Obligation, political

3. Voluntarist theories

Individualist theorists deny that we are essentially political beings, that our political obligations are a simple function of our identities as socially constituted persons (Green 1988). The political realm is a contingent, nonessential aspect of human life (even if it is also a quite typical feature of it), and our unchosen social and political roles cannot simply be assumed justifiably to define our moral responsibilities. This denial of the communitarian’s ‘political naturalism’ is most strongly stated (or assumed) by voluntarists. The classical individualist theories of political obligation were mostly voluntarist in character, and nearly every voluntarist theory prior to the twentieth century was some variant of a consent or contract theory of political obligation (see Consent; Contractarianism §5). The terms of the modern debate about political consent were set most clearly by Locke (see Locke, J. §10). According to Lockean consent theory, political obligations are grounded in the personal consent of individual members to the authority of their government or political society. This consent can be either express (as in direct agreements or contracts to obey, oaths of allegiance, and so on) or tacit (indirectly given by other behaviour that signifies consent). But voluntary, intentional consent of some sort is necessary for political obligation; government without popular consent is tyranny (Locke 1690). Consent theories tend to focus on tacit (implicit, indirect) consent, given the apparent paucity of express consenters in modern political communities. Favourite candidates for acts of tacit consent on which our political obligations might rest include continuing to reside in a state one is free to leave, freely taking benefits from the state, voting in democratic elections and accepting adult membership in a state.

The intuitive appeal of consent theory (in its respect for each person’s free choices) is considerable and its history is long and distinguished. But the theory has throughout that history been plagued by fundamental complaints that it is not in fact applicable to real political life. Real political societies are not voluntary associations and real citizens seldom give even tacit consent. Indeed, all of the acts alleged to constitute tacit consent to government are typically performed without any intention to consent to government authority at all; and they are often performed unfreely, simply because of the high cost of alternatives, such as emigration (Hume 1739–40). But if morally binding consent must be intentional and voluntary, such facts seem to force us to the conclusion that few citizens of actual states count as even tacit consenters and that consent theory cannot adequately account for the political obligations we believe these citizens to have (Simmons 1979).

Consent theorists have responded by specifying further conditions that must be satisfied if ‘government by consent’ is to be achieved (Beran 1987) and by insisting that genuine, binding consent is only given by full involvement in the political life of a participatory democracy (Pateman 1979). These responses, of course, involve to a certain extent giving up conservative ambitions in thinking about political obligation. But a more conservative move within the voluntarist camp has been to surrender instead the idea of consent as the paradigm ground of political obligation. Thus, fairness theories of political obligation maintain that our obligations are owed as reciprocation for benefits accepted from the workings of our cooperative legal and political institutions (Hart 1955). Consent to these institutions is not necessary for being obligated to support them and abide by their rules. Rather, it is enough that we freely accept the benefits that flow from the cooperative sacrifices of others; for to do so while refusing to do our own parts in the scheme would be to take unfair advantage of those who cooperated in good faith.

Fairness theories, however, have also been subjected to steady contemporary criticism. One prominent early proponent of a fairness account has since rejected it (for reasons followed by many others), arguing that citizens in actual political societies seldom freely accept the benefits their societies provide, but instead merely receive them without real choice (Rawls, J. §1). And others have challenged the portrayal of modern political communities as large-scale cooperative schemes, sufficiently like small-scale cooperative enterprises to give rise to similar obligations of fairness (Simmons 1979). As a result of these criticisms, many individualist theorists have concluded that voluntarist accounts of political obligation are unpromising, and they have turned instead to nonvoluntarist theories.