 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.