Why a Hedgehog Cannot Have Political Obligations

• Author: Andrea Faggion
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12296

© (2020) John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 33 No. 3 September 2020 (317–328)

Why a Hedgehog Cannot Have

Political Obligations

ANDREA FAGGION

Abstract. According to Ronald Dworkin, political obligation is to be justified as an associative

obligation through membership in certain political communities. In this regard, I first argue that

the concept of an associative obligation cannot help us to account for precise moral obligations.

Second, I analyze certain disanalogies between paradigmatic cases of associative obligation and

political obligation in order to show the inability of the former to justify the enforcement of

a comprehensive obligation such as the latter. Finally, I argue that Dworkin could not have

provided a better argument: His theory of law makes him incapable of justifying political

obligation.

1. Introduction

Few of us have ever performed an act believing that we thereby acquire an obligation

to obey the legally valid norms that apply to us. According to Ronald Dworkin, we

have such an obligation because political obligation—with the obligation of general

fidelity to law being central here (Dworkin 1986, 208)—is an associative obligation.

By associative or communal obligation Dworkin means “the special responsibilities

social practice attaches to membership in some biological or social group, like the re-

sponsibilities of family or friends or neighbours” (ibid., 196). As Dworkin’s examples

suggest, what is distinctive about associative obligations is that they dispense with

the need for a singular voluntary act of consenting or promising when it comes to

acquiring an obligation. Obligation is instead entailed by membership:

Even associations we consider mainly consensual, like friendship, are not formed in one act of

deliberate contractual commitment, the way one joins a club, but instead develop through a

series of choices and events that are never seen, one by one, as carrying a commitment of that

kind. (Ibid., 197)

Here, group membership does not merely identify obligations. It is also supposed

to justify or validate certain obligations. This being so, we should first ask three

questions:

(a) Are there such things as associative obligations?

(b) Can membership in political societies give rise to associative obligations?

(c) Can associative obligations ground a general obligation to obey the law?