 Gilbert attempts to articulate the sense of directedness in terms of ownership: Jack’s contralateral commitment to Sue to walk at the appropriate pace entails that Sue is owed, and in a sense owns, the relevant performance on Jack’s part (Gilbert 2008, 497). This would presumably explain why Sue and not anyone else can release Jack from fulfilling the obligation/commitment, by giving up her claim on Jack’s action. One might, in a related vein, try to articulate the directed nature of the commitment in terms of  promising.[35]  If we understand Jack’s obligation as the result of something like a promise to Sue, we can see not only that Jack has a commitment, but that Sue is in a special position such that she can, for example, release him from fulfilling it. One drawback, at least for Gilbert, of appealing either to ownership or promising to articulate the notion of directed obligation or contralateral commitment is that it is not clear that this would allow for these commitments to be as insulated from moral considerations as Gilbert seems to think they are (e.g. in the response to Bratman above). A further question is whether ownership or promising fully captures all that there is to the contralateral or directed nature of the commitment. These strategies might explain why Sue is in a special position to release Jack from his commitment. But one might wonder whether there are other aspects of her special standing with respect to Jack that are left  unaddressed.[36]  Furthermore, it might be that certain aspects of promising - in particular the directedness of the obligation - might in some way depend on shared agency or aspects thereof. See Gilbert 2011 and Roth 2016.