Political Obligation is Not a Duty to Obey the Law

Abstract

The paper offers a critical overview and a possible reformulation of the classical conception of political obligation. The paper argues that the current form of the classical conception has three weak spots. These are all created by the same mistake of conceiving of political obligation on the model of a duty to obey the law. The three weak spots are revealed (even though by no means exclusively made use of) by three typical ways of criticizing classical political obligation theory: the Conceptual Argument exploits the risk of collapsing political obligation into triviality, Philosophical Anarchism exploits the too stringent requirements for any successful accounts of political obligation, and the Legitimacy without Authority doctrine exploits the too narrow understanding of political obligation. Even though I have serious doubts about whether it is possible to find an acceptable account for political obligation within the classical project, I am still convinced that a more robust – less narrow, less stringent, and by no means trivial – reformulation of the classical conception would at least have a fighting chance to defend itself. Therefore, it is the main ambition of the paper to find such a reformulated version of the classical conception that remains consistent with the ends of the classical political obligation theory but eliminates the three weak spots that made the classical conception so vulnerable. This ambition requires a detour from the classical ways of discussing the problem of political obligation. Instead of asking what the problem of political obligation is and how to solve it as most classical accounts of political obligation (e.g. consent, fairness, gratitude, natural duty, associative duty, etc. theories) do, this paper will focus on the question what political obligation is. Why? Since the abovementioned three criticisms focus on the same question, targeting the foundational assumptions of classical political obligation theory, to keep the hope alive for the classical theory, we need to focus on this question too. The paper examines three potential answers to the ‘what is political obligation?’ question: the first is familiar from the classical project and according to it the best model for political obligation is a duty to obey ‘the letter of the law’; the second is what will be the preferred answer of the paper and according to it the best model for political obligation is acting in accordance with ‘the purpose behind an authoritative requirement’; and the third is what sometimes appears as the main alternative to the obedience to the letter of the law and according to which the best model for political obligation is acting in accordance with ‘some high-flying ideal behind an authoritative requirement.’ The paper argues that the three weak spots are the results of the classical way of conceiving political obligation as a duty to obey the law and that conceiving political obligation as a requirement to act in accordance with a purpose behind an authoritative requirement can simply eliminate these weak spots and make the reformulated classical conception robust against the abovementioned three sorts of criticism