Political obligation and the authority of the state

Do we have a moral duty to obey the law simply because it is the law? The question of political obligation is one of the oldest in political philosophy — it is the question Socrates answers, fatally, in the Crito — and one of the hardest to answer well. It must be kept distinct from the related question of the state's authority or legitimacy: a state might have the right to rule (legitimacy) without it following that each citizen has a duty to obey every law (obligation), and the gap between the two is where much of the modern debate lives.

A successful theory of political obligation, most writers agree, must meet several demands at once. The obligation should be general (binding on more or less all citizens, not just the politically active); it should be content-independent (a reason to obey because the law commands, not merely because the act commanded is independently right); and it should satisfy the particularity requirement (it must bind me to my own state, not to just any tolerably just state). No leading theory comfortably meets all three, which is why a strand of serious philosophers — the philosophical anarchists — conclude that there is no general obligation to obey at all.

This note works through the main candidates: consent (Locke, and Hume's devastating reply); the principle of fair play (Hart, Rawls, and Nozick's objection); the natural duty to support just institutions (Rawls, and the particularity problem); associative obligation (Dworkin, Gilbert); and Joseph Raz's service conception of authority, with its normal justification, dependence, and pre-emption theses. It closes with the anarchist challenge. The Razian material connects directly to your jurisprudence work on rights and Raz, and the debate runs alongside Rawls and Nozick.

The problem is ancient. In Plato's Crito, the imprisoned Socrates refuses to escape, imagining the Laws of Athens arguing that he has, by a lifetime's residence and acceptance of their benefits, entered into an agreement to obey them, and that to flee would be to wrong the city that nurtured him — an argument blending consent, gratitude, and fair play that already contains, in embryo, most of the moves the later tradition makes explicit.

The modern treatment begins with the social contract theorists. Hobbes grounds the duty to obey in the rational escape from the state of nature; Locke, more influentially for this topic, grounds it in consent, and is driven to the doctrine of tacit consent to explain how those who never expressly agreed are nonetheless bound. The contract tradition's vulnerability — that hardly anyone has actually consented to anything — was exposed once and for all by David Hume, whose essay 'Of the Original Contract' (1748) is the hinge of the whole subject.

After a long period in which the question was thought either settled or uninteresting, political obligation was revived as a sharp analytic problem in the mid-twentieth century, above all by H.L.A. Hart's 1955 paper on the principle of fairness and by John Rawls. The revival's most striking product, however, was sceptical: A.J. Simmons's Moral Principles and Political Obligations (1979) argued, theory by theory, that none succeeds, reviving a respectable philosophical anarchism. Running through and beyond this debate is Joseph Raz's reorientation of the question away from a single obligation owed by everyone and toward an analysis of authority itself — what it is for one person's say-so to make a difference to what another ought to do.

What a theory of political obligation must deliver

Before surveying the theories, fix the target. A political obligation, as standardly understood, is a moral requirement to obey the law that is:

• general — it binds (more or less) all citizens of a legitimate state, not merely those who hold office or are politically engaged;
• content-independent — it gives a reason to do what the law requires because the law requires it, over and above any independent reason the act may have (you should not murder anyway; the interesting cases are parking rules and tax);
• particular — it ties each person to their own state, explaining why I owe allegiance here rather than to any other equally just state.

Much of the debate is the discovery that theories which secure one of these tend to lose another.

Consent

The most intuitive theory: I am bound because I have agreed to be. Express consent (an oath, naturalisation) plainly binds, but covers almost no one. Locke therefore invokes tacit consent — by residing in a territory, using its highways, or enjoying its protection, one tacitly agrees to its laws. The strength of consent theory is that it delivers content-independence and particularity at a stroke; its weakness is empirical, and fatal, as the next section shows.

Fair play (the principle of fairness)

The practice questions for this topic — with model answers and mark schemes across foundation, standard, and challenge tiers — are set out below. Attempt each under timed conditions before revealing the model answer, then mark your work against the scheme.

The primary texts and the leading literature are listed below. Read Hume's essay and Simmons first; then Raz (The Morality of Freedom, chs. 2–4) for the service conception, and Dworkin (Law's Empire, ch. 6) for the associative alternative.