Obligation, political

4. Nonvoluntarist theories

The distance from voluntarist to nonvoluntarist (individualist) theories of political obligation can seem at first glance quite small. There are, for instance, nonvoluntarist versions of the fairness theory, according to which it is not our free acceptance of the benefits of government that grounds our obligations, but rather our (possibly nonvoluntary) receipt of certain cooperatively produced goods that are of great importance to both individuals and societies (such as the benefits of law enforcement and national defence) (Klosko 1992). And there are also nonvoluntarist gratitude theories, which view political obligation as a special case of the obligation to reciprocate in an appropriately grateful fashion for benefits conferred on us by others (Walker 1988). Such nonvoluntarist benefit (or reciprocation) theories obviously have much in common with voluntarist fairness theory. But the theoretical distance of such accounts from voluntarism is in fact considerable. For political obligations, instead of resting on what individuals choose to do (as in voluntarism), are now taken to rest on what merely happens to those individuals and on the virtues of the institutional arrangements under which they live. This is to locate the moral heart of political relationships in a quite different area than that identified by the voluntarist.

The distance from voluntarism is similarly deceptive in the case of hypothetical contractarian accounts of political obligation. Our obligations, on this approach, are determined not by our personal consent to (or contracts with) our political authorities, but by whether we (or some suitably described, more rational or more neutral version of us) would have agreed to be subject to such authorities in an initial choice situation (Rawls 1971; Pitkin 1965–6). Hypothetical contractarianism, because it centrally utilizes the idea of contract or consent, may at first seem to be just a development of or a variation on voluntarist consent theory (and its advocates often present it as such). In fact, however, hypothetical theories are no longer concentrating on individual choice or on specific transactions between citizen and state, but instead on the quality of the political institutions in question. Hypothetical contractarians ask whether our laws or governments are sufficiently just or good to have been consented to in advance by rational parties, in an initial specification of their terms of social cooperation. What matters here is not choice or individual history, but the nature and quality of government (see Contractarianism §5).

This emphasis on quality of government is also present in utilitarian theories of political obligation, despite their constant opposition to contractarian views. According to utilitarians, our political obligations are based in the (direct or indirect) utility of support for and compliance with government (Hare 1976). Because obedience generally promotes social happiness, it is typically obligatory. But, of course, obedience only promotes social happiness if the specific laws or government in question are well-framed, utility-producing devices; our political obligations are thus derived reasonably directly from determinations of governmental quality.

The well-known contemporary objections to utilitarian moral theory (Rawls 1971) are only one reason why critics have found unconvincing the utilitarian account of political obligation. Like all nonvoluntarist (and communitarian) theories, utilitarians accept birth and benefaction within certain kinds of political communities as sufficient to justify political bonds. Critics worry that this misses the transactional, bilateral character of legitimate cooperative relationships, which in political cases should involve citizen and state jointly committing themselves to acceptable arrangements.