Political Obligation

A Critical Introduction

Dudley Knowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135278120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Political obligation is concerned with the clash between the individual's claim to self-governance and the right of the state to claim obedience. It is a central and ancient problem in political philosophy.

In this authoritative introduction, Dudley Knowles frames the problem of obligation in terms of the duties citizens have to the state and each other. Drawing on a wide range of key works in political philosophy, from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and G. W. F. Hegel to John Rawls, A. John Simmons, Joseph Raz and Ronald Dworkin, Political Obligation: A Critical Introduction is an ideal starting point for those coming to the topic for the first time, as well as being an original and distinctive contribution to the literature.

Knowles distinguishes the philosophical problem of obligation - which types of argument may successfully ground the legitimacy of the state and the duties of citizens - from the political problem of obligation - whether successful arguments apply to the actual citizens of particular states.

Against the anarchist and modern skeptics, Knowles claims that a plurality of arguments promise success when carefully formulated and defended, and discusses in turn ancient and modern theories of social contract and consent, fairness and gratitude, utilitarianism, justice and a Samaritan duty of care for others. Against modern communitarians, he defends a distinctive liberalism: 'the state proposes, the citizen disposes'.

Part I
The authority of the state and the duties of citizens: the conceptual apparatus

Chapter 1
Political obligations and citizens’ duties

It is fair to say that states and citizens have always regarded each other with suspicion. However just a state may be, there have been so many examples of truly awful states, states that kill, rob and pillage their citizens, that the most loyal citizens do well to be on their guard against the state apparatus being in the hands of fellow citizens who would do them harm. We should always remember that this apparatus has a sinister as well as a kindly face. Down the road there is a hospital where I will be treated if I am ill and a school to which I send my children, but over the river there is a police station from which policemen patrol the streets with powers of arrest. Beside it there is a court where citizens can be tried and punishments ordered. Outside of the city there is a prison, where citizens, having been stripped of some of their rights in the judicial process, are incarcerated, sometimes for many years. And in a nearby town there is a barracks where members of the armed forces are housed – and they are trained and willing to come to the assistance of the civil power should the people be regarded as a threat. Even a just and stable state, whose citizens properly feel secure against usurpation, may make mistakes. It may prosecute and convict innocent persons, it may become inefficient and too costly and as a result tax folk excessively. It may take a grandiose view of its remit and interfere in the lives of its citizens where it has no business. So even the most loyal citizen is right to be suspicious of the state.

The state, too, operates with a Janus-faced view of its citizens. In its day-to-day dealings, through its vernacular rhetoric, it speaks to citizens as decent and loyal, presuming compliance, allegiance and a willingness to serve. It addresses its subjects as ‘good citizens’¹ and is not ashamed on occasion to demand extraordinary sacrifices. And yet it has grounds to be suspicious of these same citizens. Even where the state is providing services that the citizens acknowledge they could not do without and which they know to be costly and which they judge are best managed and provided for by the state, many citizens, individually, will seek to avoid payment, breaking the law whenever they judge that they can succeed in free riding with impunity.

If we think of the state and its citizens as characters in a relationship we can describe the interactions between them as caring, cooperative and conflictive. Or if that analogy offends (on the grounds, perhaps, that it implies a tendentious individualism – more on this later), and we prefer to think of the relation between the state and its citizens as analogous to that of a family and its constitutive members, again we shall identify care, cooperation and conflict in the dealings of family members with each other and with the family taken as a whole. States (through the voices of politicians, law officers, bureaucrats and participant members) and citizens individually, address each other in the language of prudence as they each pursue their best interests. But in their treatment of each other they also employ the language of morality (and law), each claiming rights against, and ascribing responsibilities and duties to, the other party.

