 While some critics contest the existence of associative obligations even among family members (Wellman 1997), others acknowledge their existence but maintain that they depend on a degree of intimacy and emotional connection absent from the relationship between citizens of a modern state. As Diane Jeske writes: “[A]ll of the features of intimate relationships that seem morally significant – the mutual emotions and attitudes of the parties to each other as individuals, the personal interaction, the mutual knowledge and understanding of each other’s character – must be ignored in the grounding of associative [political] obligations. [I]f the relationships that ground associative obligations are to include political relations, the notion of a relationship has to be stretched beyond recognition” (2001, p. 38; see also Simmons 1996; Wellman 1997; Dagger 2000). Advocates of associative political obligation offer two (complementary) responses. First, some contend that citizens of modern states can and do care for their fellow citizens and the health of their common political community, even if their relationships with one another do not approximate the intimacy we find in a (healthy) nuclear family. The concern for one’s polity, and its present, past, and future members, reflects the special relationship one bears to them, and therefore differs from the concern a person may have for all moral agents or sentient beings as such. Second, we should not assume that a relationship must be characterized by intimacy or specific types of emotional connection in order to have the sort of value that can justify associative obligations (Horton and Windeknecht 2015, p. 907, Scheffler 2018, p. 10). Even if intimacy is a necessary condition for realizing the good of friendship, and love a necessary condition for realizing the non-instrumental value of the parent-child relationship, it does not follow that they are necessary for achieving the (non-instrumental) value of political association.