What do you mean by political obligation?

By political obligation, theorists generally mean a moral requirement to obey the law of one's state or one's country.
In the liberal tradition, liberty is a central value, and so the fact that some individuals should obey others must be
explained. The liberalor modernview of political obligation is classically expressed in John Locke's Second
Treatise of Government. According to Locke, political obligation must stem from an individual's own consent, and
so must be self-assumed, based on a specific action or performance by each individual himself. Thomas Hobbes
presented a fully modern theory of political obligation. With Hobbes, the burden of argument shifts. Whereas, in the
late medieval period, the default position favored obedience, Hobbes's starting point is individual freedom. Locke's
view of tacit consent was classically criticized by David Hume, who believes that his account has the considerable
advantage of doing without the fictions of an original state of nature, individual consent, and social contract.
Contemporary debates about political obligation have been heavily influenced by the popularity of so-called
philosophical anarchism.
To have a political obligation is to have a moral duty to obey the laws of one's country or state. On that point there is
almost complete agreement among political philosophers. But how does one acquire such an obligation, and how
many people have really done what is necessary to acquire it? Or is political obligation more a matter of being than
of doing that is, of simply being a member of the country or state in question? To those questions many answers
have been given, and none now commands widespread assent. Indeed, a number of contemporary political
philosophers deny that a satisfactory theory of political obligation either has been or can be devised. Others,
however, continue to believe that there is a solution to what is commonly called the problem of political
obligation, and they are presently engaged in lively debate not only with the skeptics but also with one another on
the question of which theory, if any, provides the solution to the problem.
Whether political obligation is the central or fundamental problem of political philosophy, as some have maintained
(e.g., McPherson), may well be doubted. There is no doubt, however, that the history of political thought is replete
with attempts to provide a satisfactory account of political obligation, from the time of Socrates to the present. These
attempts have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, but they have brought us no closer to agreement on
a solution to the problem of political obligation than the efforts of, say, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the
seventeenth century. Nor have these sophisticated attempts made it unnecessary to look back to earlier efforts to
resolve the problem. On the contrary, an appreciation of the troublesome nature of political obligation seems to
require some attention to its place in the history of political thought.

Political Obligation in Historical Perspective

The phrase political obligation is apparently no older than T. H. Green's Lectures on the Principles of Political
Obligation, delivered at Oxford University in 187980 (D'Entrves, p. 3). The two words from which Green formed
the phrase are much older, of course, and he apparently thought that combining them required no elaborate
explanation or defense. In any case, there was nothing novel about the problem Green addressed in his lectures: to
discover the true ground or justification for obedience to law (Green 1986, p. 13). Sophocles raised this problem in
his playAntigone, first performed around 440 BCE, and Plato's Crito recounts Socrates' philosophical response to the
problem, in the face of his own death, some forty years later.
Socrates on Obeying the Law
In 399 BCE an Athenian jury found Socrates guilty of impiety and corrupting the morals of the youth, for which
crimes the jury condemned him to death. According to Plato's account, Socrates' friends arranged his escape, but he
chose to stay and drink the fatal hemlock, arguing that to defy the judgment against him would be to break his
agreements and commitments and to mistreat his friends, his country, and the laws of Athens (Crito, 54c; Trial
and Death, p. 54). Socrates' arguments are sketchy, and Crito, his interlocutor, does little to challenge them, but they
are nevertheless suggestive of the theories of political obligation that have emerged in the two and a half millennia
since his death.
These arguments fall into four categories. First, Socrates maintains that his long residence in Athens shows that he
has entered into an agreement with its laws and committed himself to obey them an argument that anticipates the
social contract or consent theory of political obligation. Second, he acknowledges that he owes his birth, nurture,
and education, among other goods, to the laws of Athens, and he hints at the gratitude theory of obligation when he
concludes that it would be wrong of him to disobey its laws now. Third, he appeals to what is now known as the
argument from fairness or fair play when he suggests that disobedience would be a kind of mistreatment of his
fellow citizens. As he asks Crito, if we leave here without the city's permission, are we mistreating people whom
we should least mistreat? (50a) There is, finally, a trace of utilitarian reasoning, as when Socrates imagines the
laws and the state confronting him with this challenge: do you think it possible for a city not to be destroyed if
the verdicts of its courts have no force but are nullified and set at naught by private individuals? (50b). None of
these arguments is fully developed, but their presence in the Crito is testimony to the staying power of intuitions and
concepts commitment and agreement, gratitude, fair play, and utility that continue to figure in discussions of
obligation and obedience.
Plato's Crito is noteworthy not only as the first philosophical exploration of political obligation but also as the last to
appear for centuries. The Cynics and others did question the value of political life, and indirectly the existence of an
obligation to obey the law, but they left no record of a discussion of the subject as sustained as even the five or six
pages in the Crito. When the morality of obedience and disobedience next became a much discussed issue, it was a
religious as much as a philosophical discussion.
Divine Command
Throughout history, the belief that political society and its rules are divinely ordained has been so strong as to keep
many people, and probably most, from considering the possibility that disobeying those rules might ever be
justified. With the advent of Christianity, however, that possibility had to be taken seriously. For the Christian, the
distinction Jesus draws (Matthew 22:1522) between the tribute owed to Caesar and that owed to God makes it clear
that what the rulers command may be at odds with what God wants done. That point became even clearer when the
rulers tried to suppress Christianity. Nevertheless, Christian doctrine held that there is an obligation to obey the law
grounded in divine command, with the most important text being Paul's Epistle to the Romans (13:12): For there
is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the
authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.

