 The most well-developed account of why we should treat obligation as special is Adams’, on which obligation is apt for theological voluntarist treatment because of its intrinsic link to demands made within social relationships (Adams 1987b, and Adams 1999, pp. 231–258; see also Evans 2014, p. 27). But it is also unclear whether this is persuasive. We may grant that obligations result from demands, but only if we emphasize (as Adams does) that it is demands from authorities that result in obligations. But what makes someone an authority is that by his or her dictates he or she can give reasons for action of a certain kind. There is some dispute over what kind of reasons they must be, but for our purposes we can just follow Joseph Raz, who holds that genuine authorities give “protected reasons” by their dictates, where a protected reason to φ is a reason to φ and a reason to disregard some reasons against φ-ing. If one is an authority over another with respect to φ-ing, then one’s dictate that the other φ is a protected reason for the other to φ (Raz 1979, p. 18).