Associative political obligations

Ethics

Volumn 106, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 247-273

  Simmons, A John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0001556235     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/233617     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. Edmund Burke, Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Works of Edmund Burke (Little Brown, 1866), vol. 4, pp. 164-67.
2. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 206; my emphasis.
3. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire Ibid., pp. 195-96.
4. John Horton, Political Obligation (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1992), pp. 146, 150.
5. For other examples of the old and new versions of this position on political obligation, see, e.g., F. H. Bradley: "What [a man] has to do depends on what his place is. . . . We must say that a man's life with its moral duties is in the main filled up by his station in that system of wholes which the state is . . . , by its laws and institutions and still more by its spirit. . . . We may take it as an obvious fact that in my station my particular duties are prescribed to me, and I have them whether I wish to or not" (F. H. Bradley, "My Station and Its Duties," in his Ethical Studies [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951], pp. 110, 112);
6. and Michael Hardimon: "The idea that we have noncontractual familial obligations is one of the most salient beliefs we have. . . . I may also have an analogous obligation to the state. . . . Our roles as family members and citizens are the source of some of the deepest and most important bonds we have" (Michael Hardimon, "Role Obligations," Journal of Philosophy 41 [1994]: 342, 344, 353).
7. The classic statement of this view, of course, is Hume's, in his essay "Of the Original Contract." It is interesting that Locke, the archvoluntarist, seems to agree that most people think this; they "take no notice" of the consent that grounds political obligations "and thinking it not done at all, or not necessary, conclude they are naturally subjects as they are men" (John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, sec. 117 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960], p. 346).
8. The best-known contemporary statement of the antivoluntarist line is in Rawls; see, e.g., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 336-37,
9. and Political liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 136, 222, 226-27.
10. See esp. R. P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970);
11. M. B. E. Smith, "Is There a Prima Facie Obligation to Obey the Law?" Yale Law Journal 82 (1973): 950;
12. A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). Some philosophical anarchists accept voluntarism as a normative thesis about what is necessary for political obligation while rejecting it as descriptively accurate (i.e., rejecting the claim that many actual citizens in actual states have performed the voluntary acts required to obligate them). Others think that political communities are such that no person ever could be obligated to one.
13. Margaret Gilbert, "Group Membership and Political Obligation," Monist 76 (1993): 119-20;
14. Horton, Monist pp. 133-35;
15. George Klosko, The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), pp. 23-26.
16. Simmons, pp. 31-35. Similar appeals to the need for particularity followed in, e.g., Dworkin, p. 193; Klosko, pp. 4-5; and Gregory Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 407-15.
17. Simmons, pp. 32-34, 154-55. Our general duties would also require different kinds of support for our own political communities under different circumstances. This general style of argument against natural duty accounts of political obligation is followed in Law's Empire (Dworkin, p. 193).
18. Rawls, Theory of Justice, chap. 6.
19. Rawls, of course, attempted to particularize his natural duty account by limiting the scope of the natural duty of justice to the support of those just institutions that apply to us. I have argued (Simmons, chap. 6, pp. 32-34) that this move in fact involves the illicit use of nonduty considerations (i.e., those that make application seem morally significant). For a recent attempt to defend a natural duty account of political obligation, see Jeremy Waldron, "Special Ties and Natural Duties," Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993): 3-30.
20. Indeed, the only other strategy that has been at all popular (once voluntarism, anarchism, and natural duty theories are rejected) is trying to devise new, nonvoluntarist versions of moral principles that used to be defended in different forms by voluntarists. The nonvoluntarist contract theories I discuss below are one example of this strategy.
21. Dworkin, pp. 195-96.
22. Horton, pp. 145-51, 157-59, 163; Gilbert, "Group Membership," pp. 122-25, 127-28.
23. Hardimon, pp. 352, 353.
24. Horton, pp. 145-48. For the simpler view of local associative political obligations as essentially self-justifying, see Haskell Fain, "The Idea of the State," Nous 6 (1972): 25.
25. See Leslie Green, "Consent and Community," in Political Obligation, ed. P. Harris (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 103-6.
26. Hardimon defines a "role obligation" as "a moral requirement, which attaches to an institutional role, whose content is fixed by the function of the role, and whose normative force flows from the role" (Hardimon, p. 335). His definition thus shares quite a few features with my definition of associative obligation, differing from it primarily where I emphasize social roles and group membership generally (as opposed to Hardimon's emphasis on purely institutional roles) and where I remain neutral on the source of the relevant normative force (as we will see, only some defenders of associative political obligations regard local social practice as normatively independent). And both definitions are obviously quite similar to Dworkin's characterization of associative obligations, despite Hardimon's claims that "role obligations . . . are not usefully thought of as a species of associative obligation" (ibid., pp. 335-36).
27. Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 27;
28. Gilbert, "Group Membership," p. 121.
29. See Margaret MacDonald, "The Language of Political Theory," in Logic and Language, ed. A. Flew, 1st ser. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), p. 184;
30. Thomas McPherson, Political Obligation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 64;
31. Hanna Pitkin, "Obligation and Consent, II," American Political Science Review 60 (1966): 39-52, p. 48.
32. For other arguments to this conclusion, see Simmons, pp. 38-43; Pateman, pp. 27-30, 104; Richard Flathman, Political Obligation (New York: Atheneum, 1972), pp. 100-106, 111-12;
33. Green, "Consent and Community," pp. 93-95;
34. Horton, Consent and Community pp. 137-45.
35. This seems to be the response in, e.g., Parekh, "A Misconceived Discourse on Political Obligation," Political Studies 16 (1993): 242-43, 249.
36. See, e.g., Gilbert, "Group Membership," p. 121;
37. Horton, Group Membership p. 145.
38. Burke, p. 165.
39. In both Obligations and Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer maintains that the rights of states and the obligations of citizens rest on consent (Michael Walzer, Obligations [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970], esp. pp. ix-xi, 7-10,
40. and Just and Unjust Wars [New York: Basic, 1977], esp. p. 54).
41. But the consent that is relevant turns out in both cases to be given in a kind of informal "contract" that is "hard to describe." It is given "over time," rather than in a series of discrete transfers of authority (Obligations, p. xi,
42. Just and Unjust, p. 54).
43. It is given by "willing membership" (where the willingness is of "minimal moral significance") and by our sense of ourselves as sharing a "common life" (Obligations, pp. 7, 18, ix,
44. Just and Unjust, p. 54).
45. Indeed, "'contract' is a metaphor for a process of association and mutuality" (Just and Unjust, p. 54),
46. and "consent" is given by "silence" and in "the daily round of social activities and the expectations of peaceful conduct" (Obligations, pp. 100-101). We can, then, give our consent and make our contract, recognize and participate in a common life, according to Walzer, without performing any fully voluntary acts or choices of the sort that we would normally describe as consent, promises, or contracts - hence my characterization of Walzer as a nonvoluntarist contract theorist.
47. Gilbert, "Group Membership," pp. 123-24.
48. Gilbert, Group Membership Ibid., pp. 124-25, 129-30.
49. See also Margaret Gilbert, "Agreements, Coercion, and Obligation," Ethics 103 (1993): 679-706, esp. pp. 701-5.
50. Gilbert, "Group Membership," pp. 127-28, 129,
51. "Agreements," pp. 703-5.
52. Gilbert, "Group Membership," p. 124.
53. Notice that Gilbert's examples of joint commitments all involve very personal shared activities, such as taking a walk together or regularly going for coffee after the meetings of a scholarly society (Gilbert, "Group Membership," pp. 122-24). Perhaps, then, Locke was right after all to insist that political obligations require a rather different sort of analysis than do the more personal obligations of family members to one another.
54. Dworkin, p. 196. Instead of saying with Dworkin that these obligations "depend upon emotional bonds," I would say that direct, personal involvement permits the actions of individuals to be imbued with a clear significance, thus permitting degrees of commitment to be clearly expressed in action.
55. Ibid., p. 201. Dworkin's argument is obviously rather more involved than this brief summary suggests. Among other things, Dworkin argues that a "true community," one that involves nonvoluntary communal obligations for its members, must in its practices display not only equal concern for all members but also a sense that the responsibilities of members are reciprocal, personal, and special to that group (ibid., pp. 198-201).
56. Ibid., p. 201; my emphasis.
57. Ibid., pp. 216, 211. For a helpful and much more detailed discussion of these (and other) aspects of Dworkin's position, see Leslie Green, "Associative Obligations and the State," in Law and Community, ed. A. Hutchinson and L. Green (Toronto: Carswell, 1989), pp. 93-118.
58. Insofar as local associative obligations are only "genuine," in Dworkin's view, when the relevant group is both a true community (i.e., when its practices are best understood as involving reciprocity, special and personal responsibilities, equal concern for all members, etc.) and a just community (i.e., it has a nondefective conception of equal concern and is just to those outside the community [Dworkin, pp. 198-205]), it is not clear just how much moral work is actually being done by the requirements of local practice - as opposed to the principles of justice and equal concern that are used to judge the bindingness of local obligations. Dworkin, of course, hopes that the appeal to local obligations will particularize the application of his general moral principles so that those principles can be understood to bind us specially to our own countries (or associations). But what he actually seems to motivate instead is questions about why our own local associations should be regarded as morally central, why they should be taken to be entitled to our special (or even exclusive) support in the face of other, foreign associations that may be better (more just) or more in need of support - given that our own local associative obligations are so easily overridden by the general, external requirements of justice and equal concern. There are also, I think, serious questions about the extent to which our own community as a matter of fact satisfies the model of principle rather than, say, the rulebook or compromise model - what Rawls calls a "modus vivendi." And it seems important to note that Dworkin's identification of true communities (which involve mutual and equal concern) with communities of principle (which involve only the acceptance of common principles) is both questionable and deeply prejudicial to his case.