I shall argue that the relationship of state to citizen can be deeply moral, which is not to say that states cannot be evil and thuggish in their dealings with citizens, nor that citizens cannot be immoral and opportunistic in their dealings with the state. The particular aspect of that relationship which we shall be examining in this book is the state’s ascription of duties to its citizens – which is not to say that this moral relationship (if such there be; its existence is itself a matter of argument) can be isolated from other elements of the state–citizen relationship. That, too, is a matter for discussion and careful argument, since, for example, whether or not citizens bear duties to their states may be conditional on whether the state fulfils its responsibilities, serving the prudential interests of its citizens and doing its duty to them, in turn. But the duties, or in the philosophical jargon, the political obligations, of the citizens are our prime concern. Hence the first step in our enquiry will be to state the problem and articulate the concept of political obligation.

What is the problem of political obligation?

Here is a question: when you break the law, do you do something that is morally wrong? Of course you may well do wrong if the law that you break is one that forbids actions that are morally wrong according to some independent standard. You’ve stolen your neighbour’s car. If it is morally wrong to steal and you have broken the law forbidding theft, then of course you’ve done something that is morally wrong. But have you done two things that are morally wrong: first stealing your neighbour’s car and in addition breaking the law? That would depend on whether breaking the law itself amounts to doing something that is morally wrong. But is it morally wrong to break the law just because it is the law?

I put matters in this way because I expect that some variant on this question has occurred to most readers. Perhaps conscience has pricked Adam when he was just about to do something which he knew to be illegal, but which would otherwise give him no qualms, say buying a drink from the local grocers before 10.00 am. (It gave him no qualms before a law was introduced which makes it illegal.) Adam wonders why this should be so. Perhaps the phenomenon is quite the opposite. Betty has been engaged in some behaviour which gives her no moral qualms, say she has just handed over a glass of beer to her daughter, as she does at home, and she understands full well that she is doing something illegal since she is in a pub and her daughter is under-age. What strikes her is that she has no feelings of guilt whatsoever. Her conscience is silent. This strikes her as odd since she would describe herself as a morally sensitive and generally law-abiding person. Both Adam and Betty identify at least one philosophical question in the offing, although they may be ill-equipped to deliberate the matter carefully. Both of them are prompted to think through the details of the moral relationship in which they stand to the state that governs them. Whether we obey the law or break it, we can be brought up short. We can be caused to wonder whether or not what we have done or what we propose doing is morally wrong or morally permissible.

I suspect that scenarios of these types, wherein we find our anxious law-abidingness or our insouciant law-breaking to be a puzzle to us, contain the most familiar ethical format that generates the philosophical problem of political obligation. This is the occasion when agents deliberate the rights and wrongs of obedience to law. If one were careless one might identify the problem of political obligation as the general or most abstract form of the puzzles that vex Adam and Betty: is illegality ipso facto immorality? This would be a mistake because the problem is wider than is suggested by its most striking and perspicuous manifestations. The relationships in which citizens stand to the state and to each other as fellow citizens are deeply moral, and it is the moral contours of these relationships which will engage us throughout this book.

Let me give a few more examples of possible moral relationships in which citizens stand to their state.

(a) Suppose an aggressive neighbouring state initiates a war for reasons of aggrandizement and plunder, as Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and as the English used to invade Scotland at regular intervals. The state which is defending its territory calls for young men and women to volunteer for the armed services to resist the aggressor. (This is not a case of conscription.) Posters which display a much respected elderly warrior are widespread: ‘The State Needs You’ is the message as he points sternly at readers. Do the young men and women have a duty to serve? Do they deserve the odium of white feathers and charges of cowardice if they fail to respond? Some would say, and with a great deal of plausibility, that they have a political obligation to rush to the defence of their country.

(b) Suppose next that our country is a genuine democracy with plebiscitary and representative institutions making for effective participation by citizens. Do citizens have a political obligation to vote in referendums and elections even where attendance at the polling station is not compulsory? I think they do, but of course I can understand those who dispute this.

(c) Suppose next that our nation has a decent and just state. As these things go, its political health requires a loyal citizenry who recognize the importance of their active engagement. These sentiments are not easy to inculcate, however appropriate they might be in such fortunate circumstances. Success requires parents to educate their children into allegiance – which is not to say political docility. In such a state do parents have a political obligation to fetch up their children to be good citizens? My inclination, for what it matters, is to say that they do, although again I can understand those who take a very different view.

