 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.