Political Authority and the Duty to Obey (SACE Stage 2 Philosophy)

What this dot point is asking

You need to distinguish legitimacy from obligation, set out the main grounds for a duty to obey, and evaluate them against the anarchist objection.

Legitimacy and obligation

Two questions are easily confused. Legitimacy concerns whether the state has the right to rule, to make and enforce law. Political obligation concerns whether citizens have a moral duty to obey that goes beyond prudence or the threat of punishment. A state might be legitimate without every citizen owing it obedience, and the grounds offered for one often differ from the grounds for the other. The challenge is to explain why the mere fact that the law requires something should give anyone a moral reason to do it.

Consent theories

The classic answer is consent, the engine of social contract theory. John Locke held that legitimate authority arises from the consent of the governed. The obvious problem is that almost no one has actually consented; we are born into states. Locke appealed to tacit consent, the idea that by remaining and enjoying the protection of a country one consents to its laws.

David Hume demolished this in his essay on the original contract: for most people, staying is not a free choice but a necessity, like a sailor who cannot leave a ship he was carried onto in his sleep. If tacit consent can be read into mere residence, the notion of consent loses the voluntariness that gave it moral force. Express consent binds the few who give it, but cannot ground a general duty for all.

Fairness and natural duty

The principle of fairness, developed by H. L. A. Hart and John Rawls, offers a different ground. When people cooperate in a mutually beneficial scheme and accept its benefits, it would be unfair to free-ride by refusing to bear one's share of the burdens. Since citizens accept public goods such as security and roads, they owe compliance in return. Robert Nozick objected that merely receiving benefits one did not ask for cannot generate an obligation, illustrated by a neighbourhood that imposes a public-address roster on you without consent.

Natural-duty theories, also from Rawls, sidestep consent entirely: there is a natural moral duty to support and comply with just institutions that apply to us, regardless of any voluntary act. The objection here is the particularity problem, explaining why this general duty binds you to your own state in particular rather than to any just state anywhere.

Philosophical anarchism

Robert Paul Wolff argued that the very idea of legitimate authority conflicts with moral autonomy, the individual's duty to act on their own reasoned judgement. To obey a command because it is commanded, rather than because one judges the action right, is to surrender autonomy. Since autonomy is a binding moral duty, no general obligation to obey can be justified. This philosophical anarchism does not call for chaos; it holds only that the state has no special moral authority, so each law must be assessed on its merits.

Evaluation

The persistent difficulty is finding a ground that is both universal, binding all citizens, and particular, binding them to their own state. Consent is morally weighty but factually absent for most; fairness and natural duty are more realistic but strain to explain the particular bond and the role of acceptance. The anarchist challenge is powerful precisely because it questions whether the mere pedigree of a law can ever override individual judgement. A strong answer concludes by weighing whether some plural account, combining fairness with natural duty, can meet both the universality and particularity demands, or whether the anarchist is right that the duty to obey as such cannot be vindicated.