## 1. Political Obligation in Historical Perspective



The phrase "political obligation" is apparently no older
than T. H. Green's *Lectures on the Principles of Political
Obligation*, delivered at Oxford University in 1879-80
(D'Entreves, p. 3). The two words from which Green formed the
phrase are much older, of course, and he apparently thought that
combining them required no elaborate explanation or defense. In any
case, there was nothing novel about the problem Green addressed in his
lectures: "to discover the true ground or justification for
obedience to law" (Green 1986, p. 13). Sophocles raised this
problem in his play *Antigone*, first performed around 440 BCE,
and Plato's *Crito* recounts Socrates' philosophical response
to the problem, in the face of his own death, some forty years
later.


### 1.1 Socrates on Obeying the Law



In 399 BCE an Athenian jury found Socrates guilty of impiety and
corrupting the morals of the youth, for which crimes the jury
condemned him to death. According to Plato's account, Socrates'
friends arranged his escape, but he chose to stay and drink the fatal
hemlock, arguing that to defy the judgment against him would be to
break his "agreements and commitments" and to
"mistreat" his friends, his country, and the laws of
Athens (*Crito*, 54c; *Trial and Death*, p. 54).
Socrates' arguments are sketchy, and Crito, his interlocutor, does
little to challenge them, but they are nevertheless suggestive of the
theories of political obligation that have emerged in the two and a
half millennia since his death.



These arguments fall into at least four categories. First, Socrates
maintains that his long residence in Athens shows that he has entered
into an agreement with its laws and committed himself to obey them
- an argument that anticipates the social contract or consent
theory of political obligation. Second, he acknowledges that he owes
his birth, nurture, and education, among other goods, to the laws of
Athens. Together with the explicit analogy he draws between a
father's rightful claim to his children's obedience and
Athens' rightful claim to her citizens' obedience, these
observations point toward a membership or associative account of
political obligation. Third, Socrates appeals to what is now known as
the argument from fairness or fair play when he suggests that to
disregard his legal sentence would be to free-ride on his fellow
citizens, enjoying the benefits provided by their complying with the
law while refusing to bear the cost of doing so himself. As he asks
Crito, "if we leave here without the city's permission,
are we mistreating people whom we should least mistreat?" (50a)
Finally, there is a trace of utilitarian reasoning when Socrates
imagines "the laws and the state" confronting him with
this challenge: "do you think it possible for a city not to be
destroyed if the verdicts of its courts have no force but are
nullified and set at naught by private individuals?" (50b) None
of these arguments is fully developed, but their presence in the
*Crito* testifies to the staying power of intuitions and
concepts - commitment and agreement, gratitude, fair play, and
utility - that continue to figure in discussions of obligation
and obedience.



Plato's *Crito* is noteworthy not only as the first
philosophical exploration of political obligation but also as the last
to appear for centuries. To be sure, the Cynics and others did
question the value of political life, and indirectly the existence of
an obligation to obey the law, but they left no record of a discussion
of the subject as sustained as even the five or six pages in the
*Crito*. When the morality of obedience and disobedience next
became a much discussed issue, it was a religious as much as a
philosophical discussion.


### 1.2 Divine Command



Throughout history, the belief that political society and its rules
are divinely ordained has been so strong as to keep many people, and
probably most, from considering the possibility that disobeying those
rules might ever be justified. With the advent of Christianity,
however, that possibility had to be taken seriously. For the
Christian, the distinction Jesus draws (Matthew 22:15-22)
between the tribute owed to Caesar and that owed to God makes it clear
that what the rulers command may be at odds with what God wants done.
That point became even clearer when the rulers tried to suppress
Christianity. Nevertheless, Christian doctrine held that there is an
obligation to obey the law grounded in divine command, with the most
important text being Paul's Epistle to the Romans (13:1-2):
"For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist
have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities
resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur
judgment."



As a theory of political obligation, divine command faces two general
problems. First, it presupposes the existence of divinity of some
sort; and second, the commands of the divine being(s) are not always
clear. It is one thing to know that we should give to Caesar what is
Caesar's and to God what is God's, for example, and quite another to
know what exactly is Caesar's due. For Christians, however, the main
challenge was to reconcile Paul's text with the uncomfortable fact
that rulers were often hostile to Christianity - or, with the
rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, hostile to what one
took to be true Christianity. To this challenge, one response was
simply to hold that hostile or vicious rulers must be endured, for God
must have given them power as a sign of His displeasure with a wicked
people. Other responses, though, made room for disobedience.



One such response was to distinguish the divinely ordained office from
the officer who occupied it. That is, God ordains that political
authority must exist, because the condition of human life since the
fall from grace requires such authority; but God does not ordain that
this or that particular person hold a position of authority, and He
certainly does not want rulers to abuse their authority by ruling
tyrannically. This distinction, employed as early as the fourth
century by St. John Chrysostom, was invoked throughout the middle ages
(McIlwain, pp. 152-53). A second response to the problem Romans
13 posed was to distinguish disobedience from resistance. According to
Martin Luther and others who drew this distinction, Christians may not
actively resist their rulers, but they must disobey them when the
rulers' commands are contrary to God's. Yet a third response was to
note the possibility of conflict between two or more of one's rulers.
In other words, if more than one person holds political authority over
you, and if they issue conflicting commands, then you may satisfy
Paul's injunction by obeying the authority whose commands are more
congenial to your understanding of true Christianity, even when such
obedience entails resisting the commands of others in authority.



These last two responses played an especially important part in the
political disputes that accompanied the Protestant Reformation. Under
the pressure of those disputes, however, another theory of political
obligation became increasingly prominent, as Protestants came to rely
on the belief that political authority derives from the consent of the
governed (Skinner, vol. 2, chaps. 7-9).


### 1.3 The Social Contract



Although the idea of the social contract long antedates the modern era
(Gough 1967), its full development occurred in the seventeenth
century, when Thomas Hobbes and John Locke used the theory to rather
different ends. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and other
philosophers have also relied on social contract theory - in
Kant's case, in ways we will examine below (SS1.5) - but the
classic expressions of the contract theory of political obligation
remain Hobbes's *Leviathan* (1651) and Locke's *Second
Treatise of Government* (1690).



For Hobbes, social contract theory established the authority of anyone
who was able to wield and hold power. If we imagine ourselves in a
state of nature, he argued, with no government and no law to guide us
but the law of nature, we will recognize that everyone is naturally
equal and independent. But we should also recognize that this state of
nature will also be a state of war, for the "restless desire
for Power after power" that drives all of us will lead to
"a warre of every man against every man" (Hobbes, chaps.
11, 13). To escape so dreadful a condition, people surrender their
independence by entering into a covenant to obey a sovereign power
that will have the authority to make, enforce, and interpret laws.
This form of the social contract Hobbes called "sovereignty by
institution." But he also insisted that conquerors acquire
authority over those they subject to their rule -
"sovereignty by acquisition" - when they allow those
subjects to go about their business. In either case, Hobbes said, the
subjects consent to obey those who have effective power over them,
whether the subject has a choice in who holds power or not. Because
they consent, they therefore have an obligation to obey the sovereign,
whether sovereignty be instituted or acquired.



Exactly how much Locke differs from Hobbes in his conclusions is a
matter of scholarly dispute, but there is no doubt that he puts the
same concepts to work for what seem to be more limited ends. According
to Locke, the free and equal individuals in the state of nature
establish government as a way of overcoming the
"inconveniencies" of that state. Moreover, Locke's social
contract appears to have two stages. In the first stage the naturally
free and equal individuals agree to form themselves into a political
society, under law, and in the second they establish the government.
This move allows Locke to argue, contrary to Hobbes, for a right of
revolution on the ground that overthrowing the government will not
immediately return the people to the state of nature. Nor does he
hold, with Hobbes, that mere submission to a conqueror constitutes a
form of consent to the conqueror's rule.



Locke does agree with Hobbes, of course, in deriving obligations to
obey the law from the consent of the governed. In developing his
argument, however, he reveals several problems that have bedeviled
social contract theory. One has to do with the nature of the contract:
is it historical or hypothetical? If the former, then the problem is
to show that most people truly have entered into such a contract (at
least if one's aim is to show that most people have a duty to
obey the law). If the contract is meant to be a device that
illustrates how people *would have* given their consent, on the
other hand, then the difficulty is that a hypothetical contract
"is no contract at all" (Dworkin, 1977, p. 151). Two more
problems concern how to characterize acts that count as consent.
Though Hobbes maintains that submission to a conqueror qualifies as
such an act, few are now likely to accept that agreement at the point
of a sword gives rise to a moral obligation to obey (as opposed to a
prudential reason to do so). Indeed, it is not clear that consent is
really the key to political obligation in Hobbes's theory;
rather, we have an obligation to obey anyone who can maintain order.
As for Locke, he seems to stretch the notion of tacit consent too far
when he states, in SS119 of the *Second Treatise*, that the
"very being of anyone within the territories" expresses a
person's willing submission to the rule of its government.



One of the first to find fault with the argument from consent or
contract was David Hume. In "Of the Original Contract,"
published in 1752, Hume takes particular exception to the appeal to
tacit consent. To say that most people have given their consent to
obey the laws simply by remaining in their country of birth is
tantamount to saying that someone tacitly consents to obey a
ship's captain "though he was carried on board while
asleep and must leap into the ocean and perish the moment he leaves
her" (1953, p. 51). For Hume, the obligation to obey the law
derives not from consent or contract but from the straightforward
utility of a system of laws that enables people to pursue their
interests peacefully and conveniently.


### 1.4 Utility and Obligation



For all its influence in other areas of legal, moral, and political
philosophy, utilitarianism has found few adherents among those who
believe that there is a general obligation to obey the laws of one's
country. Part of the reason for this situation may be the fact that
Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and others who followed Hume's path
had little to say about political obligation. A more powerful reason,
though, is that utilitarians have trouble accounting for obligations
of any kind. If one's guiding principle is always to act to maximize
expected utility, or promote the greatest happiness of the greatest
number, then obligations seem to have little or no binding force.
After all, if I can do more good by giving the money in my possession
to charity than by paying my debts, then that is what I should do,
notwithstanding my obligations to my creditors. By the same reasoning,
whether I should obey or disobey the law is a matter to be settled by
considering which will do more good, not by determining whether I have
an obligation to obey.



Some utilitarian philosophers have struggled to overcome this problem,
either by pointing to reasons to believe that respecting obligations
serves to promote utility or by restricting calculations of utility to
rules or norms rather than to individual acts (see the entry on
"consequentialism" for details). Whether their efforts
have been successful remains a matter of debate. There seems to be a
consensus, however, that the most sophisticated attempts to provide a
utilitarian grounding for political obligation, such as those of Rolf
Sartorius (1975, chaps. 5 and 6) and R. M. Hare (1976), have proved
unsuccessful (e.g., Simmons 1979, pp. 45-54; Horton 2010, pp.
60-69). As a result, utilitarianism seldom figures in the
debates of those contemporary political philosophers who continue to
believe that there is, in some political societies, a general
obligation to obey the law.


### 1.5 Kant on Legitimacy and Obligation



In contrast to utilitarianism, the practical philosophy of the
eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant plays a major part
in contemporary debates about political obligation. The proper
direction of his influence, however, is not altogether settled. On the
one hand, a leading "philosophical anarchist," Robert Paul
Wolff, claims Kantian inspiration for his a priori rejection of the
possibility of political obligation (see SS3.1, below); on the
other hand, important exponents of the "natural duty"
approach to the obligation to obey the law also claim to derive their
arguments from Kant (see SS4.4, below). Kant may bear some
responsibility for fostering these divergent responses, but it is safe
to say that he himself was no anarchist, not even of the
"philosophical" sort. Indeed, he seems to insist on an
unqualified obligation to obey the law that goes well beyond what any
political philosopher nowadays will countenance.



Kant's theory employs the same basic concepts as Hobbes's
and Locke's - natural (or innate) rights, the state of
nature, and the social contract - but he puts them to different
use. In contrast to Hobbes, Kant looks upon the coercive force of the
law not as a limitation on freedom but as the means of securing and
extending it. In the state of nature, as he conceives of it,
individuals may enjoy "wild, lawless freedom," but the
threats and constraints imposed by others prevent them from freely
acting on their choices (1991 [1797], p. 127). Justified coercion
under law provides a remedy by impeding those who would interfere with
one's actions, thereby hindering the hindrances to freedom
(Ripstein 2009, pp. 54-55 *et passim*). Moreover, unlike
Locke's justification of the social contract as the way to
secure one's property and escape the
"inconveniencies" of the state of nature, Kant takes the
"civil condition" produced by the social contract to be
the foundation that property rights and justice in general presuppose.
The social contract is thus not a matter of collective consent but a
moral imperative: "When you cannot avoid living side by side
with all others, you ought to leave the state of nature and proceed
with them into a rightful condition, that is, a condition of
distributive justice" (1991, pp. 121-22). "Properly
speaking," Kant declares, the original contract is not an
expression of consent to be governed; it is "the Idea of this
act, in terms of which alone we can think of the legitimacy of a
state" (1991, p. 127).



The upshot, as noted above, is that everyone seems to have an absolute
obligation to obey the laws of whoever is in authority; for even if
the ruler "proceeds contrary to law ... subjects may indeed
oppose this injustice by *complaints* ... but not by
resistance" (1991, p. 130, emphasis in original; also pp.
176-77). Kant's comments on this point are not
unqualified, though. Among other things, he states that "the
*spirit* of the original contract ... involves an
obligation on the part of the constituting authority to make the
*kind of* government suited to the Idea of the original
contract"; and he immediately adds that "the only
constitution that accords with right" is "that of a pure
republic" - that is, "the constitution in which
*law itself* rules and depends on no particular person"
(1991, p. 148, emphasis in original; for further discussion, see
Ripstein 2009, chap. 11). In any case, it is not so much Kant's
conclusions as the foundations of his theory that have proved so
important to contemporary discussions of political obligation.


## 2. Conceptual Matters



In the twentieth century political philosophers devoted themselves at
least as much to the analysis of the problem of political obligation,
and to the concepts it involves, as to full-scale attempts to devise
theories of the obligation to obey the law. Some even argued that the
existence of political obligations could be established by conceptual
analysis alone - a point we return to in section 3. More often
philosophers working in this vein sought to clarify what was at issue
in the assertion or denial of political obligations, or duties to obey
the law.


### 2.1 Obligation and Duty



As the previous sentence suggests, obligations are also duties. That
is true, at any rate, when the obligation in question is political
obligation. To be sure, some philosophers claim to have uncovered
differences between obligations and duties, the most important of
which is that obligations must be voluntarily undertaken or incurred,
but duties need not be (e.g., Brandt 1964; Hart 1958). The obligation
to keep a promise or fulfill a contract, for example, arises only when
one has done something that generates the obligation - made a
promise or signed a contract - but the duties of charity and
truth telling supposedly fall on us regardless of what, if anything,
we voluntarily commit to do. John Rawls relies on this distinction
when he argues that most citizens of a reasonably just political
society have no general obligation to obey its laws, even though they
do have a "natural duty" to support just institutions
- a duty he thinks has the general effect of requiring them to
obey (Rawls 1999, p. 97). For the most part, however, the alleged
distinction between obligation and duty has played no significant role
in the debates over the supposed moral responsibility to obey the law.
To invoke the distinction here would run counter to the tendency in
both ordinary language and contemporary philosophical discussion to
use the terms interchangeably, as when we speak of the
"duty" to keep a promise or an "obligation" to
tell the truth. This essay will proceed, then, like almost everything
written on either side of the question, on the understanding that a
political obligation, if it exists, is a moral duty to obey the law
(but note the elaboration of this point in SS2.3).


### 2.2 Obligation: Political, Legal, and Civil



One question that immediately arises from this conception of political
obligation is whether "political" is the appropriate
modifier. If the obligation in question is a duty to obey the law,
then why not call it a legal obligation? The answer is that
"legal obligation" has a different kind of work to do. For
many legal philosophers, the claim that a person has a legal
obligation to do X is merely a descriptive claim, a statement of
social fact [see the entry on Legal Positivism]. The fact that a
person has a legal obligation to do X provides him with a moral reason
to do X only if he has a moral duty obey the law; that is, a political
obligation. The value of this distinction is that it allows one to
hold that a person may be subject to a legal obligation even though
she has no political obligation to obey the laws of the regime in
power. Suppose that the regime is tyrannical, inept, or simply so
unjust that only a Hobbesian would maintain that those subject to its
commands have a moral obligation to obey. Nevertheless, most theorists
will agree that people in this unhappy country have legal obligations
to pay taxes, refrain from certain types of conduct when driving, and
do whatever the legal system that enjoys de facto jurisdiction over
them requires; that is, claims to this effect are true descriptions of
the world. But such descriptions are compatible with the belief that
the people of unhappy countries have no moral duty to act as the law
directs simply because the law so directs.



Bhikhu Parekh (1993, p. 240) employs the phrase "civil
obligation" to refer to "the obligation to respect and
uphold the legitimately constituted civil authority," from which
follows a moral obligation "to obey the laws enacted by the
civil authority." "Political" is a broader term,
according to Parekh, and someone who has a truly political obligation
will owe her polity more than mere obedience to its laws, such as a
positive duty to take steps to secure the safety and advance the
interests of her country. (see also Raz 2006, p. 1004). Yet we already
have a term, "civic duty," that does the work Parekh wants
to assign to "political obligation." Exhortations to do
our civic duty typically urge us to do more than merely obey the
law. These exhortations would have us vote in elections and be
well-informed voters; buy government bonds; limit our use of water and
other scarce resources; donate blood, service, or money (beyond what
we owe in taxes) in times of crisis; and generally contribute in an
active way to the common good. Whether we really have a civic duty to
do any or all of these things may be a matter of dispute, but appeals
to civic duty are certainly quite common, and it is hardly clear that
there is something to be gained by reclassifying them as appeals to
political obligation.



We now turn to the question of whether we should distinguish the
concept of political obligation from that of a duty to obey the law.
 The answer may depend on whether we understand the term
"political" to refer to the status in virtue of which a
person has the obligation or to the entity or agent to whom she owes
it. In the former case, political obligation refers to those
obligations a person has as a member or citizen of a particular
polity. So understood, a theory of political obligation will tell us
nothing about the authority a state enjoys over non-members; for
example, whether and why short-term visitors residing on its territory
have a duty to obey its laws. That need not render it defective as an
account of political obligation, but it does entail that we should not
take the phrase "political obligation" to be synonymous
with the phrase "a duty to obey the law
*simpliciter*," but only with the phrase "a
citizen's (or member's) duty to obey the law." In
contrast, if "political" refers to the agent or entity to
whom a person owes the obligation, then a theory of political
obligation will be synonymous with a theory of the duty to obey the
law, since it will aspire to explain why those who are subject to a
particular state's jurisdiction, be they citizens or foreigners,
have a moral duty to act as it directs them to act. Arguably, certain
solutions to the problem of political obligation fare better when
"political" refers to the status in virtue of which a
person has the obligation than when it refers to the entity to which
she owes it, or vice versa. For example, membership or associative
approaches to political obligation may have a leg up in justifying
citizens' duties to obey the law but face a significant
challenge in accounting for the obligation of foreigners to do so (see
SS4.3). Conversely, natural duty theories may be able to explain
why anyone, citizen or not, has a duty to obey the law (i.e., the laws
of one or another legal system) but struggle to explain why anyone has
a duty to obey the laws of the particular state of which she is a
member (see the discussion of particularity at the end of SS 2.3;
see also SS4.4). Attention to the ambiguity in the referent of the
term "political" may also support a pluralistic or
multi-principle solution to the problem of political obligation; e.g.,
a membership justification for the duty of citizens to obey the law,
and a consent justification for the duty of foreigners to do so (see
SS5).


### 2.3 Obligation, Morality, and Practical Reason



As in the five historically significant theories surveyed in the
previous section, the presumption has continued to be that the answer
to the problem of political obligation must be stated in moral terms.
When T. H. Green set out in 1879 "to discover the true ground or
justification for obedience to law," for example, he was looking
for more than prudence alone can provide. "You ought to obey the
law because you will suffer if you do not" may be a powerful
reason for obedience, but it is not a reason that speaks to
Green's concern with "the moral function or object served
by law..." (1986, p. 13). For Green, and for almost
everyone else who has pondered it, the problem of political obligation
is a moral problem, and the obligation in question is a kind of moral
obligation. To have a political obligation, then, is to have a moral
duty to obey the law.



Margaret Gilbert has recently challenged this moralized
characterization of political obligation (Gilbert 2006; Gilbert 2013).
She maintains that a political obligation is a genuine obligation, by
which she means that it provides a person subject to it with a
sufficient, though not necessarily conclusive, reason for action that
trumps considerations of inclination or self-interest. However,
Gilbert distinguishes between two kinds of genuine obligations, or two
senses of the term "obligation," the first synonymous with
being the subject of a moral requirement and the second with
"owing" something to another (2013, pp. 391-2).
Obligation in this second sense describes a normative relationship
between two or more parties, one that can be created via a suitable
act of will; for example, by what Gilbert calls an exercise of joint
commitment. It is the second sense of obligation that Gilbert
maintains we ought to employ in our analysis of the problem of
political obligation, understood here as the challenge of accounting
for the obligations people owe one another as co-members of a given
polity. That does not preclude the development of a theory concerning
when moral requirements outweigh or defeat people's political
obligations, of course. The theory of political obligation itself,
however, ought to be de-moralized.



One upshot of Gilbert's account is that it entirely separates
the existence of political obligations from the justice or injustice
of the political community's institutions and laws. On her
account, individuals can acquire genuine obligations in the sense of
owing something to another even when their suitable act of willing is
coerced or the content of what they agree to owe another is immoral.
With respect to political obligation, then, neither state coercion
(i.e., the absence of voluntary consent) nor the injustice of a
state's laws or institutions precludes its citizens'
acquisition of a genuine obligation to obey its laws. But why think
that a promise extracted at gun point generates any reason to do that
which one promised, or that a voluntary agreement to torture babies
generates a genuine (albeit not conclusive) obligation to do so? Or,
if coerced or immoral owing-obligations are genuine but always
defeated or trumped by moral-requirement-obligations, one might wonder
why we should posit their separate existence at all? One possibility
is that doing so is necessary to render intelligible the response of
the promisee when the coerced promisor reneges on her promise; we can
understand why the promisee feels betrayed even if we do not think he
is justified in feeling that way. This response, however, treats
Gilbert's account of political obligation as an explanatory
theory, not a justificatory one (Lefkowitz 2007; for a response, see
Gilbert 2013, pp. 406-7).



Gilbert aside, theorists of political obligation characterize it as a
moral duty to obey the law. As such, it provides a person with a
categorical reason for action, one that does not depend on her
inclinations or self-interest. Political obligation is also typically
understood to be *content-independent*; that is, to be a duty
to obey the law as such, or simply because it is the law [Hart 1982,
pp. 254-55]. Where a person has a duty to obey the law, the fact
that the law requires her to X suffices to provide her with a reason
to X, independent of any judgment she may make regarding the merits of
performing X. The problem of political obligation, then, is not simply
the question of whether a person has a reason to do that which the law
would have her do. Often a person will have prudential reasons to do
so, and she may have moral obligations to perform or not perform
specific acts independent of their being legally required or
proscribed, as in the case of forbearing from murder. Rather, the
question concerns the conditions, if any, in which the fact that the
law requires a person to act thus-and-so imposes a moral obligation on
her to act as the law directs. The content-independence of political
obligation reflects the fact that what stands in need of justification
is the polity's right to its subjects' obedience; to their
acting as it directs because it so directs them.



How best to understand the content-independence of political
obligation, and indeed, whether we ought to conceive of a duty to obey
the law in this way, remain live questions. For example, Stefan
Sciaraffa argues that in introducing the idea of content-independence,
H.L.A. Hart relies on Paul Grice's distinction between natural
and non-natural meaning. Statements with a non-natural meaning provide
those to whom they are addressed with a particular kind of reason to
form some belief or perform some act A, namely the intention of the
agent who uttered the statement that they form that belief or perform
that act. The phrase 'content-independent reason' is a
(misleading) label for this particular kind of reason. Or as Sciaraffa
puts the point, "an agent has a content-independent reason to
phi if and only if someone's intent that she phi is a reason for
her to phi" (2009, p. 234). N.P. Adams counters that a reason is
content-independent if and only if "it has a container as a
constituent part and changing the content of that container does not
determine whether the agent has that reason and does not determine the
weight of that reason" (2017, p. 149). Speech-acts such as
commands and promises are paradigmatic examples of containers. It is
the status of an agent as morally entitled to direct another to
perform some act, apart from any other considerations that count in
favor of performing it, that provide the person so directed with a
reason to perform that act. Sciaraffa and Adams draw on their
respective accounts of content-independence to offer rejoinders to
Peter Markwick's criticisms of (a common interpretation of)
content-independence (Markwick 2000). Laura Valentini maintains that
"if property P, invoked to justify the authority of law, is not
displayed by legal commands *robustly* across variations in
their content, then P cannot justify an obligation to obey the law
because it is the law" (2018, p. 141). She then argues that
while certain common approaches to justifying political obligation,
such as consent, can satisfy this understanding of
content-independence, others, such as fair play, cannot. Finally,
George Klosko contends that we ought to reject altogether the claim
that political obligation is content-independent (Klosko 2011; see
Adams, Valentini, for responses).



How can the state's mere willing that a person perform a certain
act create a moral obligation to do so? One response is to construe
the successful exercise of practical authority not as the creation of
moral obligations *ex nihilo* but as a justified claim to
deference to the state's judgment regarding what its subjects
have independent reason to do. The characterization of this deference
within a person's deliberation is a matter of some dispute. H.
L. A. Hart and Joseph Raz, for example, argue that law is preemptive;
law does not merely offer a consideration for or against a potential
course of action, to be weighed against any and all other relevant
considerations. Rather, law aims to exclude from an agent's
deliberation at least some of the considerations favoring or opposing
the conduct at issue, considerations that in the absence of the law it
would be permissible to take into account (Raz 1979, chaps. 1 and 2).
Rival views of the manner in which political obligation functions in a
person's deliberation reject the exclusionary element of
Raz's account of the duty to obey the law, arguing that
political obligations are simply weighty moral reasons that are
balanced against all of the other reasons a person has to perform or
not perform a given act (Perry 1989). On neither account, though, is a
person's political obligation taken to provide her with an
absolute duty to obey the law. Raz, for example, notes that law need
not exclude all of the first-order reasons a person might have for
performing a given act (1986, p. 46). Nor does he claim that the
first-order reason the law provides for not performing a given act
will always outweigh or defeat non-excluded first-order reasons a
person has to perform that act. In other words, the duty to obey the
law is a *prima facie* or *pro tanto* reason for action,
from which it follows that the bearer of a political obligation may
not always have a conclusive or all-things-considered reason to act as
the law demands.



Theorists of political obligation typically ascribe two further
features to the moral duty they seek to defend. First, the duty to
obey the law is general both in the sense that it is a duty to obey
the entire body of law in a given jurisdiction and in the sense that
the duty is borne by all those living within that jurisdiction. Note
that a general moral duty to obey the law is consistent with variation
in the legal obligations different subjects bear. For example, a given
state may impose on all and only its male citizens a duty to register
for a military draft, in which case the full set of legal obligations
borne by men in this state will differ from the full set borne by
women. Nevertheless, citizens of both sexes may be subject to a
general political obligation, meaning that they have a moral duty to
fulfill all of their legal obligations. Raz, however, denies that the
subjects of any existing state or indeed anything remotely like it
have a general duty to obey the law; rather, law's authority is
piecemeal, both with respect to who has a moral duty to obey a
particular law and with respect to the number of laws within a given
legal system that enjoy authority over anyone.



The second feature commonly ascribed to political obligations is that
they are typically conceived of as being owed *only* to the
particular political/legal society that claims primary or exclusive
jurisdiction over a person. Following John Simmons's influential
analysis, this has come to be known as "the particularity
requirement." Political obligation, Simmons maintains, carries
an implicit connection to citizenship, which means that those who are
engaged in the political obligation debate "are only interested
in those moral requirements [including obligations and duties] which
bind an individual to one *particular* political community, set
of institutions, etc." (1979, p. 31; but cf. Edmundson 2004, p.
232, and Walton, 2013). As indicated below, in SS4.4, the main
objection to natural duty theories of political obligation is that
they cannot account for this particularity.


## 3. Anarchist Challenges to Political Obligation



Until recently, most political philosophers have assumed that subjects
of a (moderately just) state have political obligations, while
disputing why that is so. Indeed, in the middle years of the twentieth
century some philosophers even asserted, on conceptual grounds, that
political obligation needs no justification. As one of them put the
point, "to ask why I should obey any laws is to ask whether
there might be a political society without political obligations,
which is absurd. For we mean by political society, groups of people
organized according to rules enforced by some of their number"
(Macdonald 1951, p. 192; also McPherson 1967, p. 64, and, more subtly,
Pitkin 1966; but cf. Pateman 1973, and Horton 2010, pp. 138-46).
This view did not long prevail, but it testifies to the strength of
the tendency to believe that citizens surely have an obligation to
obey the laws of their country, at least if it is reasonably just.



Beginning in the 1960s, however, skeptics have come to occupy a
prominent place in debates over political obligation. As they see it,
there is no general obligation to obey the law, not even on the part
of the citizens of a reasonably just polity. The most thorough-going
of these dissenters have been anarchists proper - that is, those
who insist that states and governments are necessarily immoral
institutions that ought to be abolished. Other skeptics or dissenters
have concluded, though, that the anarchist proper is wrong about the
need for the state but right about the lack of an obligation to obey
the law. Like the anarchist proper, these "philosophical
anarchists" hold that the state is illegitimate, but they deny
that its illegitimacy entails "a strong moral imperative to
oppose or eliminate states; rather they typically take state
illegitimacy simply to remove any strong moral presumption in favor of
obedience to, compliance with, or support for our own or other
existing states" (Simmons 2001, p. 104; but note Huemer 2013,
who regards philosophical anarchism as a second-best alternative that
could prepare the way for anarchism proper).


### 3.1 Philosophical Anarchism



The arguments of these philosophical anarchists take either an
"a priori" or an "a posteriori" form (Simmons
2001, pp. 104-106). Arguments of the first kind maintain that it
is impossible to provide a satisfactory account of a general
obligation to obey the law. According to Robert Paul Wolff, the
principal advocate of this view, there can be no general obligation to
obey the law because any such obligation would violate the
"primary obligation" of autonomy, which is "the
refusal to be ruled" (1998 [1970], p. 18). As Wolff defines it,
autonomy combines freedom with responsibility. To be autonomous,
someone must have the capacity for choice, and therefore for freedom;
but the person who has this capacity also has the responsibility to
exercise it - to act autonomously. Failing to do so is to fail
to fulfill this "primary obligation" of autonomy.



This primary obligation dooms any attempt to develop a theory of
political obligation, Wolff argues, except in the highly unlikely case
of a direct democracy in which every law has the unanimous approval of
the citizenry. Under any other form of government, autonomy and
authority are simply incompatible. Authority is "the right to
command, and correlatively, the right to be obeyed" (p. 4),
which entails that anyone subject to authority has an obligation to
obey those who have the right to be obeyed. But if we acknowledge such
an authority, we allow someone else to rule us, thereby violating our
fundamental obligation to act autonomously. We must therefore reject
the claim that we have an obligation to obey the orders of those who
purport to hold authority over us and conclude that there can be no
general obligation to obey the laws of any polity that falls short of
a unanimous direct democracy.



Arguments of the second, a posteriori form are more modest in their
aims but no less devastating in their conclusions. In this case the
aim is not to show that a satisfactory defense of political obligation
is impossible but that no defense has proven satisfactory, despite the
efforts of some of the best minds in the history of philosophy. All
such attempts have failed, according to those who take this line, so
we must conclude that only those relatively few people who have
explicitly committed themselves to obey the law, perhaps by swearing
allegiance as part of an oath of citizenship, have anything like a
general obligation to obey the laws under which they live (e.g., Smith
1973; Raz 1979, chap. 12; Simmons 1979, 2001, chap. 6, and 2005; Green
1988, pp. 220-47, and 1996).


### 3.2 Against Philosophical Anarchism



Whether a priori or a posteriori, the arguments of the philosophical
anarchists pose a serious challenge to those who believe in a general
obligation to obey the law. This challenge is made especially
difficult by the powerful objections that Simmons and other a
posteriori anarchists have brought against the existing theories of
political obligation. The most effective response, of course, would be
to demonstrate that one's favored theory does not succumb to
these objections, and we shall briefly consider attempts to respond in
this fashion in SS4, below. Some general attempts to refute
philosophical anarchism ought to be noted first, however.



Some of these attempts apply specifically to Wolff's a priori
attack on political authority and obligation, and others apply to
philosophical anarchism in general. The arguments against Wolff
usually concentrate on his conception of autonomy and its relation to
authority. In brief, Wolff's critics argue that he is wrong to
insist that moral autonomy is our "primary" or
"fundamental obligation," for it "is, in fact,
highly implausible to think that autonomy should invariably override
all other values" (Horton, p. 127). Moreover, there is no reason
to accept Wolff's claim that autonomy and authority are
necessarily incompatible. Insofar as autonomy is a capacity, as Wolff
says, it will need to be developed before it can be exercised, and
various kinds of authority - including political authority
- will foster its development and make its continued exercise
possible (Dagger 1997, pp. 66-68). Nor is it clear how Wolff can
reject political authority without also rejecting promises and
contracts as illegitimate constraints on one's autonomy -
a problem that leads even Simmons to declare Wolff's a priori
anarchism a "failed attempt" (2001, p. 111).



In the face of these problems, Matthew Noah Smith has recently tried
to rescue the a priori skepticism of Wolff's theory by
substituting the overriding importance of "the moral status of
the subject's self" (2011, p. 2) for Wolff's
reliance on the fundamental duty of autonomy. According to Smith,
preserving the status of the self is incompatible with the law's
claim to authority, because "the obligation to obey the law
would morally require otherwise morally upstanding subjects to undergo
a radical form of self-effacement in favor of recreating themselves in
the image of foreign values" (p. 2; see p. 9 for an admittedly
"florid" way of making this point). Whether the law is
properly understood as an "alien force" that threatens
"to fix who one is" (p. 14), however, is a point that
critics of a priori anarchism are not likely to concede. Indeed, the
radically individualistic conception of the self that underpins
Smith's argument is one that proponents of the membership or
associative theory of political obligation (see SS4.3, below) will
dismiss from the outset. It seems unlikely, then, that Smith's
adaptation will develop the "traction" that, on his
account, Wolff's has failed to gain.



With regard to philosophical anarchism in general, critics have
responded in various ways, including the disparate complaints that it
is a kind of false or hypocritical radicalism (Gans) and that it is
all too genuine a threat to political order (Senor). The latter
complaint has both an ontological and a conceptual aspect. That is,
the critics argue that philosophical anarchists fail to appreciate the
social or embedded nature of human beings, which leads the anarchists
to conceive of obligation in excessively individualistic or
voluntaristic terms - and that leads, in turn, to their denial
of a general obligation to obey the law. The problem, however, is that
it is a mistake to think "that political life can be left more
or less unchanged by dispensing with some conception of political
obligation and adopting the perspective of philosophical anarchism.
Unless it can be shown that we can continue to talk intelligibly and
credibly of *our* government or *our* state, then a root
and branch reimagining of our political relations would appear to be a
necessary consequence" (Horton 2010, p. 133; emphasis in
original). Whether the philosophical anarchists should welcome that
consequence, or whether they can find a way to stop short of it, thus
becomes a major point of contention.



In the end, of course, the best response to philosophical anarchists,
especially those of the a posteriori kind, will be to produce or
defend a theory of political obligation that proves immune to their
objections. At present, though, no single theory has the support of
all of those who continue to believe in political obligation, let
alone the clear prospect of converting philosophical anarchists.
Several theories remain in contention, however, as the following
section indicates.


## 4. Contemporary Theories of Political Obligation



Although the lines that separate one theory from another are not
always distinct, philosophical justifications of political obligation
nowadays usually take the form of arguments from consent, fair play,
membership, or natural duty. Some philosophers advance a hybrid of two
or more of these approaches, and others hold, as the concluding
section shows, that a pluralistic theory is necessary. For the most
part, though, attempts to justify a general obligation to obey the law
follow one of these four lines of argument.


### 4.1 Consent



Most people who believe that they have an obligation to obey the law
probably think that this putative obligation is grounded in their
consent. Political philosophers are less inclined to think this way,
however, in light of the withering criticism to which Hume and more
recent writers - notably Simmons (1979, chaps. 3 and 4) -
have subjected consent theory. The critics' claim is not that
consent cannot be a source of obligations, for they typically believe
that it can. Their claim, instead, is that too few people have either
expressly or tacitly given the kind of actual consent that can ground
a general obligation to obey the law, and hypothetical consent cannot
supply the defect, for reasons already noted.



Nevertheless, consent theory still has its adherents among political
philosophers. Their versions of consent theory vary considerably,
though, with two main branches emerging in response to the criticisms.
One response, advanced by Harry Beran (1987), accepts the claim that
only express consent can generate a political obligation, but then
calls for political societies to establish formal procedures for
evoking such consent. That is, states should require their members
openly to undertake an obligation to obey the law or to refuse to do
so. Those who decline the obligation will then have the options of
leaving the state, seceding to form a new state with like-minded
people, or taking residence in a territory within the state reserved
for dissenters. In the absence of such procedures, it seems that
Beran's position is roughly the same as that of the a posteriori
philosophical anarchist. Were the procedures he recommends in place,
though, it is far from clear that the options available to the members
will make their "consent" truly voluntary (Klosko 2005,
pp. 123-29; Horton, pp. 34-36).



The second line of response to the criticisms of consent theory is to
argue in one way or another that the critics construe
"consent" too narrowly. Thus John Plamenatz (1968,
"Postscript") and Peter Steinberger (2004, p. 218) have
maintained that voting or otherwise participating in elections should
count as consent; and Steinberger produces a lengthy list of fairly
ordinary activities - calling the police or fire department for
help, sending children to a public school, using a public library, and
more - that constitute "active participation in the
institutions of the state" (pp. 219-20). Mark Murphy and
Margaret Gilbert have sounded variations on this theme by arguing, in
Murphy's case, that "surrender of judgment is a kind of
consent" (in Edmundson 1999, p. 320), or, in Gilbert's,
that "joint commitment" is an important source of
obligations, including political obligations (1993, 2006, 2013). For
Murphy, surrender of judgment is consent in the usual sense of
voluntary agreement or acceptance. As he says, "One consents to
another in a certain sphere of conduct in the acceptance sense of
consent when one allows the other's practical judgments to take
the place of his or her own with regard to that sphere of conduct.
(This consent may be either to a person or to a set of rules: both of
these can be authoritative)" (p. 330). As the earlier discussion
of her ideas indicates (SS2.3), Gilbert differs from Murphy, and
others, in taking a joint commitment to be something that need not
arise voluntarily. According to her theory, "an understanding of
joint commitment and a readiness to be jointly committed are necessary
if one is to accrue political obligations, as is common knowledge of
these in the population in question. One can, however, fulfill these
conditions without prior deliberation or decision, and if one has
deliberated, one may have had little choice but to incur them"
(2006, p. 290). Indeed, membership in a "plural subject"
formed through non-voluntary joint commitments plays such a large part
in Gilbert's theory that it may be better to place her with
those who advocate an "associative" or
"membership" theory of political obligation than with
adherents of consent theory.



David Estlund (2008, pp. 117-58) has recently offered a new
twist on consent theory. Most theorists maintain that putative acts of
consent are void if it would be wrong to consent to another's
authority. For example, consent to be another's slave generates
no obligation even if it genuinely expresses a person's will.
Estlund argues on grounds of symmetry that we ought to draw the same
conclusion in cases where it would be wrong not to consent to
another's authority. Such failures are void, and so a person who
morally ought to have consented to another's authority has a
duty to obey her. If subjects of a given state ought to consent to
obey its laws, say because the state performs morally necessary tasks,
then their failure to do so is void and no barrier to concluding that
they are under a political obligation to that state. Estlund's
defense of what he labels normative consent is subtle and
sophisticated. Still, one might wonder whether in cases where
non-consent is void the duty to submit to another's authority
follows directly from the considerations in virtue of which it is
wrong for someone not to consent (see Sreenivasan 2009). It is also
unclear whether there is enough of a connection between the
agent's will and her coming to be subject to another's
authority to warrant classifying Estlund's account as an example
of consent theory (for responses to both concerns, see Estlund 2008,
pp. 127-131; 2009).


### 4.2 Fair Play



Although earlier philosophers, including Socrates, appealed to
something resembling the principle of fairness (or fair play), the
classic formulation of the principle is set out in H. L. A.
Hart's "Are There Any Natural Rights?" As Hart there
says, "when a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise
according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have
submitted to these restrictions when required have a right to a
similar submission from those who have benefited by their
submission" (1955, p. 185). John Rawls subsequently adopted this
principle in an influential essay of his own, referring to the duty
derived from the principle as the "duty of fair play"
(1964). What the principle of fair play holds, then, is that everyone
who participates in a reasonably just, mutually beneficial cooperative
practice - Hart's "joint enterprise according to
rules" - has an obligation to bear a fair share of the
burdens of the practice. This obligation is owed to the others who
cooperate in the enterprise, for cooperation is what makes it possible
for any individual to enjoy the benefits of the practice. Anyone who
acts as a free rider is acting wrongly, then, even if his or her
shirking does not directly threaten the existence or success of the
endeavor. Those who participate in the practice thus have rights
against as well as obligations to one another: a right to require
others to bear their share of the burdens and an obligation to bear
one's share in turn.



The principle of fair play applies to a political society only if its
members can reasonably regard it as a cooperative enterprise that
works to their mutual benefit. If it can, the members have an
obligation of fair play to do their part in maintaining the
enterprise. Because the rule of law is necessary to the maintenance of
such a polity - and perhaps even constitutive of it - the
principal form of cooperation is abiding by the law. In the absence of
overriding circumstances, then, the members of the polity *qua*
cooperative practice must honor their obligation to one another to
obey the laws. In this way the principle of fair play provides the
grounding for a general obligation to obey the law, at least on the
part of those whose polity they can reasonably regard as a cooperative
enterprise.



The argument from fair play has met with serious criticism, however.
The most sweeping is that of Robert Nozick, who objects that the
principle of fair play would allow others to place us under an
obligation to them simply by conferring benefits on us (1974, pp.
90-95). To make his point, Nozick imagines a group of neighbors
creating a public entertainment system and assigning every adult in
the neighborhood a day on which he or she is responsible for planning
and broadcasting a program. As a resident of the neighborhood, you
occasionally hear and enjoy the programs, but you never consent to
take part in this scheme. When your assigned day arrives, are you
obligated to take a turn? The principle of fair play says yes,
according to Nozick, but the correct answer to the question is
"surely not."



According to a second objection, fair-play considerations apply only
to cooperative schemes that produce benefits one may refuse. If it
produces nonexcludable goods, which everyone receives regardless of
whether she contributed to their production or even wants them, then
there can be no fair-play obligation to bear a share of the burdens of
the enterprise. But this is typically the case in political societies,
which produce goods such as public order and national defense that one
cannot meaningfully refuse to accept. As Simmons puts it (1979, p.
129), there is a difference between *receiving* and
*accepting* benefits, and receiving them is not enough to place
someone under an obligation. If there is a political obligation,
therefore, it does not follow directly from the existence of the kind
of nonexcludable goods that states provide. To be sure, Simmons does
acknowledge that some people may acquire fair-play obligations by
enjoying nonexcludable benefits that they take to be "worth the
price [they] pay for them" if they do so in full awareness that
"the benefits *are* provided by a cooperative
scheme" (1979, p. 132; emphasis in original). But he also
maintains that few people will satisfy both of these conditions, with
the second proving especially troublesome for advocates of fair-play
theory: for "even in democratic political communities, these
benefits are commonly regarded as purchased (with taxes) from a
central authority, rather than as accepted from the cooperative
efforts of our fellow citizens" (1979, p. 139).



As one might expect, advocates of the fair-play account have not
remained silent in the face of these criticisms. The leading advocate,
George Klosko, has written two books elaborating and defending the
principle of fairness as the foundation of political obligation (2004
[1992], 2005), and it sometimes seems that every fresh attack on fair
play provokes a swift response (e.g., Carr 2002 and Lefkowitz 2004;
Zhu 2014 and Tosi 2017). And the attacks have certainly continued
(e.g., Simmons 2001, chap. 2; McDermott 2004), as we shall indicate
shortly. First, though, it is necessary to see how fair-play advocates
have responded to the criticisms sketched above.



With regard to Nozick's objection, the response is usually to
hold that his example of the neighborhood entertainment system is
beside the point (Bell 1978). That is, Nozick is probably right to say
that one would have no obligation to operate the system on his or her
assigned day, but he is wrong to think that fair play would require
one to do so. There is no fair-play obligation in cases such as this,
either because the passive receipt of benefits is not enough to show
that one is a *participant* in a cooperative practice (Dagger
1997, pp. 69-70) or because the benefits are "of
relatively little value" (Klosko 2004, pp. 38-39:).
Responses to Simmons' objections have taken two directions. One
is to say that Simmons has drawn too sharp a distinction between the
acceptance and receipt of benefits. Between the person who passively
receives the benefits of a cooperative practice and the one who
knowingly and willingly accepts them is the person - very many
people, in fact - who actively participates in the practice
without being fully aware, in the ordinary course of life, that she is
undertaking an obligation to do her part in a cooperative practice
(Dagger 1997, pp. 73-78; Besson 2005, pp. 487-89). Others
respond to Simmons' criticism by denying that obligations must
be incurred voluntarily (Arneson 1982; Klosko 2004, pp. 39-57 ).
What matters is not that one accepts the benefits of the practice,
according to Klosko's influential account, but that three
conditions are met: "Goods supplied must be (i) worth the
recipients' effort in providing them; (ii) 'presumptively
beneficial'; and (iii) have benefits and burdens that are fairly
distributed" ( 2004, p. 39 ). If, in sum, a state qualifies as a
cooperative enterprise, and if it provides its members with goods that
are presumptively beneficial - or "indispensable for
satisfactory lives" (Klosko 2005, p. 6) - then its members
have an obligation grounded in fairness to obey its laws.



These responses have not settled the debate in favor of a fair-play
account of political obligation. Simmons, for example, continues to
hold that modern political societies are too large and impersonal to
count as cooperative enterprises (2001, pp. 38-42). He also
contends that Klosko's theory is "not really a
*fairness* theory at all," but a "disguised Natural
Duty theory, resting on an unstated moral duty to help supply
essential goods locally ..." (2005, p. 190, emphasis in
original; also 2007, pp. 22-23). Others complain that fair-play
theory is not suitably sensitive to the possible alternatives there
may have been to the cooperative practices that have emerged. We may
admit, on this view, that people receive benefits from a cooperative
practice, and even net benefits, but we should also notice that they
might have benefited more from the establishment of a different
practice. To say, in these circumstances, that those who are engaged
in a cooperative practice have an obligation to do their part is to
accept the principle of fairness as "a powerfully conservative
principle" (Normore 2010, p. 231). Yet having a fair-play
obligation to the members of an ongoing enterprise does not bar anyone
from trying to transform that enterprise, perhaps even by means of
civil disobedience (see the entry on Civil Disobedience).



In the political context, according to another critic, the proper
comparison is between a state of affairs in which benefits follow from
other people's obeying the laws in the sense of mere compliance,
on the one hand, and a situation in which benefits follow from
others' obeying "*because* the law says to do
it" (Durning 2003, p. 255). If the benefits are the same in both
cases, then there is no reason to think that true cooperation, rather
than mere compliance, is producing the benefits, and hence no reason
to think that those who receive the benefits have a fair-play
obligation to obey the laws. This argument seems likely to do no more
than renew controversies about the nature of such societies and the
viability of philosophical anarchism. The question is whether we can
expect a polity to survive if its "members" regard one
another not as cooperators in a common enterprise but exclusively as
purchasers of governmental services who comply with the law under the
threat of coercion.


### 4.3 Membership or Association



Recent decades have witnessed a resurgence of arguments in defense of
an associative account of political obligation. Associative
obligations are ones that agents are alleged to have merely in virtue
of their occupying a role in some socially salient relationship, such
as being a parent, a friend, or a doctor. These roles are at least
partly constituted by the various obligations their occupants owe to
the other(s) in the relationship; to be X's parent or Y's
friend just is to have certain duties to X or Y (as well as certain
claims against them). Exactly what those obligations are varies
somewhat depending on the relationship in question and the society in
which the participants in that relationship are embedded. These
variations reflect different conceptions of the relationship's
value or purpose, or of the particular obligations that follow from a
specific conception. Whatever their number and content, associative
obligations are owed only to particular others, namely those with whom
an agent has a certain kind of relationship, rather than being owed
universally to all moral agents or sentient beings in virtue of their
status as such.



Since associative obligations attach to an agent simply in virtue of
her occupying a role in a particular relationship, it makes no
difference whether she comes to occupy that role voluntarily, as in
the case of professional relationships and most friendships, or
non-voluntarily, as in the case of sibling relationships or, in many
cases, citizenship. As these examples suggest, occupying roles in
various types of relationships often figures centrally in
people's identity. In part, this is a matter of people's
self-conception; many of us strongly identify with our role as
parents, children, siblings, friends, teachers, members of specific
religious communities, and so on. Some proponents of associative
obligations advance a stronger claim, however. Human beings are not
essentially unencumbered individuals who can move in and out of
various roles while remaining the same person; rather, we are all
embedded in a web of normative relationships, some of which we cannot
exit without being "reborn" as radically different
people.



An associative account of political obligation has many attractive
features. It provides a justification for a duty to obey the law that
does not depend on an individual's choice or voluntary exercise
of will - surely a virtue when so many people have not consented
to be ruled by the state that governs them, or to be a member of the
political community on whose behalf it does so. The particularity of
political obligation - again, the fact that it is owed to the
particular political community to which an agent belongs -
follows straightforwardly from its nature as an associative
obligation. So, too, does the claim that political obligation requires
obedience to law. As Samuel Scheffler observes,
"membership-dependent reasons are reasons for doing one's
share, as defined by the norms and ideals of the group itself, to help
sustain it and contribute to its purposes" (2018, p. 17). Law
specifies, perhaps incompletely, what counts as doing one's
share. John Horton makes the same point when he writes that laws
"define the terms of association within a polity, [and] concern
for the interests and welfare of the polity is a concern for these
terms of association" (1992, p. 165). Finally, many people
apparently think of themselves as members of political societies, and
in virtue of that fact, believe that they have an obligation to obey
its laws. To pay one's taxes, to vote, to serve on a jury or in
the armed forces, to coordinate with other members of one's
polity to ensure a safe environment, and so on, is simply to fulfill
the obligations of citizenship. An associative account of political
obligation captures this (allegedly) widespread sense that "deep
and important obligations flow from identity and relatedness"
(Tamir 1993, p. 99).



Like the other theories of political obligation, associative accounts
have met with considerable criticism. One line of attack targets the
parallels many of its proponents draw between the family and the
polity. In Ronald Dworkin's words, "political association,
like family and friendship and other forms of association more local
and intimate, is in itself pregnant of obligation" (1986, p.
206). John Horton invokes further analogs between family and polity in
his argument for associative political obligation:



> 
> 
> My claim is that a polity is, like the family, a relationship into
> which we are mostly born, and that the obligations which are
> constitutive of the relationship do not stand in need of moral
> justification in terms of a set of basic moral principles or some
> comprehensive moral theory. Furthermore, both the family and the
> political community figure prominently in our sense of who we are: our
> self-identity and our understanding of our place in the world (1992,
> pp. 150-51).
> 
> 
> 



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.



Nevertheless, defenders of an associative account of political
obligation owe their interlocutors an account of what makes political
association valuable. The emphasis these theorists have placed on
membership or association as the ground of political obligation,
whilst giving relatively little attention to what makes it valuable,
has invited the following objection: if membership is sufficient to
generate an obligation to obey, then the members of unjust and
exploitative groups will have an obligation to obey the rules. In the
case of the polity, this leads to the unpalatable and
counter-intuitive conclusion that the routinely exploited and
oppressed "members" of an unjust polity are under an
obligation to obey its laws (Dagger 2000; 2018, p. 89).



The obvious rejoinder is to deny that unjust associations have the
sort of value that can ground associative obligations, or at least
that this is so for those "members" who are routinely
exploited and oppressed. Thus, John Horton develops a two-pronged
account of associative political obligation according to which a
polity must provide its citizens "the generic good of order
and security" and its members must identify with it and
acknowledge its political authority (Horton 2010). Similarly,
Scheffler maintains that "the value of one's membership is
not independent of the nature of the society or the justice of its
institutions," (2018, p. 14) while Ronald Dworkin holds that
associative political obligations arise only among members of a
community of principle, one committed to the treatment of all its
members with equal concern and respect (1986, pp. 213-215).
Whereas these rejoinders all make associative political obligations
conditional on the polity adequately satisfying certain substantive
moral standards, Massimo Renzo sketches a response that focuses
instead on what makes a person a member of a political society. His
answer is a "quasi-voluntarist reformulation of the associative
model" which holds that we voluntarily occupy our roles even in
families and polities as long as "we could have stepped out of
them if we had wanted" (2012, p. 109, p. 120). Oppressed
"members" of a polity have no associative obligations, at
least if stepping out of their role as "members" is not an
option available to them at a reasonable cost.



Critics maintain that in offering responses like those just described,
associative theorists effectively abandon their attempt to provide a
distinctive account of political obligation (Dagger 2018, p.
79-82; Wellman 2000, p. 553; Simmons 2001, pp. 83-84;
2005, pp. 111-115). That is because the moral duty to perform
the (conventional) duties that constitute the role of citizen
ultimately depends either on an agent's exercise of will, i.e.
consent or accepting the benefits of others' cooperation, or a
natural duty, such as the duty to support just institutions or the
duty to maximize aggregate welfare. In all of these cases,
citizens' duty to obey the law ultimately depends on a
consideration other than their membership in the polity. The task of
morally justifying political obligation bottoms out not in the fact of
association but in a moral principle external to it.



Some associative theorists respond that the critics conflate
considerations that disable associative obligations with
considerations that ground or justify associative obligations (Horton
and Windeknecht 2015, p. 914; Scheffler 2018, p. 11). For instance, it
may be that the freedom to exit a relationship is a necessary
condition for it being one that has the sort of value that justifies
obligations on the part of those who participate in it. Awareness of
the impossibility of exit may lead a person to feel alienated from
their role in the relationship, or otherwise preclude it from being
one that is valuable for that person. Yet it is the good realized in
the relationship that justifies participants' claims against one
another, and the duties to which they correlate, not any consent
implicit in their continued participation in it.



Another rejoinder starts from the observation that actual associations
between family, friends, and fellow citizens are typically
approximations of *moralized* ideal types. That is,
considerations of fairness, respect, care, and reliance are part and
parcel of our concepts of parent, sibling, friend, and citizen. Thus,
the invocation of unfairness, disrespect, or neglect to rebut the
claim that one has a duty to O because one occupies the role of
sibling or citizen need not involve an appeal to some moral principle
external to the relationship. Instead, it may involve an appeal to a
principle *internal* to the relationship; that is, to a
moralized conception of what it is to be a sibling or citizen. This
line of argument entails that obligation-generating associations exist
only where they realize the relevant ideal-type to a sufficient
degree; all genuine associations or relationships are, necessarily,
good or valuable associations. Thus, an associative theorist who
adopts this line of argument has a ready response to the allegation
that she is committed to the conclusion that exploited or oppressed
citizens have a duty to obey the law: since they have no genuine
political association or common citizenship with their oppressors,
they have none of the duties that flow from such a relationship when
it exists.



A last response holds that freedom, equality, fairness, and so on are
not abstract principles from which we can derive the existence or
non-existence of political obligation; rather, they are regulative
ideals to which (a sufficient number of) participants in genuine
political communities are committed, despite their many differences on
points of detail large and small. There is no vantage point outside
the specific, historical, political communities in which we are
inevitably situated, from which we can identify the true bases of our
moral obligations and so determine whether we have a moral duty to
obey the law. Thus, there is no abstract, universal, moral principle
of fairness, utility, respect for autonomy, etc., that provides a firm
foundation for associative obligations, or at least not one to which
we have any access. Rather, there are only the concrete practices of
fairness, welfare-promotion, and so on realized in actual polities.
"Political obligations are practical commitments that come into
play through participants' mutually holding each other to
account in political practices," (Fossen 2014, p. 231) not
truths derived from more basic principles comprehended via an act of
intellect.


### 4.4 Natural Duty



The final contenders in the political obligation debates are natural
duty accounts. In this context, natural duties are understood to be
ones people have simply in virtue of their status as moral agents;
they need do nothing to acquire them, nor does their bearing such
duties depend on their occupying some role in a socially salient
relationship. Natural duties are also universal in scope; they are
owed to all members of a class defined in terms of possession of some
feature, such as sentience or rationality. John Rawls first broached
such an argument for political obligation when he asserted in *A
Theory of Justice* that everyone is subject to a natural duty of
justice that "requires us to support and to comply with just
institutions that exist and apply to us" (1999, p. 99). More
recently, political philosophers and theorists including Jeremy
Waldron (1999), Thomas Christiano (2008), Christopher Heath Wellman
(2005), Anna Stilz (2009) and, arguably, David Estlund (2008; see
section 4.1 above) have refined and expanded upon Rawls's
somewhat vague contention, some of them in ways reminiscent of or even
explicitly modeled on Kant's defense of political obligation
(see section 1.5 above).



Contemporary natural duty theorists differ over the natural duty that
provides the basis for political obligation. Christiano grounds his
account in a fundamental principle of justice requiring the equal
advancement of people's interests, Wellman in a Samaritan duty
of easy rescue, and Stilz in a Kantian duty of respect for
others' freedom-as-independence, understood as a secure sphere
of self-determination defined by a person's rights. These
theorists agree, however, that moral agents can discharge their
natural duty to others only through submission to the authority of a
common legal order. This is so for several reasons: the demands of
justice are sometimes underdetermined; its achievement requires the
resolution of coordination problems; and most importantly, people
reasonably disagree over the demands of justice. Christiano traces
this disagreement to what he calls the facts of judgment: diversity in
people's natural talents and cultural surroundings, cognitive
biases in their interpretation of people's interests and the
value assigned to their own interests relative to the value assigned
to the interests of others, and fallibility in both moral and
non-moral judgment. In light of these facts, even those who make a
good faith effort to discern what justice requires of them in their
interaction with others will fail to reach a consensus. Agents who act
on their own, private, judgment of justice will be perceived by others
to be acting unjustly. If some are able to unilaterally impose their
conception of justice on others, the latter will not enjoy
freedom-as-independence (Stilz 2009), or will suffer the violation of
their fundamental interests in being at home in the world, in
correcting for others' cognitive biases, and in being treated by
one's fellows as a person with equal moral standing (Christiano
2008). Only submission to a common legal order can provide a solution
to this problem of domination and conflict, argue natural duty
proponents of political obligation. "There is no way other than
general compliance with a single authoritative set of rules to secure
peace and protect basic moral rights" (Wellman 2005, p. 45); law
"settle[s] for practical purposes what justice consists in by
promulgating public rules for the guidance of individual
behavior" (Christiano, p. 53); or in Stilz's Kantian
terms, law replaces the unilateral imposition of obligations on others
with the omnilateral imposition of obligations on all.



Not just any legal order will do, though. Rather, many natural duty
theorists of political obligation argue either that the law must be
crafted according to democratic procedures or that it must not violate
certain individual rights, or both, if those it addresses are to have
a duty to obey it. Christiano, for instance, argues that against a
background constituted by diversity, cognitive bias, and fallibility,
agents can be sure that their fundamental interest in judgment will
not be unjustifiably set back only if political power is exercised
within institutions that publicly realize equality, i.e. democratic
ones. Likewise, Waldron defends the authority of a majority-rule
decision procedure on the basis of its "commitment to equality
- a determination that when we, who need to settle on a single
course of action, disagree about what to do, there is no reasonable
basis for us in designing our decision-procedures to accord greater
weight to one side than to the other in the disagreement"
(Waldron 1999, p. 117; see also Lefkowitz 2004). Even if a person does
not believe that the particular scheme of distributive justice
realized in the law treats her justly, she can recognize that the
process whereby that scheme was created, and can be modified or
eliminated, does treat her as an equal. Daniel Viehoff also appeals to
the egalitarian character of democratic procedures to justify a moral
duty to obey the law, arguing that they best realize an ideal of
relational equality in which agents forbear from using any power
advantages they may enjoy to determine the terms of their morally
necessary coordination (Viehoff 2014; see also Kolodny 2014; Viehoff
2019). Finally, Stilz argues that law omnilaterally imposes
obligations on all only if it expresses a general will. It does the
latter if and only if it "first, defines rights (protected
interests) that apply equally to all; second, it defines these rights
via a procedure that considers everyone's interests equally; and
third, everyone who is coerced to obey the law has a voice in the
procedure" (Stilz 2009, p. 78). The latter two conditions, she
maintains, can only be met by a democratic procedure. Unsurprisingly,
some theorists remain unconvinced by the forgoing arguments for
democracy's essential contribution to the justification of
political obligation (see, e.g., Huemer 2013; Frye and Klosko
2017).



Whatever its details, many natural duty theorists also argue that the
conception of the person that grounds their accounts of political
obligation also limits the scope of legitimate law. Reasonable
disagreement over freedom-as-independence does not extend to torture,
for example, and at some perhaps indeterminate point the denial of
freedom of conscience clearly conflicts with a person's
fundamental interests in correcting for cognitive bias and being at
home in the world. Most natural duty theorists conclude that subjects
of a legal order that recognizes no rights on the part of some or all
of its subjects against such treatment lacks legitimate authority,
even if it is democratic.



Recall that natural duty accounts of political obligation begin with
duties that all moral agents owe to all other moral persons as such.
Simmons argues that this commitment renders natural duty accounts
unable to justify the particularity of political obligations; that is,
the fact that people have political obligations in virtue of their
citizenship or residence in particular states, and that they owe those
obligations to that particular state (or to their fellow citizens)
(1979, pp. 31-5; 2005, pp. 166-79). Even if we have a
natural duty "to support and comply with just
institutions," as Rawls maintains, why must we discharge that
duty by supporting and complying with the just institutions that
comprise the state in which we are citizens or residents? True, those
are the institutions that "apply to us," in the sense that
they claim jurisdiction over us. But why think this social fact
has any moral import, particularly if we think the political
institutions of other states more worthy of our support because they
better promote justice, or are in greater need of support?



Some natural duty theorists point to the intensity and frequency of
interaction among those who live in close proximity to one another as
a justification for the duty to obey the laws of the particular
jurisdiction in which one resides (Waldron 1993; 1996). Others
emphasize that a person who free-rides on his fellow citizens'
support for and compliance with the law to act on his own judgment of
how he can best discharge his natural duty of justice unfairly takes
advantage of them. Absent their good-faith sacrifice of the liberty to
act on their private judgments regarding what justice requires, the
free-rider would likely be unable to act as he does (Wellman 2005, pp.
44-5). Finally, some natural duty theorists argue that Simmons
misconstrues the natural duty of justice. Justice is not an outcome or
state of affairs that agents have a duty to promote via whatever means
they judge to be most effective or efficient, be it the political
institutions of their state or those of another. Rather, justice
characterizes a particular manner of interacting with others, such as
with respect for their freedom-as-independence or their fundamental
interests, including but not limited to their interests in judgment.
At least for a citizen of a liberal democratic state, the latter
construal of justice entails that she can only treat her fellow
citizens justly if she guides her conduct according to its law (Stilz
2012).



Simmons has recently offered a rebuttal to this second line of
argument (Simmons 2013). It entails, he argues, that citizens of one
liberal-democratic state who are forcibly subjected to the rule of
another liberal-democratic state immediately acquire political
obligations to the second state as long as they are accorded full
citizenship rights. Simmons treats this implication as a reductio ad
absurdum of the democratic Kantian justification for political
obligation, a demonstration that it cannot properly account for the
particularity of such obligations. In part, this latest rejoinder by
Simmons evidences and gives further impetus to a shift in the debate
over political obligation from the question of what gives states a
right to rule particular people, to which correlates their duty to
obey the law, to the question of what gives states a right to rule
over a particular territory [see the entry on territorial rights and
territorial justice]. But it also points to the need for natural duty
theorists to elaborate upon their so far brief discussions of the
contribution that a legitimate international legal order makes to the
legitimacy of domestic legal orders.


## 5. Conclusion: A Plurality of Principles?



The four theories of political obligation sketched above do not
exhaust the possibilities - Dorota Mokrosinska, for instance,
has recently advanced a "civil justice" theory in her
*Rethinking Political Obligation* - but they seem to
represent the main lines of argument. Indeed, even Mokrosinska
acknowledges that her "argument from civil justice combines
elements of both natural duty accounts and associative theories"
(2012, p. 174). In fact, the search for a hybrid theory is something a
number of philosophers have undertaken, either implicitly or
explicitly, in recent years. Gilbert (2006) and Steinberger (2004),
for example, seem to have developed hybrid theories without ever
advertising them as such. Gilbert's theory fuses the consent and
associative approaches through her reliance on *joint
commitments* to a *plural subject*, or group. For his part,
Steinberger combines the consent and natural-duty approaches, arguing
that any "generalized attempt to divorce obligations from
natural duties, to find justifications for the former that are
entirely independent of the latter, is ... doomed to fail"
(2004, p. 211). Wellman explicitly acknowledges the hybrid nature of
his theory, which combines an appeal to the natural duty of
samaritanism with reliance on the argument from fair play (Wellman
2005, esp. chap 2).



Others, notably Klosko (2005), Jonathan Wolff (1995, 2000), and Dudley
Knowles (2010) have explicitly called for a pluralistic or
multiple-principle approach to political obligation. There is no
single answer to the problem of political obligation, as they see it,
because the problem has more than one aspect. Not every
"member" of a polity will stand in the same relation to
the laws, for instance, which means that it is a mistake to think that
everyone must have the same general obligation to obey. Nor is every
obligation of equal force. Some are weak, such as the notorious
obligation to stop at a traffic signal in an isolated area when no one
else is around, and others are quite strong. Klosko thus thinks it
necessary to rely on the principle of fairness to supply the core of a
justification, but to supplement it with appeals to natural duty and
the common good (2006, chap. 5).



As yet there has been little reaction to these attempts to create
hybrids and to draw on multiple principles in the attempt to provide a
satisfactory theory of political obligation (but see Edmundson 2004,
pp. 250-52). Those who doubt that such a theory can be
constructed, however, are likely to say that combining principles,
whether in hybrid or pluralist fashion, will not help, for combining a
set of principles that are unsatisfactory individually will hardly
produce a strong and satisfying theory (Simmons 2007, n. 17). Whether
a plurality of principles is necessary or even desirable, in sum,
remains one of many open questions with regard to the vexing problem
of political obligation.