Political obligation and the particularity requirement

Legal Theory

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 97-115

  Wellman, Christopher Heath ^a  

^a GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 85013616523     PISSN: 13523252     EISSN: 14698048     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1352325204000199     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. For the purposes of this paper, I use “duty,” “obligation,” and their cognates interchangeably. Moreover, I understand these duties and obligations to bemerely prima facie, not absolute. Hence if I can establish that there is a moral duty to obey just laws of legitimate states, I do not thereby mean to rule out the possibility of permissible civil disobedience or perhaps other justified lawbreaking.
2. I borrow this trifold distinction and the subsequent definitions from A. John Simmons, Civil Disobedience and the Duty to Obey the Law, in A COMPANION TO APPLIED ETHICS 50-61 (R.G. Frey & Christopher Heath Wellman, eds., 2003).
3. The chief transactional theories feature consent, fairness, and gratitude. The problems with these approaches are explained in A. JOHN SIMMONS, MORAL PRINCIPLES AND POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS (1979). Of course, not everyone believes that Simmons's criticisms are decisive. In response to Simmons, Harry Beran defends consent theory in his book, THE CONSENT THEORY OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION (1987); George Klosko seeks to repair the fairness principle in his text, THE PRINCIPLE OF FAIRNESS AND POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS (1992); and A.D.M. Walker defends gratitude as a source of political obligations in his essay, Political Obligation and the Argument fqrom Gratitude, 17 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 191-211 (1988).
4. The problems with associative approaches are outlined in my article, Associative Allegiances and Political Obligations, 23 SOC. THEORY & PRAC. 181-204 (1997); and in A. John Simmons, Associative Political Obligations, 106 ETHICS 247-273 (1996).
5. As will become clear below, different theorists understand this requirement to be more or less strenuous. At the very least, it requires a specific obligation to obey the law; understood more ambitiously, it requires that one have special obligations to one's own state or compatriots; and at the extreme, it stipulates that a theory of political obligation can be theoretically adequate only if it explains all of our political responsibilities without invoking “extratheoretical” considerations.
6. Moreover, if one understands the natural duty to promote well-being less ambitiously (so that it does not involve maximization), then one would not be required specifically to obey the law because each individual would have discretion as to how she promoted happiness.
7. It might seem odd to allege that even substantively just, liberal-democratic governments are nonconsensually coercive, but one must remember that nonconsensual coercion is not necessarily illegitimate. Hence one can maintain that such governments are nonconsensually coercive (insofar as they do not ask for permission before imposing themselves everyone within their territorial borders) and still search for compelling moral grounds that legitimate this coercion.
8. Jeremy Waldron, Special Ties and Natural Duties, 22 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 3-30 (1993).
9. SIMMONS, MORAL PRINCIPLES, Special Ties and Natural Duties note 3, at 148.
10. Waldron, MORAL PRINCIPLES note 8, at 22.
11. I explain the samaritan theory of political obligation in Toward a Liberal Theory of Political Obligation, 111 ETHICS 735-759 (2001). Here my very brief recapitulation is meant only to introduce this view and show why it must contend with the particularity requirement.
12. Joel Feinberg discusses this samaritan case involving multiple drowning babies in his HARM TO OTHERS 144-150 (1984).
13. SIMMONS, MORAL PRINCIPLES, Joel Feinberg discusses this samaritan case involving multiple drowning babies in his HARM TO OTHERS note 3, at 31-32. Pauline Kleingeld, for instance, explores the possibility of grounding some of our special political responsibilities in democracy in her article, Kantian Patriotism, 29 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 313-341 (2000).
14. I offer an account of the special responsibilities that compatriots have to one another in Relational Facts in Liberal Political Theory: Is There Magic in the Pronoun “My”? 110 ETHICS 537-562 (2000). John Rawls also explains the more robust distributive obligations thought to exist among fellow citizens in THE LAW OF PEOPLES (1999), and Charles R. Beitz criticizes this account in Rawls's Law of Peoples, 110 ETHICS 669-696 (2000).
15. Quoted in LOUIS L. SNYDER, ENCYCLOPEDIA OF NATIONALISM ix (1977).