As a theory of political obligation, divine command faces two general problems. First, it presupposes the existence
of divinity of some sort; and second, the commands of the divine being(s) are not always clear. It is one thing to
know that we should give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, for example, and quite another to
know what exactly is Caesar's due. For Christians, however, the main challenge was to reconcile Paul's text with the
uncomfortable fact that rulers were often hostile to Christianity or, with the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth
century, hostile to what one took to be true Christianity. To this challenge, one response was simply to hold that
hostile or vicious rulers must be endured, for God must have given them power as a sign of His displeasure with a
wicked people. Other responses, though, made room for disobedience.
One such response was to distinguish the divinely ordained office from the officer who occupied it. That is, God
ordains that political authority must exist, because the condition of human life since the fall from grace requires such
authority; but God does not ordain that this or that particular person hold a position of authority, and He certainly
does not want rulers to abuse their authority by ruling tyrannically. This distinction, employed as early as the fourth
century by St. John Chrysostom, was invoked throughout the middle ages (McIlwain, pp. 15253). A second
response to the problem Romans 13 posed was to distinguish disobedience from resistance. According to Martin
Luther and others who drew this distinction, Christians may not actively resist their rulers, but they must disobey
them when the rulers' commands are contrary to God's. Yet a third response was to note the possibility of conflict
between two or more of one's rulers. In other words, if more than one person holds political authority over you, and
if they issue conflicting commands, then you may satisfy Paul's injunction by obeying the authority whose
commands are more congenial to your understanding of true Christianity, even when such obedience entails resisting
the commands of others in authority.
These last two responses played an especially important part in the political disputes that accompanied the Protestant
Reformation. Under the pressure of those disputes, however, another theory of political obligation became
increasingly prominent, as Protestants came to rely on the belief that political authority derives from the consent of
the governed (Skinner, vol. 2, chaps. 79).
The Social Contract
Although the idea of the social contract long antedates the modern era (Gough 1967), its full development occurred
in the seventeenth century, when Thomas Hobbes and John Locke used the theory to rather different ends. JeanJacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and other philosophers have also relied on social contract theory, but the classic
expressions of the contract theory of political obligation remain Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and Locke's Second
Treatise of Government(1690).
For Hobbes, social contract theory established the authority of anyone who was able to wield and hold power. If we
imagine ourselves in a state of nature, he argued, with no government and no law to guide us but the law of nature,
we will recognize that everyone is naturally equal and independent. But we should also recognize that this state of
nature will also be a state of war, for the restlesse desire for Power after power that drives all of us will lead to a
warre of every man against every man (Hobbes, chaps. 11, 13). To escape so dreadful a condition, people surrender
their independence by entering into a covenant to obey a sovereign power that will have the authority to make,
enforce, and interpret laws. This form of the social contract Hobbes called sovereignty by institution. But he also
insisted that conquerors acquire authority over those they subject to their rule sovereignty by acquisition
when they allow those subjects to go about their business. In either case, Hobbes said, the subjects consent to obey
those who have effective power over them, whether the subject has a choice in who holds power or not. Because
they consent, they therefore have an obligation to obey the sovereign, whether sovereignty be instituted or acquired.
Exactly how much Locke differs from Hobbes in his conclusions is a matter of scholarly dispute, but there is no
doubt that he puts the same concepts to work for what seem to be more limited ends. According to Locke, the free
and equal individuals in the state of nature establish government as a way of overcoming the inconveniencies of
that state. Moreover, Locke's social contract appears to have two stages. In the first stage the naturally free and equal
individuals agree to form themselves into a political society, under law, and in the second they establish the

