 A third account is reason-based. On this view, what constitutes obligations is neither the social resources with which they are enforced, nor the practices in which they may be expressed, but the kind of reasons for action that they offer. Legal obligations are content-independent reasons that are both categorical and pre-emptive in force. The mark of their content-independence is that their force does not depend on the nature or merits of the action they require: in most cases, law can impose an obligation to do X or to refrain from doing X (Hart 1958; 1982: 254–55; but cf. Markwick 2000; Sciaraffa 2009; Valentini 2018). That they are pre-emptive means that they require the subject to set aside his own view of the merits and comply nonetheless. That they are categorical means that they do not condition their claims on the subject’s own goals or interests.