## 1. Special Obligations and Consequentialism



What is *special* about special obligations? One way to answer
this question is to contrast special obligations with some type of
duty or obligation that is *not* special. One example of such a
'non-special' type of duty or obligation is that
recognized by consequentialists. (Special obligations can also be
contrasted with another type of non-special duty. See section III).
According to one version of consequentialism, the right action is that
action which, of all alternatives available to the agent, produces the
greatest net sum of intrinsic value, where intrinsic value is value as
an end or for its own sake and not merely as a means to something
other than itself. (There are, of course, many forms of
consequentialism. The important feature of such views for our purposes
is that they understand right action as a function of and solely of
the consequences (actual, probable, or possible) of the action and its
alternatives. (The following discussion presupposes a version of
actual consequence act-consequentialism. But the points made apply
*mutatis mutandis* to other versions of consequentialism.)



But now consider how, according to the consequentialist, I ought to
treat my friends (or family members, or colleagues, ...). If my
friend's well-being is no more intrinsically valuable than the
well-being of any other person, then I ought to be impartial, at least
in my actions, between promoting the good of my friend and promoting
the good of a complete stranger. Thus, the mere fact that someone is
my friend (or my mother, or my colleague, or my fellow citizen) does
not imply that I have any obligations to such a person that I do not
have to any and all persons. Similarly, the mere fact that I have
promised someone to benefit her in some way does not, considered in
itself, imply that I have any obligation to benefit that person: my
promisee's good carries no greater weight than does the good of
any other person. On the other hand, commonsense morality, in contrast
with consequentialism, seems to regard the mere fact that a person is
my friend or that I made a promise to that person as morally
significant. For example, most people do not think that I am justified
in breaking a promise merely because slightly more good would result
from my breaking the promise than from my keeping the promise.
Similarly, most people think that if I have a choice between
benefitting a friend or providing an equal benefit to a stranger that
I ought to benefit my friend. Consequentialism, in so far as it
diverges from commonsense morality on these points, strikes many as an
unacceptable moral theory.



Of course, the consequentialist has more than one possible reply to
these sorts of worries about her view. First, the consequentialist can
argue that, in fact, each person acting so as to benefit her friends,
loved ones, promisees, etc., will have the best overall consequences.
Promising, for example, is an instrumentally valuable institution, and
each of us should do her part to support that institution: one thing
that each of us can do is to keep her own promises. Promises also
create expectations in their recipients, and the harm of unrealized
expectations or hopes needs to be taken into account when we consider
whether the breaking of a promise has better consequences than the
keeping of a promise. Similarly, each of us ought to take special care
of her loved ones, because friendship is a valuable institution. Also,
we are well positioned to take care of our loved ones: our efforts are
more likely to be efficacious than if we were to attempt to benefit
persons distant from us whom we do not know and people often
experience greater emotional harm when they are slighted by their
intimates than when they are slighted by strangers. As John Stuart
Mill remarked in Utilitarianism, "[f]ew hurts which human beings
can sustain are greater, and none wound more, than when that on which
they habitually and with full assurance relied fails them in the hour
of need" (59).



In *The Methods of Ethics*, Henry Sidgwick appealed to the
considerations mentioned in the previous paragraph in an attempt
"to show that the commonly received view of special claims and
duties arising out of special relations, though *prima facie*
opposed to the impartial universality of the Utilitarian principle, is
really maintained by a well-considered application of that
principle" (439). Our 'natural benevolent
affections' guide us to do good toward some small sector of
humankind (a small sector composed of our friends, promisees,
colleagues, family, etc.), and stifling such natural tendencies would
leave only "a very feeble counterpoise to self-love" and
thus little from which to develop a more extended and generalized
benevolence (434). Also, given the naturalness of certain affections,
we come to expect others to act on them, and so pain is caused by
deviations from these expectations (439). Thus, consequentialists have
for a long time been aware of the apparently counterintuitive
implications of their theory with respect to special obligations and
been at pains to show that such implications are merely apparent.



This move, however, does not accommodate *genuinely* special
obligations within a consequentialist view. The consequentialist
justification for an agent's giving greater attention to the
well-being of her intimates is that her doing so will best promote
intrinsic value. The reason that each of us has to promote the good of
her intimates does not have any weight that counters the weight of our
duty to maximize intrinsic value; rather, whatever weight our reason
to promote the good of our intimates has, it has *derivatively*
as a means of our fulfilling our fundamental or basic duty to maximize
value. Whenever we can maximize value by ignoring our intimates or by
breaking a promise, then we, in such circumstances, have no even
*prima facie* reasons to take care of our intimates or to keep
our promises. Thus, on this account, the consequentialist secures only
*derivatively* special obligations: reasons to take special
care of a select group of people that are *derived from* a more
general duty to care for all persons as such. Each agent has the same
fundamental duty or reason to maximize value, but each of us, given
our unique causal and epistemic position, ought to perform different
actions in order to be fulfilling that fundamental shared duty.



But then, of course, whatever derivative reason an agent has to care
for her intimates is determined by the nature of her contingent,
empirical circumstances. If I find myself causally and epistemically
positioned to do greater good by ignoring my intimates and serving the
needs of strangers, then that is what I ought to do, according to the
consequentialist. In fact, if I have the choice of providing
*x* units of good to my friend or *x*+1 units of good to
a complete stranger, then, barring any further long-run negative
effects on my character, my friendship, or the institution of
friendship, I ought to provide the *x*+1 units of good to the
stranger. Commonsense morality, however, as we have seen, regards the
fact of my standing in the friendship relation to someone as morally
significant in and of itself. In so far as the consequentialist is
unable to grant friendship (or promising, etc.) any such independent
moral significance, it remains out of step with commonsense
understanding of the status of special obligations.



Another move that the consequentialist can make is to claim that each
person taking care of her own intimates (or keeping her own promises)
is an intrinsically valuable state of affairs. And *my* taking
care of my intimates is an essential part of this intrinsically
valuable state of affairs: it is not merely a contingent matter that
I, rather than others, am better placed to promote it. Thus, it seems
that I have reason to take care of my intimates that no one else has,
and I have no similar reason to take care of persons other than my
intimates. But this too is only a derivatively special obligation: it
is derived from the fundamental duty to maximize value. If I can
produce more value by promoting *your* taking care of
*your* intimates than by taking care of my own, then I ought to
do the former rather than the latter. Perhaps your intimate
relationships are more valuable than my own, and I could promote more
good by devoting myself to helping you to maintain your relationships
to family, friends, colleagues, and promisees. In such circumstances,
I ought to devote my resources to promoting your devotion to your
intimates. My reason to pay special attention to certain persons
provides no independent counter-weight to my reason to maximize
overall value: I must be, at bottom, impartial, at least in action, as
between my own intimate relationships (or my own promises) and anyone
else's intimate relationships (or promises).



Peter Railton has argued that a 'sophisticated
consequentialist' agent has reason to cultivate in himself
motivational dispositions that support the kinds of partiality that
commonsense views as necessary for friendship and other intimate
relationships. If moral agents were inclined to reason as
straightforward consequentialists, they would be unable to form
loving, intimate relationships. Given the value of such relationships,
agents will, in the long run, produce more overall good if they
dispose themselves to benefit loved ones, even if such dispositions
lead them, on occasion, to perform an action with less than optimal
consequences. Thus, good consequentialist agents are ones who guide
themselves to act as though they had special obligations to friends
and other loved ones. (See Driver for an attempt to show how
consequentialism is not in tension with feminist concerns about
"partiality and the demands of morality" (197).)



