you have with the word "obligation."

"my answer would have been 'yes'" suggests that you feel obliged to save the child. This is only your own moral obligation that you impose on yourself. Don't worry about the baggage the word carries. If you feel like you should this is an obligation. This doesn't mean you have to it simply means you consider yourself duty-bound to do so. Contrast with "requirement." Obligation=ought. Requirement=must. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you don't like the word obligation because it sounds like a requirement.
...

Nope.  Not getting over it.  Getting into it has led me to my current hypothesis regarding the reason why 'the morality question' has not yet been resolved... and the ideas I've been formulating over the last year as to what morality really is and what it's for.

Obligation (from google):  "an act or course of action to which a person is morally or legally bound; a duty or commitment."
- which makes 'moral obligation' a tautology, but that's by-the-by.  The point is that it's deontological rather than consequential.  
Obliged (from google):  "require or compel (someone) to undertake a legal or moral duty."
- and there's the rub.

'Required' involves the cognitive systems.  It is not necessarily mandatory (must/shall), it could be 'should' but it is consequentialist.
'Compulsion' involves the limbic system.  'Impulse' would be a better word and that's deontological.

So, I'm making a distinction between an unfeeling or unthinking action and an action based on feelies or thinkies.

Dogs have been known to save drowning children.  Is that from a moral obligation?

I would save the child in the same way that a dog would (well, I wouldn't use my teeth   )

If rationale comes into it, which it does for humans, having new shoes might be one of those consequentialist rationales (although not for me) as would say the fact that I had gone back in time and was in the middle of another thought experiment ("if you could go back in time to kill Hitler" etc.) and had already decided that this child must die!!!  

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(Dude, learn to swim.)

I've tried.  I can even teach children how to swim.

But for me, vertical swimming is the extent of my ability.