 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]).