 The discussion of the previous section stressed that the alleged difficulties that consequentialism has in accommodating the commonsense understanding of special obligations arise from the fact that the consequentialist can allow only derivatively, not genuinely, special obligations. Another way to express this point is to say that the consequentialist allows only agent-neutral reasons, whereas special obligations, as understood by commonsense, are agent-relative reasons. Derek Parfit understands agent-neutral as opposed to agent-relative reasons in the following way: