Abstract
This project investigates how variation in institutions and social norms affect political obligation, defined as a moral obligation to obey the law. My goal is to underscore how thoroughly the law reaches into our lives and make political obligation grapple with this reach. Governance structures the possibilities we have for living together. The state does not merely issue its commands from above. Its power is distributed, in a variety of ways that are not always visible, but persistent and often influential in shaping our lives Largely within the context of fair play, I demonstrate various ways that our contemporary world of governance complicates the standard account of political obligation.
Publicity—that laws must be made public—is a background mechanism in our story: if someone is obligated to follow the law, they must first know what the law is asking of them. Acquiring this knowledge is much more difficult than previously acknowledged given misinformation. Some of these difficulties arise from institutions, and others as individual, behavioral responses. Thus, Chapter One, “Publicity’s Misinformation Problem,” opens by framing the problems that individuals face when they try to learn the law.
Chapters Two, Three, and Four challenge and revise three foundational principles in the literature on political obligation—content-independence, particularity, and generality—in light of behavioral and institutional advances in empirical social science.
In Chapter Two, “Defining and Defending Approximate Compliance,” I emphasize the use of judgment in satisfying political obligations. To demonstrate the importance of judgment, I argue that the standard approach to political obligation is unrealistic because it views the law as a clean-cut set of directives that rarely need individual interpretation. While the content of the law cannot ground a duty to obey it (from the standpoint of political obligation), the content and context of the law must play a role in how people obey the law.
In Chapter Three, “On Federalism and Political Obligation in the United States,” I turn to providing a more nuanced understanding of particularity. I argue that federalism creates a system of duties that are divided, overlapping, and distinct: we have different duties to the national government than we do to subnational governments.
Finally, in Chapter Four, “Reciprocity Beyond Equality: Political Obligation in Unequal Legal Orders” I argue that benefits and burdens that the law provides to people inside of the legal condition are not equally distributed. Therefore, people have different relationships to the law. People who are more powerful—people who benefit more from the law, people who can use the law as a cudgel, or people who have an outsized effect on how other people consider the law—have stronger political obligations. The opposite is also true.
By emphasizing the importance of one’s position inside of a political-economic system to political obligation, and the necessity of judgment, I hope to demonstrate the value in studying civic duty as a practice.