The difficulty with Railton's strategy is in its ultimate
evaluation of the action of a sophisticated consequentialist agent on
the occasion when he acts to benefit a loved one even though the
consequences of doing so are slightly less good than if he had acted
to benefit a stranger instead. As Richard J. Arneson says, according
to the sophisticated consequentialist, "it can be morally right
to form the intention to do what is morally wrong ... Sometimes
one ought to become a friend, even though this involves disposing
oneself to do wrong, because forming this disposition would be acting
to produce best consequences" (394). Arneson is quite right to
point out that such a claim does not involve the consequentialist in
any "paradox or inconsistency" (394). However, most people
are reluctant to view friendship and the dispositions that it involves
as inevitably an arena of wrongdoing, albeit blameless wrongdoing. If
this is the best that consequentialism can do for our reasons to take
special care of friends and of loved ones -- labeling such action
as wrongdoing that is a byproduct of otherwise instrumentally valuable
dispositions -- then it seems that consequentialism simply cannot
capture our deep-rooted sense of our obligations arising from special
relationships. (See Jollimore 70-71.)


## 2. Special Obligations and Agent-Relativity



The discussion of the previous section stressed that the alleged
difficulties that consequentialism has in accommodating the
commonsense understanding of special obligations arise from the fact
that the consequentialist can allow only derivatively, not genuinely,
special obligations. Another way to express this point is to say that
the consequentialist allows only agent-neutral reasons, whereas
special obligations, as understood by commonsense, are agent-relative
reasons. Derek Parfit understands agent-neutral as opposed to
agent-relative reasons in the following way:



> 
> Suppose we claim that there is a reason to relieve some person's
> suffering. This reason is objective if it is a reason for everyone
> - for anyone who could relieve this person's suffering. I
> call such reasons agent-neutral. ... When I call some reason
> agent-relative, I am not claiming that this reason cannot be a reason
> for other agents. All that I am claiming is that it may not be (143).
> 



Thomas Nagel explicates the difference between agent-neutral and
agent-relative reasons in a slightly different way: 



> 
> If a reason can be given a general form which does not include an
> essential reference to the person who has it, it is an *agent-neutral*  reason. For example, if it is a reason for anyone
> to do or want something that it would reduce the amount of
> wretchedness in the world, then that is a neutral reason. If on the
> other hand the general form of a reason does include an essential
> reference to the person who has it, it is an  *agent-relative* 
> reason. For example, if it is a reason for anyone to do or want
> something that it would be in  *his*  interest, then that is a
> relative reason. In such a case, if something were in Jones's
> interest but contrary to Smith's, Jones would have reason to
> want it to happen and Smith would have the same reason to want it not
> to happen (1986 152-153).
> 



Thus, special obligations would be understood by Parfit and Nagel as
agent-relative reasons: my reason to take care of my friend by giving
her encouraging words may not be shared by anyone else (even when in a
position which makes it possible for her to do that), and the
"form of the reason ... include[s] an essential reference
to the person who has it" - I have reason to give my
friend encouraging words. 



We can make Parfit's explanation of the distinction between
agent-neutral reasons and agent-relative reasons more precise in the
following way:



> 
> Agent-Neutral Reason: S's reason to do or to promote *p* is
> an agent-neutral reason if and only if, necessarily, for any *Q*,
> *Q* would also have that reason to do or to promote *p* if
> *Q* were in a causal position to do or to promote *p*. All
> other reasons are agent-relative.
> 



It is important to see that an agent could have more than one reason
to promote any given state of affairs, some of those reasons being
agent-neutral, others agent-relative. Consider Peter's reasons
to buy Mary a dinner that she will enjoy. If enjoyment or pleasure is
intrinsically valuable, then Peter will reason R to buy Mary that
dinner, where R is grounded or constituted by Mary's enjoyment
of the dinner. If Paul, like Peter, is casually placed so as to be
able to provide Mary with that intrinsically valuable enjoyment, then
Paul also has reason R to do so. But now suppose that Peter is
Mary's friend. Defenders of special obligations of friendship
are likely to claim that Peter also has reason R\* to buy
that dinner for Mary, where R\* is generated or grounded or
constituted by his friendship with Mary. If Paul is not Mary's
friend, then he does not stand in the friendship relation to her, and
so he will not have reason R\* (or any reason of that type)
to buy Mary dinner, regardless of his causal placement. Thus,
Peter's reason R\* is an agent-relative reason,
whereas R was agent-neutral.



Notice that on this definition of agent-neutrality and its
correspondent definition of agent-relativity, nearness in space cannot
be an ultimate ground of an agent-relative reason. When we think of
nearness affecting our moral obligations, it seems that it does so by
affecting our causal efficacy in providing aid: we are standing on the
bank of a river in which someone is drowning, someone has had a heart
attack in the room where we are and we know CPR, etc. In all of these
cases, if someone else had been in our spatial position, he or she
would have been in our causal position and so would have had the same
duty to aid as we do. And spatial position does not seem to have any
other significance beyond its effect on causal position. After all, if
someone had been further away but able to push a button to activate a
machine that would save the one drowning, then she would have had the
same duty to aid as we did. (See Orsi for a discussion of nearness and
obligations.) 



But friendship and promising, for example, are not like spatial
position, i.e., it does not seem that the relevance of these
relationships is a matter of the parties to them being best causally
situated to provide aid. Even if a person who is wealthier than me is
actually in a better position to aid my friend, it nonetheless seems
to be the case that I have some reason to aid my friend that the
person at least as well or better causally situated to do so does not
have. She may have stronger agent-neutral reason to aid my friend, but
she does not have the agent-relative reason arising from friendship
that I have. 



Do we have such genuinely agent-relative special obligations? We can
see the difficulty in accepting special obligations through another
contrast, this one with natural duties as understood by commonsense
morality.


## 3. Special Obligations and Natural Duties



Although commonsense morality seems firmly committed to special
obligations, and seems firmly committed to an understanding of such
obligations that cannot be accommodated by consequentialism,
difficulties remain in trying to provide some grounds for such
obligations. We can see these difficulties more clearly if we contrast
special obligations with a type of duty recognized by commonsense
morality that is not special, i.e., natural duties. Natural duties are
"moral requirements which apply to all men [and women]
irrespective of status or of acts performed...owed by all persons
to all others" (Simmons 1979, 13). It is plausible to suppose
that the fundamental or basic justification of why we have natural
duties is the intrinsic nature of persons, i.e., the intrinsic nature
of those to whom the duties are owed (moral patients). For example,
consider my duty to tell the person sitting next to me at a bar that
Joe Schmoe slipped poison into her drink. It may seem to be the case
that I am morally required to tell only a limited class of people that
someone has put poison into their drink, namely, the class consisting
of the person sitting next to me right now whose drink is such that I
know that it is poisoned. However, the fundamental or basic
justification for my having that duty is the nature of the person to
whom the duty is owed - she is rational, or sentient, or
[substitute your preferred characterization of a moral patient]
- and her nature is sufficient to ground the duty. My proximity
to the person and my knowledge of the poison in her drink facilitate
my being able to fulfill my (natural) duty of mutual aid, but it is
not a part of the fundamental explanation of why I have such a duty in
the first place. So it is the nature of the action, i.e., warning the
relevant sort of being of imminent danger, that renders the action
morally required. Anyone else in the same causal and epistemic
position would similarly have a duty to warn of the poison in the
drink. I occupy no peculiar status or role and have performed no prior
actions such that if I did not occupy that role or had not performed
those actions, I would have no duty to warn of the poison in the
drink.



Special obligations, on the other hand, are owed not (necessarily) to
all persons, but to some (possibly) limited class of
 persons,[1]
 where the fundamental or basic justification for the having of such
obligations cannot be the intrinsic nature of the obligee as such (or,
at least, not only the intrinsic nature of the obligee: the obligee
must have the requisite properties in order to qualify as a moral
patient before she can be owed any obligations or duties at all.)
After all, those to whom I owe special obligations are not necessarily
more worthy or needy (and are certainly not more sentient or rational)
than those to whom I do not owe any special obligations. Rather, the
relationship between me and my obligee is fundamental to any
explanation of my special obligations to that obligee. Consider, for
example, my obligation to keep my promise to you to remind you,
whenever you start to drink alcohol, that you have given it up for
Lent. The fundamental explanation of why I have an obligation to
remind you that you have given up alcohol for Lent is not that you
have the requisite features to qualify as a moral patient in
conjunction with the nature of the action of reminding persons when
they have given up alcohol as part of a religious commitment. My
relation to you (my status as defined by past action), i.e.that I have
made a promise to you, does not simply facilitate my fulfilling some
more general duty, but, rather, is part of the basic explanation of
why I have the obligation to remind you of your commitment. (There are
difficulties with this specification of special obligations as opposed
to natural duties. In order to remove the difficulties, one would need
to explain why certain contingent features of persons such as causal
position are not partly constitutive of 'status' or best
seen as a result of 'acts performed.' In other words, one
who intends to attribute to moral agents some type of genuinely
special obligation owes an account of what sorts of status or position
or what types of acts performed are such that, as a result of being in
such a position or having performed such acts, one has obligations
that are not derived from some more general obligation that one has to
all persons considered as
 such.[2]).



As I have said, common sense morality seems to regard persons as
having certain special obligations, in particular, special obligations
to one's friends, one's family, those persons to whom one
has made a promise, and one's fellow citizens. As I indicated in
the first section, appeal to these special obligations has often been
used as a weapon against the consequentialist: persons have special
obligations, consequentialism cannot accommodate such obligations,
therefore consequentialism is false. As I have said, the
consequentialist has attempted to show the ways in which she can
justify our acting as though we have special obligations, but must
deny that we actually have any non-derivative special obligations. The
consequentialist can, at this point, join forces with any moral
theorist who accepts natural duties while rejecting special
obligations. Consequentialists and defenders of natural duties base
the duties that they defend on some intrinsic feature of the state of
affairs to be promoted or of the person to whom the duty is owed. They
can then press the defender of special obligations to offer some
account of the grounds of alleged non-derivative special obligations:
why suppose that we have reasons to benefit some persons merely
because of some special relationship that we stand in to those
persons, our own status or position, or past actions that we have
performed?



This demand of the consequentialist is backed by a particular and
familiar understanding of the nature of moral demands. Morality, it
seems to many people, requires us to be impartial between persons, not
giving special consideration to anyone merely on the basis of
irrelevant features. Deviations from such impartiality often appear
morally odious, as the world's history of racism, sexism,
religious bigotry, homophobia, etc. demonstrate all too clearly. But
special obligations are a deviation from impartiality, as they offer
support to our being partial to those persons who stand in special
relationships to us. A defense of special obligations, then, requires
a defense of morality as involving both partial and impartial demands
(see Cottingham). Instead of deviating from an impartial conception of
morality, some philosophers have instead claimed that special
relationships such as friendship generate their own, non-moral reasons
of partiality (Cocking and Kennett), while others have followed Samuel
Scheffler (1994) in claiming that we have permissions or
agent-centered prerogatives that allow us to deviate from impartial
moral demands in certain contexts. And, of course, another option is
to deny that we are justified in acting partially even in contexts in
which such partiality is generally accepted. (See, for example,
Gomberg, for a defense of the claim that partiality to compatriots is
no more justified than is racism.)


## 4. Special Obligations and Voluntarism



Now we can consider how the consequentialist, or anyone who claims
that special obligations are not genuinely special but only
derivatively so, can turn the burden of proof back upon the defender
of special obligations. The following discussion borrows from Samuel
Scheffler's (1994) exposition of what he calls the voluntarist
and the distributive objections to any claim that persons have
non-derivative special obligations. First, the voluntarist objection
arises when we consider the perspective of the person supposed to have
special obligations over and above natural duties. Why suppose that I
acquire additional moral obligations simply by, for example, being a
member of some group or standing in some relationship to another? Why
suppose that I am obliged to sacrifice more for another person simply
because that person is my intimate or colleague or fellow citizen?



Unlike natural duties, special obligations are grounded on something
other than (or, in addition to) the intrinsic nature of the obligee.
The voluntarist worries support the view that special obligations can
only be acquired through the voluntary actions of the agent whose
obligations they
 are.[3]
 (It is important to recognize that voluntarism is a thesis about
special obligations alone. The question being pressed by the
voluntarist concerns obligations over and above those owed to all
persons in virtue of their intrinsic nature or those that we have to
promote intrinsically valuable states of affairs.) Thus, the
voluntarist will grant that special obligations are acquired through
promises and contracts, because, in making a promise or contract, the
agent voluntarily agrees to bear a certain burden for the person to
whom she makes the promise or contract. But other sorts of purported
special obligations, in particular those owed to family members or to
fellow citizens, would not be acquired through the voluntary actions
of the obligor: one does not choose to be born into a certain family
or as a citizen of a given country, so why suppose that, simply as a
result of luck, either good or bad, I have obligations, over and above
my natural duties or my consequentialist duties, to my family members
and to my fellow citizens?



Those who accept the voluntarist thesis concerning special obligations
take one of several approaches, including the following: (i) they
limit special obligations to the straightforwardly contractual or
promissory, (ii) they attempt to show that all of the special
obligations that they defend really are contractual or promissory in
nature, or (iii) they show that while not all special obligations are
contractual, they nevertheless are similar in a relevant respect.



Let us begin with option (i). According to this option, in addition to
whatever natural duties we have, we have only those further
obligations that we have acquired through explicit promises or
contracts. The difficulty with this option is that it does little to
accommodate the range of special obligations acknowledged by
commonsense morality. For example, most of us do not make the sorts of
promises that we make to spouses to all of our friends. I have never
explicitly promised my best friend to love and care for her. This
difficulty is even more apparent in the case of familial
relationships. We do not enter into contracts with our parents of the
form: take care of me as a child and I will reciprocate when you are
older and need care. Nonetheless, it does seem that parents and
children owe one another a special degree of concern and commitment.
If the defender of special obligations is attempting to accommodate
commonsense morality, then she will have done so to a very limited
extent if she allows only those special obligations that are acquired
through explicit contracts or promises.



So consider (ii), i.e., claiming that while some special obligations
may initially appear to be non-contractual in nature, they are really
contractual. We can see, for example, Locke's famous appeal to
the notion of tacit consent in the political context as an instance of
this second strategy. In the *Second Treatise of Government*,
Locke claims that we have special political obligations, i.e.,
obligations to our own government that we do not have to all
governments. He himself, however, imagines someone responding, when he
proposes that these special political obligations are contractual in
nature, "[t]hat all men being born under government, some or
other, it is impossible any of them should ever be free, and at
liberty to unite together, and begin a new one, or ever be able to
erect a lawful government" (61). In other words, given our
situations as being born into particular governments, it certainly
doesn't appear that our special obligations to our governments
are contractual in nature. Thus, if we accept voluntarism (as Locke
clearly did), then it seems that we cannot have special political
obligations.



Locke famously appeals to the notion of *tacit consent* in
order to accommodate special political obligations given his
voluntarist commitment: "every man, that hath any possessions,
or enjoyment, of any part of the dominions of any government, doth
thereby give his *tacit* *consent*, and is as far forth
obliged to obedience to the laws of that government, during such
enjoyment, as any one under it" (64). A person gives tacit or
implicit, as opposed to express or explicit, consent, when her consent
is expressed via refraining from some action or type of action. As A.
John Simmons (1979) has argued, either refraining from or performing
some action can only be taken as indicative of consent when certain
conditions are met: the person must be aware that she is in a
situation in which consent is appropriate and/or expected, it must be
made clear in some way what must be done or not done in order to give
consent, it must be clear when action is to be taken or avoided, and
the consent-giving action or failure to act must be possible and not
extraordinarily costly. It has been argued that the political context,
at least as it is in the modern nation-state, fails to meet any of the
above conditions, and so it is implausible, if one accepts voluntarism
and the claim that all voluntarily assumed obligations are contractual
in nature, to suppose that persons in modern nation-states have
special political obligations.



