Why People Obey Laws: The Grounds of Political Obligation

Why people OUGHT to obey: the grounds

Each of these is a theory, and each gets tested against the four problems from the previous chapter: generality, particularity, content independence and universality.

1. Consent

The dominant ground in modern thought: you ought to obey because you agreed to. Chapters 300 to 340 are about the varieties of this argument.

Strength. Consent explains particularity perfectly, and it fits the moral intuition that a person is bound by what they undertook.

Weakness. Almost nobody has actually consented. Nobody signed anything, most people were born into the state, and the tacit and hypothetical versions of consent are much weaker.

2. Gratitude

You have received enormous benefits from the state: security, roads, courts, education, the very language you argue in. Gratitude requires you to make some return, and obedience is that return.

Strength. The benefits are undeniable and the debt feels real.

Weakness. Gratitude is a duty of a vague kind. It might require you to be helpful, or to serve, or to think well of the state; why does it require obedience specifically, and to every law? And a benefit conferred without being asked for does not ordinarily create a debt.

3. Fair play, or fairness

Associated with Hart and with Rawls, and the strongest of the non-consent grounds. Where a number of people cooperate in a joint enterprise under rules, and their compliance produces a benefit that you enjoy, it is unfair for you to take the benefit and not bear the burden. You are a free rider, and it is the unfairness to your fellow citizens, not the state's authority, that binds you.

Strength. It explains generality and content independence: the benefit comes from the scheme as a whole, so you cannot pick.

Weakness. Nozick's objection: a benefit thrown at you without your acceptance does not bind you. If the neighbours start a public address system and each takes a turn broadcasting, you may enjoy the music and still owe nobody a turn. So the argument needs the benefit to have been accepted, and it is unclear that citizens accept the state's benefits in any meaningful way.

4. The natural duty of justice

Rawls's alternative. Everybody has a natural duty to support and comply with just institutions that exist and apply to them. The duty does not arise from anything you did; it arises from the justice of the institution.

Strength. It binds everybody, so universality is satisfied, and it does not depend on a fiction of consent.

Weakness. Particularity. If the duty is to support just institutions, why this state's institutions rather than any just institutions anywhere?

5. Associative or membership obligations

Associated with Ronald Dworkin. You are a member of a community, and membership itself carries obligations, as it does in a family. Nobody consents to being a brother, and the duties are real.

Strength. It explains particularity and fits how people actually feel about their country.

Weakness. It has trouble with communities you would rather not belong to, and it risks saying that whatever a community demands is owed simply because it is your community.

6. The common good, or utility

You ought to obey because general obedience produces better consequences than general disobedience: order, coordination and predictability, which everybody needs.

Strength. It explains why obedience is generally right and why the presumption is strong.

Weakness. It is act by act. If breaking a particular law would produce better consequences on this occasion, the argument requires you to break it, and an obligation that dissolves whenever calculation favours it is not content independent at all.

7. Divine command, force and prescription

Three further grounds MU sets separately at 2.2, and they get chapters of their own: obedience owed because God ordained the ruler, because the ruler is strong enough to compel, and because the arrangement has stood for so long that it may not now be questioned.

A worked example

Priya files her income tax return by the due date. Why?

Causes. Her employer deducts at source, so most of it is automatic. Her accountant reminds her. She wants a loan and will need the acknowledgment. She has never seriously considered not filing. She would be embarrassed if her family found out she had not.

Grounds. Did she consent? She has never been asked. Gratitude? She uses the roads and the courts, though she was not asked whether she wanted them. Fair play? Others file, the revenue funds what she enjoys, and if she did not file while they did she would be a free rider, which is the strongest argument on these facts. Natural duty? If the tax system is broadly just, she owes support to it. Common good? General compliance is plainly better than general evasion.

What the example shows. Not one of the causes justifies anything, and not one of the grounds is what actually made her file. The two lists both exist, and they barely overlap. That sentence is worth writing in an answer.

Distinctions that carry marks

What this topic is NOT

"Because of the punishment" is not a ground. It is a cause, and treating it as a ground turns the state into Hart's gunman.

Habitual obedience is not a ground either. A habit is a fact about behaviour, and no quantity of habit produces an ought.

No single ground is generally accepted. The honest position, and the one most modern writers take, is that political obligation rests on several overlapping grounds and that no one of them carries the whole weight.

The absence of a knock-down ground does not mean disobedience is justified. Even philosophical anarchists usually accept that the state may be useful and that gratuitous disobedience is wrong.

Quick revision

1. Two questions in MU's own topic: causes explain why people do obey; grounds justify why they ought to. Answer both and label both.
2. Causes: fear, habit, self-interest, coordination, social pressure, ignorance of alternatives, and belief in legitimacy. Compliance research finds the belief in fair and entitled authority predicts obedience better than fear does.
3. Grounds: consent, gratitude, fair play, the natural duty of justice, associative membership, and the common good.
4. Fair play is the strongest non-consent ground; its objection is Nozick's, that an unrequested benefit does not bind.
5. Natural duty wins on universality and fails on particularity.
6. Utility fails content independence, because it collapses whenever the calculation favours breach.
7. No single ground carries the whole weight, and saying so is the strongest way to close an answer.

Test yourself

1. Distinguish the causes of obedience from the grounds of political obligation. Causes explain why people in fact obey: fear of sanction, habit, self-interest, the convenience of coordination, social pressure, the absence of any thought that things could be otherwise, and belief in legitimacy. Grounds justify why they ought to obey: consent, gratitude, fair play, the natural duty of justice, associative membership and the common good. The lists barely overlap, and a regime universally obeyed may have no claim on anybody, which is why offering a cause as a ground is an error.

2. State the fair play argument and Nozick's objection to it. Where people cooperate in a joint enterprise under rules and their compliance produces a benefit one enjoys, it is unfair to take the benefit while refusing the burden, so one is bound not by the state's authority but by fairness to fellow citizens. Nozick objects that a benefit thrown at somebody who never sought it creates no obligation: if neighbours set up a public address system and each takes a turn broadcasting, one may enjoy the music and owe nobody a turn. The argument therefore needs benefits to be accepted, and it is doubtful that citizens accept the state's benefits in any meaningful sense.

3. Why does the natural duty of justice fail the particularity test? Because it grounds the duty in the justice of institutions rather than in any relationship between the citizen and their own state. If everyone has a natural duty to support and comply with just institutions that apply to them, the argument explains why one should support just institutions but not why one owes obedience to this state in particular rather than to any just state. Consent and associative theories handle particularity better and fail on other tests.

4. Why is the utilitarian ground said to fail content independence? Because it makes obedience depend on the consequences of each act. If breaking a particular law on a particular occasion would produce better results, the argument positively requires the breach, so the citizen ends up following their own calculation rather than the law. An obligation that dissolves whenever calculation favours it is not an obligation to obey the law at all, but an obligation to do whatever is best, which happens usually to coincide with the law.

5. "People obey because they are afraid." Discuss. As a cause it is real but much overstated: most people never calculate the penalty for most rules, and the penalty for the great majority of rules is never applied to anyone they know. Research on compliance consistently finds that the belief that authorities are entitled and act fairly predicts obedience better than the perceived likelihood of punishment does. As a ground it is worthless, since a credible threat produces being obliged and not being under an obligation, which is exactly the distinction that separates a legal system from a gunman.