This clause is significant, because the obligee may have losses in excess of the penalty of the bond.
The state's rules had "provided a huge benefit to the obligee," Mr. Dutton said at the time, "while putting the obligor at a substantial disadvantage".
Some salvage clauses require that any salvage be paid to the obligee up to the full amount of all losses, and others provide that any salvage be divided between the surety and the obligee on a pro rata basis, in the proportion that each party has suffered loss.
Fidelity bonds are written to cover the obligee, usually an employer, against loss from dishonest acts of employees; surety bonds cover not only dishonesty but also incapacity to perform the work agreed upon.
A salvage clause also is included, stating the way in which any salvage recovered by the surety from the principal is to be divided between the surety and the obligee.
Rather, the relationship between me and my obligee is fundamental to any explanation of my special obligations to that obligee.
Unlike natural duties, special obligations are grounded on something other than (or, in addition to) the intrinsic nature of the obligee.
That is, they have (especially in the case of natural goods) a sort of evidentiary function, explaining why the obliger wills such-and-such, and why the obligee wills (or might be motivated to) its acceptance.
In response to this argument, some obligationists about gratitude have suggested modifying the correlativity thesis to allow that directed obligations need not entail standing to enforce or exact, but only standing to hold the obligee responsible in some weaker way—say, with a reactive attitude, like resentment (Darwall 2012).
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.