While appeal to tacit consent is most familiar in the context of
attempting to ground special political obligations, one could also use
this notion in order to ground, for example, special obligations to
friends. Again, however, one would have to show that friendship is a
context that meets the conditions as described by Simmons, and it
seems implausible to suppose that it is. Further, however, some would
have a further objection to construing obligations of friendship as
contractual: such a model seems to misconstrue the nature of
friendship as involving, as Aristotle claimed, concern for the other
for the other's own sake. Whether or not one can accommodate
obligations of friendship (or obligations of parents to care for their
children) as grounded on tacit consent, it seems quite clear that, for
example, familial obligations, such as those of children to parents,
do not involve anything like a promise or contract, either express or
tacit. Again, as with option (i), option (ii) does not go far toward
accommodating the range of special obligations recognized by
commonsense morality.



The third strategy available to a voluntarist defender of special
obligations is to argue that while it is not the case that all special
obligations are reducible to contractual obligations, nonetheless, all
special obligations share the feature of voluntary assumption with
contractual obligations. All special obligations, according to this
account, are forms of voluntary commitments undertaken by the
individual moral agent. While not all actions that constitute the
undertaking of a commitment mimic those involved in the making of a
promise or contract, they are all such that the agent can choose
whether or not to perform them. Also, while promises and contracts are
temporally discrete events, a commitment may be undertaken via a
temporally extended series of events, each of which, in and of itself,
has no moral significance: it is only the series taken as a whole that
generates or grounds special obligations. While this strategy has the
virtue of being able to accommodate obligations of friendship without
distorting the nature of friendship, it, like the previous voluntarist
options, holds out little hope of accommodating political or familial
special obligations. At this point, the voluntarist is faced with a
choice: either reject her initial commitment to voluntarism regarding
special obligations or reject the commonsense claim about the
extensive range of special obligations that we have.



Some have been dissatisfied with the seeming limitations placed on the
extent of our special obligations by the voluntarist thesis. (Again,
only voluntarism with respect to special obligations is under
discussion here. Voluntarism with respect to all of our duties would
seriously delimit our moral responsibilities, and so, for that reason,
is held by virtually no one.) Common sense morality, after all, seems
to endorse a host of obligations derived from persons's roles or
positions, even when these roles or positions are not occupied as the
result of any voluntary choice on the part of the moral agent. Each of
us occupies various roles; for example, I am my mother's
daughter, my brother's sister, a university professor, a U.S.
citizen, a resident of Iowa, etc. Some people occupy positions in
religious communities as, e.g., Jews or Catholics or Hindus, some are
members of armed forces, some belong to clubs, sports teams, etc. Our
understandings of what it is to occupy a certain role often involves
certain normative assumptions about the person's obligations in
virtue of occupying that role. So, for example, in virtue of being an
Orthodox Jew, Joe Schmoe is obligated not to eat pork, in virtue of
being a philosophy professor, I am obligated to provide assistance to
my students, and in virtue of being my mother's daughter, I am
obligated to care for her when she is elderly. So role obligations,
i.e., obligations that we have in virtue of occupying some role
(whether or not voluntarily assumed), appear to be special
obligations: they are usually owed to some limited class of persons
and one acquires them through some actions of one's own or in
virtue of one's status, not as a result of intrinsic features of
the obligee or of the state of affairs to be promoted.



But, of course, we always need to distinguish between moral and
non-moral (or reason-giving and non-reason-giving) obligations of role
(or position). It is true that our very understanding of certain roles
seems to involve the having of certain obligations, duties, or
responsibilities. To be a daughter, for example, involves certain
care-taking responsibilities toward parents, just as being a professor
of philosophy involves obligations to students, colleagues, and the
profession more generally. But, analogously, being the commandant of a
concentration camp in Nazi Germany seemed to involve certain
obligations of role, including using slave labor as productively as
possible and killing as many Jews as possible on a daily basis. Also,
Orthodox Jewish women have certain role obligations to be submissive
to their husbands and to refrain from certain forms of work, study,
and participation in religious observance. However, the sense in which
a commandant of a camp has obligations of role does not seem to be a
moral or reason-giving sense, and it is at least an open question as
to whether Orthodox Jewish women have obligations to be submissive to
the male members of their community. Such language of obligations of
roles seems to involve merely others' expectations of persons
holding such positions. Why, a voluntarist (or anyone else, for that
matter) will ask, should we suppose that such expectations are
sufficient for the having of obligations in the reason-giving or moral
sense?



Anti-voluntarists have taken at least five different routes to
responding to this voluntarist worry about the normative status of
obligations of role or position (the names used here are not
necessarily used by those who take one or the other of these options):
(i) the 'true community' view, (ii) the 'reflective
acceptance' view, (iii) the 'justice view', (iv) the
appeal to value, and (v) the 'constitutive commitment'
view. In assessing these various options, we need to keep in mind the
range of roles that people can occupy, ranging from being the parent
of or being a university professor to being the commandant of a
concentration camp or the member of a terrorist organization. If roles
or positions generate moral or reason-giving obligations, we need some
conception of roles that does not yield the implausible implication
that Nazis had moral obligations to herd Jews into gas chambers.
Further, we need some conception of a role or position that does not
reduce all obligations to obligations of role or position. If natural
duties are not to be rendered obligations of role or position, we need
to be told why being a moral agent is not a role, but being an
American is. In other words, what descriptions of a person constitute
statements of that person's obligation-generating roles and
which do not? Why is the fact that I am my mother's daughter
constitutive of a role that I occupy whereas being a human being or
being a person born in the latter half of May on the cusp of Taurus
and Gemini is not?



Let us begin with (i) as advocated by Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin uses the
term 'associative [or, communal] obligations' to refer to
what have been called obligations of role. By 'associative
obligations' Dworkin means "the special responsibilities
social practice attaches to membership in some biological or social
group, like the responsibilities of family or friends or
neighbors" (196). Because his understanding of these obligations
is not such as to require 'choice or consent,' Dworkin
thinks that we can construe special political obligations as
associative obligations.



However, according to Dworkin, only in a true community do members
have associative obligations toward one another. Whereas a bare
community is one that "meets the genetic or geographical or
other historical conditions identified by social practice as capable
of constituting a fraternal community," the members of a true
community meet the following four conditions (201):



> 
> First, they must regard the group's obligations as
> *special*, holding distinctly within the group, rather than as
> general duties its members owe equally to persons outside it. Second,
> they must accept that these responsibilities are *personal*:
> that they run directly from each member to each other member, not just
> to the group as a whole in some collective sense. ... Third,
> members must see these responsibilities as flowing from a more general
> responsibility each has of *concern* for the well-being of
> others in the group ... Fourth, members must suppose that the
> group's practices show not only concern but an *equal*
> concern for all members. (199-200)
> 



Thus, on Dworkin's account, mere social expectation is not
sufficient to create associative obligations: persons must meet
certain psychological requirements in order for their group, be it a
friendship, a family, or a nation-state, to be the sort of community
such that membership in that community, independent of choice or
consent, grounds associative obligations.



Returning to the issues raised about role positions, we can notice
that a community could satisfy Dworkin's requirements for being
a true community and yet be such that we might not want to regard its
members as having special moral obligations to one another. Consider a
white supremacist organization: it might very well meet all of the
criteria that Dworkin lays out as both necessary and sufficient for a
community's being a true community. But is it really the case
that members of white supremacist organizations have special moral
obligations in virtue of being a member of, e.g., Aryan Nation? One
response is that in fact they do have prima facie special obligations
of role to one another, but that, given the hideous nature of the aims
of Aryan Nation, those obligations are never their
all-things-considered duties, i.e., their obligations of role are
always outweighed by their natural duties or duties of justice. But
the question then remains: why do white supremacists have special,
additional moral obligations toward one another simply in virtue of
their having a joint commitment to the immoral treatment of blacks and
Jews?



