 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.)