7 - Political Obligation

Summary

Introduction

The previous two chapters illustrate some of the advantages to be gained from re-presenting familiar problems about the obligations of promise and fair play as problems of explaining why one might have reasons to defer to the normative views of others. This chapter attempts a similar re-presentation of the obligation to obey the law. I shall suggest that this problem, too, is best seen as a direct application of a theory that shows why citizens may always have reasons to defer to the legal norms of the state. But I shall begin by first attempting to apply the more traditional argument about fair play as a basis for political obligation. Since we have now shifted the focus of fair play arguments from benefits conferred to the duty to respect the normative judgments of others, it may be that this new focus will help solve standard problems in using fair play to establish a prima facie obligation to obey the law.

Political Obligation and Fair Play

I suggested earlier that fair play arguments for political obligation have become a popular alternative to arguments based on consent because they have the advantage of generating duties in exactly those cases where consent theories are weakest: namely, where citizens who derive benefits from living in a state cannot, by any reasonable interpretation of their conduct, be said to have agreed or promised to do anything in return.