So let us consider approach (ii), the reflective acceptance view, as
advocated by Michael Hardimon in his "Role Obligations."
Hardimon aims to offer an account of obligations attached to certain
institutionally defined roles, namely "political, familial, and
occupational roles" (334), where a role is a
"[constellation] of institutionally specified rights and duties
organized around an institutionally specified social function"
(334). A role obligation, according to Hardimon, is "a moral
requirement, which attaches to an institutional role, whose content is
fixed by the function of the role, and whose normative force flows
from the role" (334). Some role obligations attach to unchosen
social roles, but only to social roles that are *reflectively
acceptable*:



> 
> To say that a social role is *reflectively acceptable* is to
> say that one would accept it upon reflection. Determining whether a
> given social role is reflectively acceptable involves stepping back
> from that role in thought and asking whether it is a role people ought
> to occupy and play. Determining that a given social role is
> reflectively acceptable involves judging that it is (in some sense)
> meaningful, rational, or good. (348)
> 



Thus, on Hardimon's account, it is hypothetical rather than
actual consent that grounds unchosen special obligations. (Some have
interpreted Locke as in fact appealing to hypothetical rather than to
actual consent. It is important to see that hypothetical consent is
not really consent, and so a view such as Hardimon's is not a
voluntarist view, as Hardimon himself readily acknowledges.)



The obvious question for Hardimon's view is why we need to
appeal to the notion of reflective acceptance at all. It seems that
what Hardimon is really appealing to as a necessary condition of a
role's generating obligations is that's role being
'meaningful, rational, or good'. As we saw, a difficulty
with (i), the true community view, is that it leaves open the
possibility that occupying a role in an unjust community still
generates obligations. Hardimon is clearly worried about this issue
and so makes appeal to what one would judge good or just if one were
to make such a judgment (and, let's assume, judge correctly).
But then the hypothetical judgment is really epiphenomenal with
respect to the justification and we are left with (iii), the justice
view: one has obligations in virtue of occupying a role if and only if
one's filling that role and the institution in which one would
be filling that role meet certain conditions of morality or
justice.



Is this justice or morality condition, however, sufficient? Suppose
that all of my neighbors organize the "West Side Reading
Group," which will meet once a month at the local coffee house
to discuss edifying books, articles, etc. Members of the group are
obligated to attend a certain number of meetings a year, participate
in discussions, and recommend books or articles to other members of
the group. Everyone who lives in a certain sector of the west side of
town is a member of the group. Given that I live in that part of the
west side of town, I am thereby a member of the group. Do I have
obligations to attend meetings, etc.? The group appears to be just and
to have good ends. Given that I am well-read, it would be good if I
were to contribute to the group, and my participating would certainly
not be unjust or immoral. But why suppose that I have special
obligations to other members of the reading group simply because those
others have decided to describe me in a certain way, even if their
group is a good group with just and worthy goals in which I could
participate without violating any requirements of justice or
morality?



A similar difficulty plagues (iv), the appeal to value, as defended by
Samuel Scheffler in his "Relationships and
Responsibilities." Scheffler argues that relationships give rise
to special obligations only when persons have reason to value the
relationships. Scheffler's argument has the following form:



> 
> (1) We have good reason to value (noninstrumentally) certain
> relationships with other persons.
> 
> 
> (2) To value (noninstrumentally) relationships with others is, in
> part, to see those relationships as a source of reasons, that is, as a
> source of special obligations.
> 
> 
> 
> (3) Therefore, we have good reason to see ourselves as having special
> obligations.
> 
> 
> 



Scheffler's claim is that the very act of valuing certain types
of relationships involves seeing ourselves as having special
obligations. If we have reason to value the relationship, then we have
reason to understand ourselves as having special obligations,
regardless of whether we have chosen to enter or to maintain the
relationship. The plausibility of Scheffler's view depends, to a
large extent, upon what counts as a relationship in this context. Do I
stand in the relevant sort of relationship to other members of the
West Side Reading Group? As stated above, it seems that I have reason
to value being a member of the group in so far as my being in the
group would promote my well-being and the well-being of the other
members. So, according to Scheffler, I have reason to see myself as
having special obligations to other members of the group. But it
hardly seems that I am not fulfilling obligations when I fail to go to
meetings.



The final view that I will consider, Michael Sandel's
antivoluntarism, is motivated by dissatisfaction with Western liberal
political theory as exemplified by, for example, Locke and John Rawls.
Sandel claims that adherence to voluntarism is inconsistent with the
nature of the person. Sandel advocates (v), the claim that certain
roles that we find ourselves in, understood as involving special
obligations, are 'constitutive commitments.' The person is
not free to make all of her own commitments, because the self cannot
be understood separately from certain commitments, such as those
arising from family or political community. Sandel is objecting to
what he takes to be the standard, liberal picture of the self: free to
choose her own ends and only having those special obligations that
result from her voluntary choices.



The plausibility of Sandel's version of anti-voluntarism
depends, of course, upon the plausibility of the claim that persons
are partially constituted by their relationships to other persons or
groups of persons. In order to assess the plausibility of that claim,
we need to disambiguate two possible readings of it, a causal reading
and a metaphysical reading. The first, causal reading of the claim is
obviously true: persons are the sort of persons that they are as a
result of their causal interactions with other persons and groups of
persons. Nobody would deny this causal reading of Sandel's
claim, but it is not at all clear how it would support any normative
conclusions. After all, other persons can have negative as well as
positive effects on my character and personality. Why suppose that I
have special obligations as a result of interactions over which I
might have no control?



The second, metaphysical reading of Sandel's claim needs more
defense. According to Sandel, certain of my relationships to other
persons are partly constitutive of the person that I am. According to
the metaphysical reading of that claim, I would not be the same person
that I now am if, for example, I had not been born in the U.S. In
other words, I am necessarily an American. At best, such a claim is
controversial, at worst, obviously false. After all, I certainly seem
to be able to conceive of myself as having been born in France, having
been born an Orthodox Jew, or being born an only child instead of
having a brother as I do. So before we can even ask whether a
'constitutive commitment' would have normative
implications, we need to be told quite a bit more as to why we should
view ourselves as being partly constituted by the relationships in
which we happen to stand to other people. On either reading of
Sandel's claim, the constitutive commitments view faces all of
the difficulties inherent in any form of relativism: if I am born in a
sexist culture, for example, why suppose that I thereby have
obligations to obey the men in my life? A view such as Sandel's
seems to make it the case that I am morally obligated as a result of
the social structures into which I am born, no matter how morally
repugnant those social structures might be. It is this sort of worry
that gives even greater credence to the voluntarist thesis with
respect to special obligations.


## 5. Special Obligations and the Distributive Objection



Finally, let us return to the second of the objections to special
obligations, what Scheffler calls 'the distributive
objection.' Special obligations are owed to those that we can
think of as 'insiders': those to whom promises have been
made, members of a given family, citizens of a certain nation, etc. If
I owe more to my intimates, then, it seems, I am justified in doing
more for them than for other persons, even if the latter are more
needy than my intimates. This sort of worry is, of course, in part
what motivates a consequentialist theory: no person's well-being
is more valuable than that of any other person, and so we are
unjustified in failing to be impartial between intimates and
strangers. Whereas there may be good consequentialist reasons for
acting as though we have special obligations, as we have seen, the
consequentialist (and any other defender of the distributive
objection) will insist that a commitment to genuinely special
obligations gives weight to morally insignificant contingent features
of persons.



