Political Obligation

Political obligation is the supposed moral duty of citizens to obey the law of their state, and this topic asks whether such a general duty exists and, if so, what grounds it.

Definition

Political obligation is a moral requirement to comply with the directives of one's political authority — paradigmatically, to obey the law — binding citizens generally and in virtue of their membership rather than the independent merits of each law.

Scope

Covers the leading candidate grounds for a duty to obey — consent, fair play, gratitude, natural duty, and associative obligation — and the 'anarchist' challenge that no such general obligation can be established. It is closely tied to consent and to philosophical anarchism.

Core questions

• Is there a general moral duty to obey the law of one's state?
• If so, what grounds it — consent, fairness, gratitude, or natural duty?
• Does obligation bind all citizens equally, or only some?
• How does political obligation relate to the state's legitimacy?

Key concepts

• the duty to obey the law
• consent
• fair play
• gratitude
• natural duty of justice
• associative obligation
• the particularity requirement

Key theories

The principle of fair play

Hart proposes, and later theorists develop, the idea that those who accept the benefits of a cooperative scheme have a fair-play obligation to bear their share of its burdens, including obeying its rules.

The fairness account defended

Klosko argues that a suitably restricted principle of fairness can ground political obligation for the provision of presumptive public goods that are essential and benefit recipients whether or not they choose to accept them.

The anarchist critique

Simmons examines consent, fair-play, gratitude, and natural-duty arguments and concludes that none establishes a general political obligation binding citizens to their particular state, supporting a weak philosophical anarchism.

History

Long treated as settled by consent within the social-contract tradition, political obligation became a distinct analytic problem in the mid-20th century. Hart (1955) and Rawls articulated the fair-play principle; Simmons's Moral Principles and Political Obligations (1979) mounted an influential challenge, prompting fairness-based defences such as Klosko's.

Debates

Is there any general obligation to obey?

Whether any principle successfully grounds a general duty to obey one's own state, as fairness theorists hold, or whether all such arguments fail, as Simmons's anarchist conclusion claims.

The particularity problem

Whether a proposed ground of obligation ties citizens specifically to their own state rather than to states or to justice generally, a test many candidate principles struggle to meet.

Key figures

• A. John Simmons
• H. L. A. Hart
• George Klosko
• John Rawls

Seminal works

• simmons1979
• klosko1992

Frequently asked questions

What is the principle of fair play?

It is the idea that someone who voluntarily accepts the benefits of a cooperative scheme acquires an obligation to do their fair share in sustaining it, which some theorists use to ground a duty to obey the law.