government. This move allows Locke to argue, contrary to Hobbes, for a right of revolution on the ground that
overthrowing the government will not immediately return the people to the state of nature. Nor does he hold, with
Hobbes, that mere submission to a conqueror constitutes a form of consent to the conqueror's rule.
Locke does agree with Hobbes, of course, in deriving obligations to obey the law from the consent of the governed.
In developing his argument, however, he reveals three problems that have bedeviled social contract theory. One
problem has to do with the nature of the contract: is it historical or hypothetical? If the former, then the problem is to
show that most people truly have entered into such a contract. If the contract is meant to be a device that illustrates
how people would have given their consent, on the other hand, then the difficulty is that a hypothetical contract is
no contract at all (Dworkin, 1977, p. 151). The second problem has to do with the way Hobbes and Locke rely
on tacit consent. If only express or explicit statements of agreement or commitment count as genuine consent, then it
appears that relatively few people have consented to obey the laws of their country; but if tacit or implied consent is
allowed, the concept of consent may be stretched too far. Hobbes does this when he counts submission to a
conqueror as consent, but Locke also runs this risk when he states, in 119 of the Second Treatise, that the very
being of anyone within the territories of a government amounts to tacit consent. Finally, it is not clear that consent
is really the key to political obligation in these theories. The upshot of Hobbes's theory seems to be that we have an
obligation to obey anyone who can maintain order, and in Locke's it seems that there are some things to which we
cannot consent. In particular, we cannot consent to place ourselves under an absolute ruler, for doing so would
defeat the very purposes for which we enter the social contract to protect our lives, liberty, and property (Pitkin
1965).
One of the first to find fault with the argument from consent or contract was David Hume. In Of the Original
Contract, published in 1752, Hume takes particular exception to the appeal to tacit consent. To say, he protests, that
most people have given their consent to obey the laws simply by remaining in their country of birth is tantamount to
saying that someone tacitly consents to obey a ship's captain though he was carried on board while asleep and must
leap into the ocean and perish the moment he leaves her (1953, p. 51). For Hume, it seems, the obligation to obey
the law derives not from consent or contract but from the straightforward utility of a system of laws that enables
people to pursue their interests peacefully and conveniently.
Utility and Obligation
For all its influence in other areas of legal, moral, and political philosophy, utilitarianism has found few adherents
among those who believe that there is a general obligation to obey the laws of one's country. Part of the reason for
this situation may be the fact that Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and others who followed Hume's path had little
to say about political obligation. A more powerful reason, though, is that utilitarians have trouble accounting for
obligations of any kind. If one's guiding principle is always to act to maximize expected utility, or promote the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, then obligations seem to have little or no binding force. After all, if I can
do more good by giving the money in my possession to charity than by paying my debts, then that is what I should
do, notwithstanding my obligations to my creditors. By the same reasoning, whether I should obey or disobey the
law is a matter to be settled by considering which will do more good, not by determining whether I have an
obligation to obey.
Some utilitarian philosophers have struggled to overcome this problem, either by pointing to reasons to believe that
respecting obligations serves to promote utility or by restricting calculations of utility to rules or norms rather than
to individual acts (see the entry on consequentialism for details). Whether their efforts have been successful
remains a matter of debate. There seems to be a consensus, however, that the most sophisticated attempts to provide
a utilitarian grounding for political obligation, such as those of Rolf Sartorius (1975, chaps. 5 and 6) and R. M. Hare
(1976), have proved unsuccessful (e.g., Simmons 1979, pp. 4554; Horton 2010, pp. 6069). As a result,
utilitarianism seldom figures in the debates of those contemporary political philosophers who continue to believe
that there is, in some political societies, a general obligation to obey the law. In contrast to utilitarianism, the
practical philosophy of an eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, does play a major part in

