Obligation

The problem of political obligation is the problem of establishing an obligation within the moral deontic realm regarding the legal deontic realm—a moral obligation to obey the law, for instance. Many offer the voluntarist account, that the moral obligation is based on what is in effect a promise. Others think that moral obligations, and a fortiori political obligation, are all tied to promoting the overall good. Still others follow Socrates in thinking we owe an obligation of gratitude to the state for preventing harms and facilitating our good. Some have argued, however, that the whole issue is illusory because "it is part of the concept, the meaning of 'law,' that those to whom it is applicable are obligated to obey it" (Pitkin, p. 214). "U.S. citizen" means "person obligated to comply with U.S. laws." Obligations are in effect parts of our ordinary concepts defining our positions and roles. The seemingly deep question of whether a U.S. citizen is "really" obligated to follow U.S. laws either betrays a confusion about what "U.S. citizen" means or takes the language "on holiday"—that is, uses terms such as obligation and law outside of the contexts in which they have a meaning.

In the early twenty-first century, this conceptual argument has few adherents on the grounds that it does not dissolve the problem so much as relocate it (see, e.g., Pateman, 1979; Simmons, 1996). Suppose "citizen" does just mean "someone with a genuine obligation to conform to the law." Then we may legitimately ask, is anyone genuinely a citizen in this sense? Clearly, the selfsame problem has returned dressed in new clothing. Many, however, agree with the view that obligations come with one's social roles and positions. So although the connection between role and obligation is not analytic, it is still true in a deeper substantive sense that to occupy many roles means having certain obligations. The origins of the position are in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and a version of it was defended in F. H. Bradley's famous essay, "My Station and Its Duties." It can be found most prominently in "communitarian" views of such late twentieth-century figures as John Charvet, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Hardimon, and John Horton.

The basic outline of the idea is as follows: the conception of the bare presocial individual who voluntarily takes on various obligations and agreements is illusory, an abstraction. A person just is a collection of social roles, a nexus of connections to other roles in a social fabric, very few of which are voluntarily assumed, and none are in any deep sense voluntary. When you tell someone who you are, you tell them about the collection of positions you occupy in a variety of social structures and institutions—a parent, an American, a teacher, a lawyer, an Oregonian, a writer. Your social identity may include your gender, race, and sexual preference. If each person is made up to a significant degree or other by these roles, then we are deeply identified with them, in the sense that we are attached to these positions as "who we are." Each of these roles comes with a set of obligations: To be a parent is to be someone genuinely obligated to care for her child, to be a teacher is to be someone genuinely obligated to instruct students, and so on. The view is thus not that the meaning of the word teacher is "someone obligated to instruct," but that what it is to actually occupy this position is to have such a genuine obligation.

This viewpoint has come to enjoy wide acceptance. It faces serious difficulties, however, not the least of which is an analog of the question facing the conceptual argument. For even if to have a certain obligation just is to occupy a certain role, there seems to be a meaningful question about the normative status of that role and the practices that create it—a question of whether one ought to occupy that role, and moreover whether its obligations are genuinely binding. A defender of such obligations has to deny that there is any question of what one is genuinely obligated to do beyond what is laid down by one's social positions. The question "Ought I occupy this role and take on these requirements?" can be understood only from the perspective of some other role and its requirements. It asks only which social position or role should win out when there is a conflict. No single distinctive question about what one ought or ought not to do can be asked of social positions and their directives in general, because there is no single distinctive position or role that every person has in common with every other person.

In her 1996 book, The Sources of Normativity, Christine M. Korsgaard applied a similar strategy to the problem of moral obligation. In her view, this is a requirement stemming from one's "practical identity"—an identity that is constituted by ongoing commitments to act in various ways in various circumstances. Her insight is that the power and legitimacy of obligations are tied to a sense of one's own identities. As mentioned earlier, most of us think that there are some actions about which we say "I would rather die than do that"—that the necessity of some moral obligations is sufficient to put the acceptance of death on the table as an option. Korsgaard takes this talk seriously. If death is the loss of identity, the necessity of obligation comes from the threat of this loss. There are actions one would rather die than perform, or at least things the doing of which would be as good as dying. But combining the idea that death is a loss of identity with the idea that everyone has a multiplicity of identities tied to various positions and roles yields the idea that we might die as an F, where F names some role or position we occupy. Thus, to be a parent requires one to pursue the care of one's child. To stop this pursuit just is to give up that practical identity (insofar as this is a "person who cares for her child"), and hence to die as a parent. The necessity of parental obligation is thus tied to the persistence of one's identity as a parent. Where Korsgaard differs from the neo-Hegelian turn discussed above is that she holds that some identities are not merely social roles. In particular, our deepest identity—an identity it is impossible for us rationally to lose or throw off—is our identity as a reflective rational agent. This identity, she argues, is constituted by a requirement to respect this reflective agency in oneself and others. Failures of respect are in this way moral deaths, ways of giving up one's identity as a rational agent. This, she contends, explains the special grip or authority of moral obligation.