Political Obligation Reconsidered

Abstract

The problem of political obligation as it is interpreted here concerns the grounds, limits and content of the obligation of people to the polity of which they are members. In the context of a political community it is concerned with who is obligated to whom or what and under what conditions. The principal philosophical task has been understood to be to discover or construct a convincing moral justification for the political obligation of members to their polity. In the preceding chapters several such attempts have been assessed and, to varying degrees, found wanting. None of them provides very plausible reasons for attributing political obligations to most members of any polity that does exist, has existed, or indeed, is likely to exist. The claim has to be expressed in this rather qualified way because some of the arguments do justify some political obligations for a few people under some actual, or for more people, under some highly unlikely, circumstances. The point is that they do not provide what they have mostly sought, which is a satisfactory general justification of political obligation. Further, one class of responses to this failure, the various forms of anarchism, has also been considered and doubts expressed about its adequacy.