(d) Suppose finally that our basically decent and just state has been led by an over-ambitious and self-righteous Prime Minister into engaging in a war that a serving officer in the armed services deems to be illegal. His conscience tells him that he should refuse to serve, but further, he deems that he has a political obligation as a loyal citizen to protest against the war and thereby break the law governing the terms of his service. This officer may be mistaken in his judgement that the war is illegal, but surely he is quite right to believe that open disobedience may be amongst his political obligations.

I haven’t introduced these examples in order to persuade readers that youngsters should volunteer for war service, that citizens should vote, that parents should regard themselves as agents of the state teaching the arts of citizenship, or that conscientious objectors should rebel. I use them to make the point that one should not think of political obligation as consisting solely in (or the problem of political obligation as concerned solely with) the obligation of citizens to obey the law. One should not even think of the obligation of citizens to obey the law as the paradigm or core obligation. How would one argue for that view against one who believed that the key element of citizenship is the duty of parents to educate their children properly? All such beliefs are at stake in a philosophical theory of political obligation.² Of course, one may engage in a philosophical discussion of whether citizens do have a duty to obey the law. One may perfectly well restrict one’s philosophical attention to that particular issue (just as one might concentrate on any of the other cases I have listed). But if one does, he or she should not claim to be settling the problem of political obligation – the problem is much wider than that.

Obligations and duties: why this book has a really misleading title³

Having read the last page or two you might think it odd that one should describe the parent who educates her children to be good citizens as fulfilling a political obligation. But that may be because the term ‘political obligation’ is very much a term of term of art amongst philosophers. It is really just a label for a cluster of familiar problems that we broached above. Obviously we need to say more about the concept of obligation but we should be aware that the analysis of terms is not an exact science and any conclusions should be viewed with caution. It has been a commonplace of philosophical discussions of the concept of obligation that one might profitably begin by marking a distinction between the concepts of ‘obligation’ and ‘duty’. Both of these terms are used to specify how agents ought to behave in usages such as ‘x has an obligation to

’ or ‘x has a duty to

’, but the first appears to be the more specific.⁴ The distinctive features of obligations according to Hart are:

(1) that obligations may be voluntarily incurred or created. (2) that they are owed to special persons (who have rights), (3) that they do not arise out of the character of the actions which are obligatory but out of the relationship of the parties. Language roughly though not consistently confines the use of “having an obligation” to such cases.

(Hart 1955:288, n. 7)

On this account, a paradigm obligation is that which the person who promises (the ‘promiser’ or ‘promisor’ in legal jargon) owes to the promisee.

This is as clear an account of the concept of obligation as one might find, so long as one observes the caution which is explicit in Hart’s final sentence: it provides a rough match with general usage. But notice straightaway that if we accepted this analysis as creating necessary conditions on political obligation then it would be tendentious on the grounds that it begs important questions that will have to be tackled directly. May political obligations be voluntarily incurred or created? Some say that they must be; others say that they can’t be, as we shall see in Chapter 4. Likewise, what are we to make of the claim that obligations are owed to special persons? Can the state be viewed as a person in this context? As for the thought that our obligations do not arise out of the character of the actions which are deemed obligatory, we shall see later in Chapter 3 that this fits very well the particular case of the authoritative command and hence the dictates of law. It does not fit so well with the obligations of the volunteer soldiers, the enthusiastic voters, the patriotic parent or the conscientious law-breaker. These obligations arise directly out of the nature of the actions the agents are obliged to perform.⁵

But then again, perhaps the mistake is to think of these latter cases as obligations rather than duties. It would certainly be more natural to say the youngsters have a duty to volunteer, the citizens have a duty to vote, the parents have a duty to educate their children to be good citizens in turn, and the officer has a duty to refuse to serve in the unjust war. In my book these are all duties of the citizen, as also is the duty to obey the law, each being orientated towards⁶ the state as a political institution or one’s fellow citizens as specifically citizens of the same polity; they are distinctively political duties, ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Contemporary Political Philosophy
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I The authority of the state and the duties of citizens: the conceptual apparatus
• Part II The arguments: ancient and modern, for and against
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index