The distributive objection is troubling: it forces us to find some
justification for that feature of common sense morality that C. D.
Broad called 'self-referential altruism,' the view that
each of us has special obligations to *her* family,
*her* friends, *her* fellow citizens, etc. Defenders of
special obligations need to show why our pre-theoretical commitment to
such obligations is more than merely a reflection of our constitution
as, in Hume's terms, 'limited altruists.' Advocates
of evolutionary ethics will suggest that, given that we can offer a
story about why beliefs to the effect that we owe more to certain
persons than to others have survival advantage, we have reason to
discount the claim that we have genuine special obligations. It has
been claimed that we are hard-wired to promote the continuance of our
genetic inheritance. Doing what we need to do to protect genetically
related persons (and others willing to protect such persons), then, is
evolutionarily advantageous. Thus, acting as though and believing that
we have special obligations (at least to friends and family members)
is advantageous.



Of course, there are difficulties with appeal to an evolutionary
account of the source of our beliefs about our obligations. All that
such an appeal does is to propose a causal hypothesis about the
genesis of our beliefs. Even if that causal hypothesis is true, it
does not show that the belief that we have special obligations is
false. People often acquire true beliefs as a result of mechanisms
that do not provide any evidence or justification for the belief. For
all that we know, our acceptance of modus ponens as an inferential
rule might be due to the selective advantage accruing to those who use
that rule, but, I take it, few would see that as undermining the
validity of that rule of inference.



Leaving aside any such evolutionary considerations, however, still
leaves us with the fact that the intuitive pull of special obligations
competes with the intuitive pull of the consequentialist stance. In
order to avoid the latter and to respond to charges of parochialism,
the defender of special obligations needs to deal with the
distributive objection.



One potential response is to insist that upon acquiring special
obligations, a moral agent does not owe less to other persons, but,
rather, simply owes more to her intimates. Thus, in addition to our
duty of benevolence, we have, as Ross claimed, special obligations to
those who "stand to me in the relation of promisee to promiser,
of creditor to debtor, of wife to husband, of child to parent, of
friend to friend, of fellow countryman to fellow countryman, and the
like" (19). The more such relationships that I stand in, the
more obligations I acquire. Unless my duty of benevolence is a
maximizing duty, there is no reason to suppose that I cannot balance
that duty with my special obligations. Of course, even if my
obligations to 'outsiders' have not decreased, it is still
true that 'insiders' will be benefitted more than
'outsiders,' and that might still be worrisome. However,
given that 'insiders' also have to bear the cost of
benefitting other 'insiders,' the relative balance of
costs and benefits might remain the same for insiders and outsiders.
But, the defender of special obligations might say, as long as I
benefit everyone to the extent to which I owe them benefits, why is
the relative balance of costs and benefits relevant? Only on the most
radical of egalitarian views is the equalizing of that balance
considered an end in itself of morality.



In any case, this reply to the distributive objection depends upon the
claim that we can balance our special obligations against our natural
or consequentialist duties. According to most defenders of special
obligations, such obligations are prima facie obligations, i.e., they
are obligations with a certain weight that can be counterbalanced by
the weight of other special obligations or of other types of
obligations. In order to figure out what our all-things-considered
duty is, we need to weigh all of our reasons for action and decide
which is the strongest or weightiest in the circumstances. One
advantage of a theory such as consequentialism is that, given that it
regards all of our obligations or duties as derivative from one
fundamental duty (the duty to maximize value), we do not need to try
to determine which of our duties is strongest in any given instance.
Once we allow non-derivative, genuinely special obligations in our
moral theory, we are left with the question as to whether we can ever
know when a special obligation outweighs another special obligation or
a natural duty. Moral philosophers such as Ross give us no answer to
this question, and it is plausible to suppose that there is no general
rule that we can use for weighing duties against one another. Perhaps
the best answer is that, once we know what our obligations are, it is
self-evident as to which is the strongest, always remembering that
'self-evident' does not mean 'obvious,' but,
rather, 'can be known or justifiably believed without any
process of reasoning or inference.' At this point, we are
involved in controversies in moral epistemology that are beyond the
scope of this piece.


## 6. The Range and Types of Special Obligations



When and if we are able to defend the claim that we have fundamental
agent-relative special obligations, we need to determine which special
obligations we have. The political community, friendship, and
promising/contracting have already been discussed as arenas in which
special obligations may or may not arise. All of these areas of the
moral life have received extensive attention in the philosophical
literature. But there are two important contexts that have received
less attention, but, for various reasons, are becoming more pressing
for moral agents in our society today. Hopefully, philosophers will
begin to pay these contexts the attention they urgently need.


### 6.1 Filial Duty



Medical advances are making it possible for people to live longer and
longer lives. Thus, our society has an ever increasing percentage of
elderly persons in need of medical and other forms of care. Many of us
bear very special ties to some of those persons: they are our parents,
the people who raised and nurtured us in our formative childhoods and
young adulthoods. Now that our positions are reversed -- we,
their children, are self-sufficient and capable, and they, our
parents, are in need of care and supervision -- what do we owe to
them? Given the needs of elderly persons, caring for them may be
extremely burdensome, and may require adult children to completely
alter their lives, thereby making great sacrifices. Do adult children
have special obligations to their aging parents, and, if so, why?



Simon Keller offers a thoughtful discussion of these issues in his
"Four Theories of Filial Duty." Keller rejects three
accounts of such duties: the debt account, the gratitude account, and
the friendship account. He offers instead what he calls the
"special goods" account: parents and children provide each
other with very special goods, goods that cannot be gotten from any
other type of relationship. No matter how true this is, Keller needs
to explain why the fact that I can provide certain goods for my aging
parents that nobody else can provide makes it the case that I have
special obligations to my parents -- after all, the
consequentialist seems to be able to accommodate my reasons to care
for my parents if my reason is grounded on the provision of benefits.
So one possible objection to Keller's account is that it is in
serious danger of collapsing into consequentialism, i.e., of making
our obligations to our parents only derivatively agent-relative.



Keller also needs to give more serious consideration to the friendship
account of special obligations to parents. He claims that duties to
parents are different from duties to friends because the former are
much weightier than the latter and that our duties to our parents are
not within our discretion to the same extent as our duties to friends
(263-264). Keller's critique only works to the extent that
he is right about the nature of our duties to our friends. It might be
argued that genuine friendship is not so easily disposed of as Keller
makes it, and many of us expect more of our friends than he seems to
think that friends should legitimately expect of one another. The
important thing to see here, though, is how important an account of
various relationships is to an understanding of the obligations that
those relationships generate. (See Jeske, 2008a.)


### 6.2 Parental Obligations



In our society the least questioned of all apparent special
obligations is that of a parent to his or her children. We seem to
reserve our harshest moral condemnations for those who fail to see to
the best interests of their children. We also seem to see the special
obligations of parents to their children as requiring great
self-sacrifice, perhaps more than is demanded by any other special
relationship. But what explains these highly stringent
obligations?



David Archard makes the important distinction between having "an
obligation to ensure that someone acts as a parent to the child"
and having an obligation to act as a parent oneself. He calls the
former 'parental obligations,' and the latter are dubbed
'parental responsibilities' (104-105). Archard
defends a causal theory of parental obligations, according to which
"those who cause children to exist thereby incur an obligation
that they are adequately cared for" (127). Thus, a parent could,
according to Archard, fulfill her parental obligations that result
from conceiving and bearing a child, by finding adoptive parents who
will assume parental responsibilities for the child. As Archard
acknowledges, anyone offering a causal account owes us a view about
what role one needs to play in the causal generation of a child in
order to have parental obligations: if I rent an apartment to a couple
that makes it possible for them to have the privacy to pursue the
creation of a family, I play a causal role in bringing their child
into existence, but surely I do not have parental obligations of any
kind.



