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What Is Political Obligation?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Richard K. Dagger
Richard K. Dagger*
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
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Abstract

Political philosophers have long been exercised by the problem of political obligation. Many have tried to solve it, and others, more recently, have dismissed it as a pseudo-problem which cannot be solved and need not be posed. This essay is an attempt to clarify the problem of political obligation and to see why it is a problem. My argument, briefly, is that the traditional understanding of the problem is misleading because it fails to distinguish questions of obedience from questions of obligation. When it is properly stated the problem can be solved–in principle, at least–and I try to show what form a solution will take.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 86 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1977

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Footnotes

*

I am indebted to Terence Ball and Rolf Sartorius for their encouragement and for their comments on drafts of this essay.

References

1 See Macdonald, Margaret, “The Language of Political Theory,” in Logic and Language, ed. Flew, A. G. N. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965)Google Scholar; McPherson, Thomas, Political Obligation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967)Google Scholar; Prichard, H. A., “Green: Political Obligation,” in Prichard's Moral Obligation, ed. Urmson, J. O. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Weldon, T. D., The Vocabulary of Politics (London: Penguin, 1953)Google Scholar for the argument that the problem of political obligation is impossible to solve because there can be no general theory of political obligation. For a defense of the “traditional” position, see Pateman, Carole, “Political Obligation and Conceptual Analysis,” Political Studies, 21 (June, 1973), 199–218 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 This is McPherson's judgment. He says (Political Obligation, pp. 84–85) that “we may well feel justified in dispensing with the concept of political obligation” for this reason: “it is so general a notion as to do little or no useful work, and if interpreted in terms specific enough to be useful it is … no longer the satisfyingly general thing that [theorists] wanted in the first place.”

3 See Hart, H. L. A., “Are There any Natural Rights?”, Philosophical Review, 64 (April, 1955)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Legal and Moral Obligation,” in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. Melden, A. I. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958)Google Scholar; also Feinberg, Joel, “Supererogation and Rules,” Ethics, 71 (July, 1961), 276–288 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gauthier, David, Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963)Google Scholar, chap. 12; Lemmon, E. J., “Moral Dilemmas,” Philosophical Review, 71 (April, 1962), 139–158 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sartorius, Rolf, “Utilitarianism and Obligation,” Journal of Philosophy, 66 (February, 1969), 67–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An extended use of “obligation” is defended by Brandt, R. B., “The Concepts of Obligation and Duty,” Mind, 73 (1964), 374–393 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Baier, Kurt, “Moral Obligation,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (July, 1966), 210–226 Google Scholar.

4 Feinberg, , “Supererogation and Rules,” p. 278 Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 278. This does not mean that “obligation” is in no sense prescriptive; it is consistent with the belief that ceteris paribus one ought to fulfill one's obligations. For an analysis of “political obligation” which regards obligation as a “conduct-guiding” concept, see Flathman, Richard, Political Obligation (New York: Atheneum, 1972), esp. pp. 29–30 and 34 Google Scholar.

6 The phrase is Lemmon's, E. J. in “Moral Dilemmas,” p. 141 Google Scholar.

7 This distinction is drawn from Hart, , “Legal and Moral Obligation,” p. 100 ffGoogle Scholar. “Promises,” Hart says, “have pre-eminently the feature I have called independence of content: the obligation springs not from the nature of the promised action but from the use of the procedure by the appropriate person in the appropriate circumstances” (p. 102).

8 “The Concepts of Obligation and Duty.”

9 Ibid., p. 385.

10 Ibid., p. 376 (emphasis in the original).

11 Ibid., p. 390.

12 Ibid., p. 390 (emphasis in the original).

13 Ibid., p. 379. It should be noted that even in these cases we can still point to someone or some group to whom the obligation may be owed–e.g., “Citizens are obligated to their fellow citizens to pay taxes.”

14 Ibid., p. 390.

15 Ibid., p. 391.

16 Hart, , “Legal and Moral Obligation,” p. 100 Google Scholar.

17 Ibid., p. 95.

18 Ibid., pp. 95–99. See also Hart's, extended critique of the “coercive theory of law” in The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), esp. chaps. 2 and 4 and pp. 79–89 Google Scholar. I am “much obliged” to Hart for what follows.