59. "Misleadingly" because, first, the conceptual argument and the nonvoluntarist contract theory I have already discussed might also not unreasonably be called communitarian and, second, because the term 'communitarian' has come in contemporary literature to stand for any of the enormous variety of positions that oppose themselves in fundamental spirit to those positions described (equally vaguely) as liberal. I will discuss here only a subgroup, although a large subgroup, of the positions on political obligation that might be called communitarian.
60. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), p. 56,
61. "Philosophy and Politics," in Philosophy and Human Enterprise, ed. J. L. Capps, United States Military Academy Class of 1951 Lecture Series (1982-83), p. 158.
62. Horton, pp. 150, 157. See also, e.g., John Charvet, "Political Obligation: Individualism and Communitarianism," in On Political Obligation, ed. P. Harris (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 65-88, esp. pp. 79-85.
63. One would expect other prominent communitarians, such as Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, to endorse this position. For the classic statement of the position, see Bradley: "We have found ourselves when we have found our station and its duties, our function as an organ in the social organism. . . . If we suppose the world of relations, in which he was born and bred, never to have been, then we suppose the very essence of him not to be; if we take that away, we have taken him away. . . . The state . . . gives him the life that he does live and ought to live" (Bradley, "My Station," pp. 101, 104, 110).
64. Horton, p. 147. As we have seen, Hardimon's account of role obligations characterizes them as moral requirements "whose normative force flows from the role" (Hardimon, p. 334).
65. Gilbert, "Group Membership," p. 127;
66. Horton, Group Membership, pp. 152-54, 159.
67. Hardimon considers a similar case: "Role identification and voluntary acceptance are distinct. . . . Imagine a person with strong anarchist leanings who has successfully completed his medical training. Such a person might voluntarily accept the cluster of duties associated with the role of doctor and yet refuse to identify with this role" (Hardimon, p. 359). So, while this is never clearly stated, identification with a role is apparently not, for Hardimon, necessary for possessing the associated role obligations. And it seems that it cannot be sufficient for this either, since (1) he claims that only those roles that are "reflectively acceptable" generate moral obligations, and (2) we can clearly identify with roles that fail this test of reflective acceptability (ibid., pp. 348-51). But it is then unclear why Hardimon insists that "the idea of role identification" is an "absolutely vital factor" allegedly ignored by the (and for that reason, defective) voluntarist theories of institutional obligation (ibid., p. 357).
68. Dworkin, p. 198.
69. Horton, p. 156.
70. Dworkin, pp. 203-5.
71. Horton, p. 156.
72. Ibid.
73. Gilbert, "Group Membership," p. 125;
74. Horton, Group Membership, pp. 150-51, 163.
75. If we respond by claiming that the content of political obligation is also vague and indeterminate (Horton, p. 163), we simply threaten the basis of the entire argument. Ordinary people, if they believe they have political obligations at all (an assertion that merits testing, although I have not questioned it here), plainly adhere to the idea of reasonably strict obedience to enacted law, not to some vague idea of obligatory special concern for their state.
76. MacIntyre writes that in a society such as ours "the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political and moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community. . . . When however the relationship of government to the moral community is put in question both by the changed nature of government and the lack of moral consensus in society, it becomes difficult any longer to have any clear, simple and teachable conception of patriotism" (After Virtue, p. 236). Horton replies that in a pluralistic society lacking moral consensus there can still "be some agreement about the desirability of many laws, or even where there is such disagreement . . . there [can] be some mutual accomodation which . . . is generally acceptable" (Horton, p. 168). But this reply seems to amount only to an argument for the possibility of a political modus vivendi in modern states, not for what Dworkin calls a "community of principle." The former condition, however, is consistent only with political obligations so utterly different in character from the associative or role obligations of families, friends, or neighbors that the point of stressing the analogy seems altogether lost.
77. My preferred account of political obligation maintains that few citizens of modern states have political obligations, that associative, communal, role, or institutional obligations require external justification to be morally binding, and that associative obligation theorists go wrong from the start by accepting unqualified versions of the theses of antivoluntarism and the authority of shared moral experience and by accepting any version of the theses of the analogy with the family and the normative power of local practice. Sustaining these claims, of course, would require a far more systematic account of the subject than it has been my business to attempt here.