On the other side of the debate is the voluntarist account of parental
obligations, according to which one comes to have parental obligations
only by voluntarily accepting such obligations (see Brake for a
defense of this view, and Prusak for critique of Brake). Of course,
any such view owes us an account of what would count as voluntary
assumption of parental obligations. Certain accounts of what counts as
voluntary assumption - i.e., ones that count engaging in
procreative sexual activity as voluntary assumption of parental
obligations - could cause the voluntarist view to collapse back
into the causal account. Clearly, getting the appropriate account of
causation - if we accept the causal view - and of
voluntary assumption - if we accept the voluntarist view -
is important if we are to apply these views to issues such as
abortion, child support, surrogate motherhood, and new reproductive
technologies.


### 6.3 Professional Obligations



Many of us assume obligations when we assume professional roles. As a
philosophy professor at a state university, I have obligations to my
colleagues, my students, and the taxpayers of the state of Iowa.
Physicians and therapists have obligations to their patients, police
officers to the citizens of their jurisdictions, ministers and priests
to their flocks, etc. Are these obligations mere obligations of role
without moral implications, or are they genuinely moral special
obligations? These questions are particularly pressing, given how
often our professions can force us to make morally charged decisions:
any study of history shows how dangerous it can be for people to bow
unreflectively to what they take to be the duties of their roles. As
Joel Feinberg points out, conflicts between perceived special
obligations of position and more general duties created great tension
and conflict for American abolitionist judges prior to the Civil War.
In an era of increased concern about professional ethics, we need to
have some account of which professional roles, if any, generate
genuinely moral special duties. (See Almond.)


###  6.4 Compatriots



One type of voluntarist account of special obligations has become
familiar from the political context: Locke's consent theory of
political obligations. (See section 4.) Many people seem to understand
themselves as having special obligations to their fellow citizens, and
various accounts of these obligations have been offered. (See the
entries on
 political obligation,
 and
 cosmopolitanism.)



In recent years, more and more attention is being paid to issues of
global justice, and, inevitably, discussion has turned to the conflict
(or, at least, the apparent conflict) between our duties to our
compatriots and our duties to others around the globe, in particular,
the global poor. In this literature, the debate is described as being
between those who accept associationism and those who accept
cosmopolitanism. The former accept that we have associative duties
- "duties we owe to people with whom we are associated in
some way," including compatriots (Seglow 54) - while the
latter "regard people's local allegiance as a parochial
obstacle that stands in the way of achieving global distributive
justice" (55). Seglow aims to defend the former, associationist
position, while others, such as Caney, defend the latter (even while
attempting to give at least an instrumental role to associations). Yet
others (Moellendorf) try to extend the notion of association in such a
way that the global economy, for example, grounds associational duties
(see Lenard and Moore for discussion of such views).



This debate is clearly closely related to Scheffler's discussion
of the distributive objection discussed above. How can we justify
partiality to our perhaps already comparatively well-off compatriots
when many people around the globe do not have the basic necessities?




These are only some of the types of special obligations that have been
defended by philosophers. Here is just a sample of the range of
special obligations defended in the philosophical literature: members
of society to help families and children of those incarcerated
(Bulow), beneficiaries of injustice to aid those who are victims of
injustice (Butt), pharmaceutical companies to provide lifesaving
medication to those in need (Huebner), and those who become aware of
another's need via a waver of privacy to aid that other
(Richardson). Philosophers who defend special obligations of any type
need to carefully consider whether that defense can also be used with
respect to other special obligations and also whether such extension
is plausible. If not, the special obligation originally defended
should be reconsidered. After all, if special relationships generate
or ground special obligations, we need to be careful not to render any
and every relationship 'special,' or that term will lose
its significance. For any proposed special obligation, we need to
consider whether it is more plausibly understood as derivative from an
agent-neutral reason or a natural duty and so not really special in a
fundamental sense.


## 7. The Grounds of Special Obligations



So far we have examined some contrasts between special obligations and
both consequentialist duties and natural duties, and have also
discussed two objections to special obligations, the voluntarist
objection and the distributive objection. In discussing responses to
the voluntarist objection, some accounts of the grounds of special
obligations were considered. But there are some other important
accounts that deserve mention. Given the number of types of special
obligations that commonsense recognizes, presenting the various
accounts that have been offered of their grounds would be a
book-length task. So the following discussion of the grounds of
special obligations should not be taken as in any way exhaustive.



As indicated above, voluntarists have often tried to assimilate all
special obligations to promissory or contractual obligations. Even if
such an assimilation were to be successful, we would still need an
account of the basis of promissory obligations. Some have attempted to
ground obligations to keep promises on the fact that when one makes a
promise, one raises expectations in the one to whom the promise has
been made. The promisee, then, has a right to have her expectations
met, given the promisor's voluntary raising of her expectations.
If you voluntarily lead me to expect that you will perform a given
action, then I am likely to make plans on the basis of that
expectation. You are obligated not to upset the plans that I have made
on the basis of your voluntary actions that you knew would raise my
expectations. This account of the basis of promissory obligations has
been extended into other contexts, including those of friendship and
the family (see especially Hoff Sommers' account of filial
obligations). Our friends and family members come to rely upon us to
act in certain ways with respect to them, and their reliance is due to
our own voluntary past actions. Thus, as with our promisees, our
friends and family members have a right not to be disappointed in
their expectations, a right correlated with a duty on our part to meet
their expectations.



One serious difficulty with this sort of grounding of special
obligations is that it appeals to the psychological states of those to
whom the obligations are owed. But consider a case in which the person
to whom a promise is made does not expect the one making the promise
to comply (Scanlon calls this the case of the Profligate Pal). If such
expectations are not raised, are no obligations created? Parents often
have little expectation that their children will care for them when
they are elderly, but that does not seem sufficient to defeat the
claim that children do in fact have special obligations to care for
their parents. The defender of the expectations account could try
appealing to legitimate even if only hypothetical expectations at this
point, but we are still left wondering why I ought to meet
expectations that have never actually been raised.



With respect to friendship, some have defended what can be called an
'Aristotelian' account of special obligations. Jennifer
Whiting, for example, argues that we ought to take special care of our
friends if they are worthy of such concern. Thus, if I have a virtuous
friend, I am required to care for her because her character renders
her deserving and a suitable object of such concern. The obvious worry
about any such Aristotelian account is its distance from commonsense.
According to the Aristotelian account, I have special obligations to
friends and family if they are deserving of special concern. But
commonsense allows that I have special obligations to friends and
family members even if they are not particularly or especially
virtuous. It seems that I have special obligations to help my
intimates be virtuous, even if they are not yet virtuous. The
Aristotelian view only accounts for our special obligations to those
of our friends or loved ones who are virtuous. But what about our less
than virtuous intimates? The Aristotelian must either deny that we
have special obligations to our non-virtuous intimates or allow that
something other than virtuous character grounds special obligations to
most of our intimates. So the Aristotelian account is either
implausible or radically incomplete as an account of special
obligations.



Some defenders of special obligations have tried to draw upon claims
about personal identity to support their views (see especially David
Brink). If defenders of what is known as psychological reductionism
are right, then me now is co-personal with me later as a result of the
psychological relationship existing between me now and me later. Me
later bears many psychological connections (either direct or indirect)
to me now, and those connections form a causal chain from me now to me
later. But these connections can also exist in the interpersonal case,
e.g., I can share traits with my friends and this sharing of traits
may be due to the interaction between us. If the relation of
'identity' between me now and me later supports reasons of
prudence, we might suppose that the similar relation in the
interpersonal case supports reasons of special obligation. Of course,
this account requires far more development. Why suppose that we do in
fact have reasons of prudence? Why suppose that similarity of relation
grounds similarity of reasons? These questions need to be answered
before any appeal to the metaphysics of personal identity can be used
to ground special obligations.