19 Ibid., p. 96, and The Concept of Law, pp.79–89; also Gauthier, , Practical Reasoning, pp. 174–176 Google Scholar.

20 I am not suggesting that all forms and all degrees of coercion are always justified. The sanction must fit the abuse, as it were.

21 This borrows from Hart, who (in a slightly different context) says: “ ‘Sanctions’ are … required not as the normal motive for obedience, but as a guarantee that those who would voluntarily obey shall not be sacrificed to those who would not. To obey, without this, would be to risk going to the wall. Given this standing danger, what reason demands is voluntary co-operation in a coercive system.” The Concept of Law, p. 193 (emphasis in original).

22 There are other objections to “Why should I obey the law?” which remain, I take it, even if we consider this to be a question of obedience rather than obligation –e.g., the single question hides a cluster of distinct questions. See Pitkin's, Hanna valuable essay “Obligation and Consent–I,” American Political Science Review, 59 (December, 1965), 990-999, esp. p. 990–991 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Kelsen, Hans, “Why Should the Law be Obeyed?” in his What Is Justice? (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 262 (emphasis added)Google Scholar.

24 Weldon, T. D., The Vocabulary of Politics, p. 57 Google Scholar. I owe this reference to Gewirth, Alan, “Obligation: Political, Legal, Moral,” in Nomos XII: Political and Legal Obligation, ed. Pennock, J. Roland and Chapman, John (New York: Atherton Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

25 Ladd, John, “Legal and Moral Obligation,” in Pennock, and Chapman, , pp. 21–22 Google Scholar.

26 Macdonald, , “The Language of Political Theory,” p. 192 Google Scholar.

27 Weldon disputes the significance of this point. “It is argued,” he says, “that if I do not like my cricket club or my trade union or even my Church, I can resign from it and join a different one. But I cannot escape from my State. There seems to me to be very little in this.… Resigning from any institution involves some inconvenience. … But to say that one cannot escape from one's State is simply untrue. Normally emigration is possible, though it is sometimes so difficult as to be practically out of the question. But there is always suicide, and it is not in these days so very uncommon.” The Vocabulary of Politics, p. 48.

28 McPherson, Thomas, Political Obligation, p. 64 Google Scholar.

29 The notion of “essentially contested concepts” is developed by Gallie, W. B., Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1966)Google Scholar, chap. 8. See also MacIntyre, Alisdair, “The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts,” Ethics, 84 (October, 1973), 1–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Pitkin, , “Obligation and Consent–I,” p. 999 (emphasis in the original)Google Scholar.

31 Singer, Peter seems to be working along these lines in Democracy and Disobedience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, where he argues that there are reasons for obeying the laws of democratic states which do not hold for nondemocracies. There are, according to Singer, two reasons for this claim to obedience: “firstly, that one ought to accept a decision-procedure which represented a fair compromise between competing claims to power. ‘Accept’ here involves both participating in and abiding by the results of the decision-procedure. Secondly, … that participation in a decision-procedure, when others are participating in good faith, creates a prima facie obligation to accept the results of the procedure” (p. 59).

32 One remains liable, of course, for obligations incurred before he renounced his citizenship; so that if one has a political obligation to a state which requires an income tax, he may not legitimately avoid payment by renouncing his citizenship just before the tax is due.

33 The Second Treatise of Government, ed. Gough, J. W. (Oxford: Blackwell's, 1966), 119, p. 61 Google Scholar.

34 Murphy, Jeffrie, “Allegiance and Lawful Government,” Ethics, 79 (October, 1968), 56–69, at 57 Google Scholar. This quotation is somewhat out of context–Murphy is arguing against natural law theorists who claim that a legal system cannot be immoral–but I think it fits the present discussion well enough.

35 The Concept of Law, pp. 26–48.

36 That is, different conceptions of citizenship and just state are associated with different traditions in political theory. On this point, see Walzer's, Michael essay, “The Problem of Citizenship,” in his Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971)Google Scholar. In The Logic of the Social Contract (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1976)Google Scholar I argue that the social contract can be used to provide satisfactory conceptions of citizenship and the just state.

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