I Should Not Be a Free Rider, nor Am I Obligated to Obey

• Published date: 01 June 2017
• Date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12160

NOTES • DISCUSSIONS • BOOK REVIEWS

I Should Not Be a Free Rider, nor Am I

Obligated to Obey

LUO YIZHONG*

1. Introduction

Is there a general moral obligation to obey the law? Is there a prima facie moral

obligation to obey the law? Is political obligation a justification or a corollary of

political authority? Is political obligation entailed by the concepts of legitimacy and

authority? Are there justified grounds for conscientious disobedience and civil dis-

obedience? These are typical (although sometimes misplaced) themes present

within the debate surrounding political obligation, which has been ongoing since

Plato’s record of Socrates’ obedience to the law of Athens by accepting the death

penalty and refusing life-saving but illegal help from his friends.

1

According to

some scholars, political obligation is the central problem of political philosophy

(see McPherson 1967). In contrast, other scholars deny the significance of political

obligation by proving that there cannot be a general moral obligation to obey the

law, not even a prima facie one.

2

However, there seems to be a consensus that

political obligation is one of the most intriguing issues for philosophers as the

debate involves moral philosophy, political philosophy, and legal philosophy. This

* I am most gratefulto Thomas Fossen, Paul Nieuwenburg, NicholasVrousalis, and two anony-

mous reviewers for their helpful comments. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the

Disputationes Quadrangulae workshop co-organised by Antwerp University, UC Louvain, KU

Leuven, andLeiden University, and I thank the participantsfor their comments.

1

Especially in thefollowing arguments of Plato: “As it is, you depart,if you depart, after being

wronged notby us, the laws, but by men; but if you depart aftershamefully returning wrongfor

wrong and mistreatment for mistreatment, after breaking your agreements and commitments

with us, after mistreating those you should mistreat least—yourself, your friends, your country

and us—we shall be angrywith you while you are still alive, and our brothers, the laws of the

underworld, will not receive you kindly, knowing that you tried to destroy us as far as you

could. Do not let Critopersuade you, rather than us, to do what he says”(see Plato 1997, 54b–c).

2

Notable arguments of these scholars are advanced in these materials: Raz 1994; Simmons

1979; Smith1999; Wolff 1970; see also Raz 1979a,1979b.

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Ratio Juris. Vol. 30 No. 2 June 2017 (205–225)

overlap is manifest when Williams (1985, 27) illustrates Plato’s arguments regard-

ing the power of the ethical as a political problem: “[Plato] thought that the power

of the ethical was the power of reason, and that it had to be made into a force. He

saw it as a problem of politics, and so it is.”

One rationale given by supporters of political obligation entails the moral princi-

ple of fairness or fair play:

3

Simply put, every citizen incurs a political obligation to

obey the law of his or her country as a consequence of the moral obligation not to

be a “free rider,” if a state is regarded as a kind of cooperative scheme or venture.

The moral obligation of not violating the law is a corollary of the moral principle of

fairness, which forbids a person from taking advantage of or exploiting the benefits

of others’ endeavours or sacrifices. It is this approach of political obligation theory

that I intend to examine in this article. There are at least two tiers of questions that

can be raised to cast doubt upon the soundness of political obligation as fairness:

(1) whether the principle of fairness is capable of generating moral obligations or

not; and (2) if so, whether moral obligations generated by the principle are capable

of accommodating political obligation. In other words, the first tier deals with the

fairness principle as a moral principle in the general sense, while the second tier

concentrates on its application within the specific arena of political obligation. Rob-

ert Nozick, for example, focuses on the first question to rebut the principle of fair-

ness as a sound ground for moral obligation altogether (Nozick 1974, 90–5). I will

focus mainly on the second question: whether the principle of fairness can justify

the particular moral obligation of obedience, assuming that this principle is indeed

able to generate moral obligations.

First, I would like to outline two criteria for a successful theory of political obli-

gation in Section 2. Unlike A. John Simmons and George Klosko, who emphasise

formal standards for a theory of political obligation, these two criteria would scru-

tinise substantive dimensions of theories of political obligation. Section 3 presents

the debates between proponents of the fairness approach and its opponents, for

whom the crux and also the most controversial part of the fairness-based theory is

the definition of participants and benefits of cooperation. I would like to demon-

strate how defenders of this approach reinforce their arguments, and how the scep-

tics fail to repudiate it due to an incorrect grasp of the political obligation theory

based on the fairness principle. But even if the fairness approach could circumvent

this criticism by proposing a theory of fairness based on what Klosko calls

“presumptive public benefits,” it is unclear how this approach is able to accommo-

date the second substantive requirement, which concerns specific content. In Sec-

tion 4, rather than lingering on detailed and complicated arguments between the

proponents of the principle of fairness and its critics, I intend to explore how the

fairness principle would influence or make a difference to the structure of practical

reasoning, if it is indeed a plausible justification for political obligation. Would it

suffice as a normative reason for certain actions, if the rationale of political obliga-

tion is to attain “presumptively beneficial” goods from states as cooperative

schemes? If it fails to affect our practical reasons, the Kloskoian theory of political

obligation may turn out to be practically trivial.

3

These are two termsfor this principle used by Rawls (seeRawls 1971, 1999a).

206 Luo Yizhong

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