Richard J. Arneson raises another worry about this type of appeal to
psychological connections to ground special obligations. As both he
and the advocates of such accounts point out, my strongest
psychological connections are those that I bear to myself. But if such
psychological connections are supposed to underlie obligations to take
special care of those to whom I bear such connections, then it follows
that my strongest special obligations are to myself, and so I am
morally obligated to give special weight to my own interests. Arneson
argues that any account of "special-ties partiality", in
order to be acceptable, must not have the consequence that we each
have special obligations to be partial to ourselves. Perhaps, however,
one could meet Arneson's objection, by refusing to use the word
'obligation': we have various kinds of fundamental
agent-relative reasons, and one of those reasons is to take special
care of ourselves. Couched in terms of reasons, rather than in terms
of obligations, the latter claim does not seem at all implausible.



Let's consider one last account of the grounds of special
obligations. The difficulties with the consequentialist account of
special obligations arise from its only granting instrumental
significance to special relationships, i.e., special relationships
provide unique opportunities for promoting intrinsic value. But
commonsense seems to accord moral significance to special
relationships considered for their own sake, not in virtue of the
opportunities that they afford. One could then argue that reasons of
special obligation supervene upon relationships between friends,
between promisor and promisee, etc. So there is no deeper account of
special obligations: truths about reasons and the relationships upon
which they supervene are self-evident. This was the intuitionist line
adopted by W. D. Ross. Defense of this account of the grounds of
special obligation requires meeting objections to an intuitionist
moral epistemology, which, as a version of foundationalism, is a
frequent target of attack in recent philosophical work.


## 8. Moral Risk and Special Obligations



Special relationships take many forms, and the parties to those
relationships range across the entire spectrum of moral character (at
least according to some views), from the extremely virtuous to the
downright bad, with most of us falling somewhere in the middle of that
range. This fact about the human beings who make promises, stand in
familial relationships, and have friends, leads to the worry that
special obligations, in certain circumstances, will license, and
perhaps even require, very bad behavior.



Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett, in their "Friendship and
Moral Danger," offer a case in which one friend, Carl, calls
upon another, Dave, to help him to hide the body of someone whom he
has killed (279-280). What ought Dave to do in such a
circumstance? The worry is that if Dave has special obligations to his
friend Carl, then it seems that Dave ought to help Carl to hide the
body. But, in the absence of special obligations, it seems clear that
Dave ought to alert the police to what Carl has done. Does the
friendship between Dave and Carl provide them with a license or even a
requirement to act immorally (or, in a way such that in the absence of
the friendship, it would count as immoral) in order to protect one
another? Similarly, do Nazis have special obligations to one another
to help each other with their genocidal plans? Do parents have
obligations to protect their children, no matter what terrible crimes
their children have committed?



Cocking and Kennett regard the claims or obligations of friendship as
non-moral claims. They use the likelihood of 'moral
danger' within friendship to undermine what they call
"highly-moralized" accounts of friendship (280ff). Thus,
for them, the demands created by special relationships are not moral
demands. So, on their view, the non-moral special obligations of
friendship may certainly conflict with moral obligations, just as,
presumably, reasons of self-interest or prudence may conflict with
moral demands. We then are left with the familiar problem of how we
ought to balance moral and non-moral reasons against one another.



In "Moral Permissibility Constraints on Voluntary
Obligations," Alistair Macleod argues for the claim that there
are moral limits on the types of voluntary actions that can give rise
to special obligations: "Actions ... must survive moral
scrutiny - which means, in effect, that it must be possible to
characterize them as morally permissible actions - if the duties
that are generated by the acts in question are to be given recognition
as  *moral* duties " (132; emphasis in original). Special
moral obligations can only arise from voluntary actions and choices
that are morally justifiable (135). Of course, Macleod could then take
the Cocking and Kennett route and still regard those voluntary actions
which are not morally justified as creating reasons of some kind, or
he could deny that morally impermissible choices, such as, perhaps,
becoming friends with a Nazi, create any sort of reasons whatsoever.
In his discussion of "Reasonable Partiality Towards
Compatriots," David Miller claims that special obligations
"arise only from relationships that are intrinsically
valuable" (65), and "the attachments that ground them
[cannot] inherently involve injustice" (66). So membership in
the Nazi party will not generate special obligations, because that
group does "inherently involve injustice."



What is important is not whether we decide to call the demands arising
from special relationships 'moral obligations' or
'non-moral obligations.' What matters is whether these
demands are actually reasons, or whether they are mere obligations of
role or position, where the latter are really just shorthand for
social expectations or understandings. If special obligations are
genuine reasons, we need to decide whether they can only arise from
relationships or commitments that satisfy independent moral criteria,
or whether they can arise from friendships, promises, etc., which are
such that we might very well have had moral reasons not to enter or to
make. Even, however, friendships, for example, that were morally
acceptable for us to enter may place demands upon us that run counter
to impartial moral demands. After all, even good people can require
help in getting themselves out of bad situations. It is always
important to remember, however, that no plausible account of special
obligations will view them as always being all-things-considered
reasons for action. So even if special obligations can direct us to do
that which is wrong or bad on other grounds, it does not immediately
follow that we ought to act on our special obligations. It seems quite
clear that if I learn that my dearest friend in the world is a serial
killer, even though I have an obligation to protect him, I also have
very strong reason to turn him in to the police, and that what I ought
to do is to act on that latter reason.



However, there will be other times such that our special obligations
are weighty enough that we ought to do that which, in other
circumstances, would be immoral for us to do. But this should not be
surprising or troubling to us, if we accept that friendship, promises,
collegial relationships, etc., have moral, or at least rational,
significance. Such significance inevitably changes the landscape of
reasons.


## 9. Extending the Moral Domain



Animal ethics is a burgeoning field in ethics. The most famous work in
the area is, of course, that done by utilitarian Peter Singer, who
argued that the best consequences will be brought about if we become
vegetarians, thereby ending the terrible suffering endured by animals
raised for food. Following in Singer's footsteps, much of animal
ethics is concerned with issues surrounding the use of animals for
food, scientific research, and entertainment purposes, legal issues
addressing overt cruelty to animals, and how to deal with rapidly
increasing populations of both domestic and wild animals.



But, recently, some philosophers have begun to focus their attention
on companion animals, i.e., those cats, dogs, fish, birds, etc., that
many of us take into our homes and care for as pets. (See
Burgess-Jackson, Rollin, Palmer.) Americans spend small fortunes
providing medical care for their animal companions, and lavish time,
attention, and love on them. Many of us regard our cats or dogs as
members of our family, and we feel ourselves obligated to take special
care of our animal companions. But can we really have special
obligations to non-human animals? If not, how can we possibly justify
the resources expended on companion animals, given the amount of human
suffering in the world?



In order adequately to address the question whether we have special
obligations to our companion animals, we need to do more investigation
into the nature of the relationship that we have to animals and the
nature of our companion animals. Can we be friends with creatures
other than human beings? (See Jeske 2008b.) Can we make promises to
animals? Can we bear relevant psychological connections to animals?
These questions need serious attention if we are to insure that we
meet our moral obligations to the vulnerable creatures that we call
pets.


## 10. Conclusion



We have seen that the issue as to whether we have special obligations
is relevant to some of the central issues in contemporary ethics,
including the viability of consequentialism as a moral theory, the
possibility and nature of agent-relative reasons, the relationship
between voluntary action or association and the acquisition of duties
or responsibilities, and the nature of self, family, friendship, and
political community. In attempting to ground special obligations, the
defender of special obligations must face issues about the role of the
metaphysics of personal identity in determining features of morality
and questions in moral epistemology, among other issues. Thus, the
topic of special obligations is central to debates in both normative
and meta- ethics.