contemporary debates about political obligation. The proper direction of his influence, however, is not altogether
settled. On the one hand, a leading philosophical anarchist, Robert Paul Wolff, claims Kantian inspiration for his a
priori rejection of the possibility of political obligation (see 3.1, below); on the other hand, important exponents of
the natural duty approach to the obligation to obey the law also claim to derive their arguments from Kant (see
4.5, below). Kant may bear some responsibility for fostering such divergent responses, but it is safe to say that he
himself was no anarchist, not even of the philosophical sort. Indeed, he seems to insist on an unqualified
obligation to obey the law that goes well beyond what any political philosopher nowadays will countenance.
Kant's theory employs the same basic concepts as Hobbes's and Locke's natural (or innate) rights, the state of
nature, and the social contract but he puts them to different use. In contrast to Hobbes, Kant looks upon the
coercive force of the law not as a limitation on freedom but as the means of securing and extending it. In the state of
nature, as he conceives of it, individuals may enjoy wild, lawless freedom, but the threats and constraints imposed
by others prevent them from freely acting on their choices (1991[1797], p. 127). Justified coercion under law
provides a remedy by impeding those who would interfere with one's actions, thereby hindering the hindrances to
freedom (Ripstein, pp. 5455 et passim). Moreover, unlike Locke's justification of the social contract as the way to
secure one's property and escape the inconveniencies of the state of nature, Kant takes the civil condition
produced by the social contract to be the foundation that property rights and justice in general presuppose. The
social contract is thus not a matter of collective consent but a moral imperative: When you cannot avoid living side
by side with all others, you ought to leave the state of nature and proceed with them into a rightful condition, that is
a condition of distributive justice (1991, pp. 12122). Properly speaking, Kant declares, the original contract is
not an expression of consent to be governed; it is the idea of this act, in terms of which alone we can think of the
legitimacy of a state (1991, p. 127).
The upshot, as noted above, is that everyone seems to have an absolute obligation to obey the laws of whoever is in
authority; for even if the ruler proceeds contrary to law subjects may indeed oppose this injustice
by complaints but not by resistance (1991, p. 130, emphasis in original; also pp. 17677). Kant's comments on
this point are not unqualified, though. Among other things, he states that the spirit of the original contract
involves an obligation on the part of the constituting authority to make the kind of government suited to the idea of
the original contract; and he immediately adds that the only constitution that accords with right is that of a pure
republic that is, the constitution in which law itself rules and depends on no particular person (1991, p. 148,
emphases in original; for further discussion, see Ripstein, chap. 11). In any case, it is not so much Kant's conclusions
as the foundations of his theory that have proved so important to contemporary discussions of political obligation.

MORALITY
Morality (from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior") is the differentiation of intentions,
decisions, and actions between those that are good or right and those that are bad or wrong.[citation needed] Morality can
be a body of standards or principles derived from acode of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion, or culture,
or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. [1] Morality may also be
specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness."
Moral philosophy includes moral ontology, or the origin of morals, as well as moral epistemology, or what is known
about morals. Different systems of expressing morality have been proposed, including deontological ethical systems
which adhere to a set of established rules, and normative ethical systems which consider the merits of actions
themselves. An example of normative ethical philosophy is the Golden Rule which states that, "One should treat
others as one would like others to treat oneself."[2]
Immorality is the active opposition to morality (i.e. opposition to that which is good or right), while amorality is
variously defined as an unawareness of, indifference toward, or disbelief in any set of moral standards or principles.
[3][4][5]

Morality and politics[edit]

If morality is the answer to the question 'how ought we to live' at the individual level, politics can be seen as
addressing the same question at the social level, though the political sphere raises additional problems and
challenges.[31] It is therefore unsurprising that evidence has been found of a relationship between attitudes in morality
and politics.Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham have studied the differences between liberals and conservatives, in
this regard.[32][33][34] Haidt found that Americans who identified as liberals tended to value care and fairness higher than
loyalty, respect and purity. Self-identified conservative Americans valued care and fairness less and the remaining
three values more. Both groups gave care the highest over-all weighting, but conservatives valued fairness the
lowest, whereas liberals valued purity the lowest. Haidt also hypothesizes that the origin of this division in the United
States can be traced to geohistorical factors, with conservatism strongest in closely knit, ethnically homogenous
communities, in contrast toport-cities, where the cultural mix is greater, thus requiring more liberalism.
Group morality develops from shared concepts and beliefs and is often codified to regulate behavior within
a culture or community. Various defined actions come to be called moral or immoral. Individuals who choose moral
action are popularly held to possess "moral fiber", whereas those who indulge in immoral behavior may be labeled as
socially degenerate[disambiguation needed]. The continued existence of a group may depend on widespread conformity to codes
of morality; an inability to adjust moral codes in response to new challenges is sometimes credited with the demise of
a community (a positive example would be the function of Cistercian reform in reviving monasticism; a negative
example would be the role of the Dowager Empress in the subjugation of China to European interests).
Within nationalist movements, there has been some tendency to feel that a nation will not survive or prosper without
acknowledging one common morality, regardless of its content. Political Morality is also relevant to the behaviour
internationally of national governments, and to the support they receive from their host population. Noam
Chomsky states that [35][36]

... if we adopt the principle of universality : if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right

In fact, one of the, maybe the most, elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's
right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at
has that at its core somehow.

Moral Obligation
The term moral obligation has a number of meanings in moral philosophy, in religion, and in layman's terms.
Generally speaking, when someone says of an act that it is a "moral obligation," they refer to a belief that the act is
one prescribed by their set of values.
Moral philosophers differ as to the origin of moral obligation, and whether such obligations are external to the agent
(that is, are, in some sense, objective and applicable to all agents) or are internal (that is, are based on the agent's
personal desires, upbringing, conscience, and so on).
Obligation being a set code by which a person is to follow. (Obligations) can be found by an individual's peers that set
a code that may go against the individual's own desires. The individual will express their morality by the person
following the set code(s) through seeing it as good to appease society.