Abstract
Ancillary‐care obligations are a type of special obligation of beneficence that arise in the context of focused, special relationships – fleeting or established, professional or informal – between people. They arise in a way that is incidental or ancillary in relation to the purposes of those interacting, and hence will often constitute special obligations – obligations owed to particular others – that the interacting individuals did not intend to incur. Ancillary‐care obligations arise in two main situations: (a) that of two people who informally fall into a relationship with one another that is not yet a friendship or other obligation‐creating relationship, and yet may contingently generate obligations ancillary to the relationship; and (b) that of relationships between professionals (such as journalists, public health officials, and medical researcher teams) and those with whom they must professionally interact when the interaction incidentally reveals that those they are interacting with have important needs – perhaps urgent ones. Theorizing about ancillary‐care obligations is most advanced in the context of medical research ethics. In that context, where the general (not special) obligation of rescue is widely recognized as a minimum baseline, competing theories are offered of the special, ancillary‐care obligations that go beyond that. To ground these obligations, current theories appeal either to the nature of the relationship between the interacting parties or to the fact that the obligation‐holders had gained special permission to obtain personal (e.g., medical) information from the others. The possibility of synthesizing these two types of theory has also been floated.