Authority, Deference, and Fair Play

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dagger
Keyword(s):  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Play Theory ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
General Obligation ◽  
Service Conception ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

This chapter defends the fair-play theory of political obligation and punishment by addressing two further challenges. According to the first challenge, recent revisions to the standard conception of political and legal authority lead to the conclusion that there is no general obligation to obey the law. On this standard account, to have political or legal authority is to have a right to rule, and those subject to authority have an obligation to obey the directives of those who have the right to rule. If this account is faulty, then the connection between political authority and political obligation is neither as straightforward nor as strong as the standard account assumes. According to the second challenge, the problem is not with authority but with what citizens owe to their polities. That is, citizens do have duties with regard to the law, but the weaker duties of respect or deference rather than an obligation to obey. This chapter responds to the first challenge by demonstrating the superiority of the standard account to the so-called service conception of authority and to the second by showing how appeals to respect or deference rely on a belief in political obligation.

AUTHORITY, LEGITIMACY, AND THE OBLIGATION TO OBEY THE LAW

Legal Theory ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-102
Author(s):  
Richard Dagger
Keyword(s):  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
Traditional Account ◽  
The Law ◽  
Philosophical Anarchism

ABSTRACTAccording to the standard or traditional account, those who hold political authority legitimately have a right to rule that entails an obligation of obedience on the part of those who are subject to their authority. In recent decades, however, and in part in response to philosophical anarchism, a number of philosophers have challenged the standard account by reconceiving authority in ways that break or weaken the connection between political authority and obligation. This paper argues against these revisionist accounts in two ways: first, by pointing to defects in their conceptions of authority; and second, by sketching a fair-play approach to authority and political obligation that vindicates the standard account.

Playing Fair

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dagger
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Fair Share ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
General Obligation ◽  
Cooperative Enterprise ◽  
The Law

Is there a general obligation to obey the laws of a reasonably just polity? Is there any justification for imposing suffering, in the form of punishment, on those who break the law? Political and legal philosophers have long debated these vexing questions, but the debates typically have taken up each question in isolation. Playing Fair, however, treats the two questions as intertwined and provides affirmative answers to both—answers grounded, in both cases, in the principle of fair play. According to this principle, those who are engaged in a mutually beneficial cooperative practice or enterprise have a duty to the cooperating participants to bear a fair share of the burdens of the practice. Applied to the political order, the principle holds that a reasonably just polity is a cooperative enterprise whose members receive benefits from the rule of law only because other members obey the law even when they find obedience burdensome. The members of a reasonably just polity thus have a political obligation, understood as a defeasible moral duty to obey the law, to one another. Those who break the laws fail to fulfill this obligation, and their failure justifies the law-abiding members, acting through the proper authorities, in punishing the lawbreakers. Rather than two separate problems, then, political obligation and punishment are two aspects of the same fundamental concern for sustaining a polity that its members can reasonably regard as a cooperative enterprise under the rule of law.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dagger
Keyword(s):  
Political Obligation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Play Theory ◽  
Justification Of Punishment ◽  
Sustained Effort

This book aims to develop a unified theory of political obligation and the justification of punishment that takes its bearings from the principle of fair play. Much has been written on each of these subjects, of course, including numerous essays in recent years that approach one or the other topic in fair-play terms. However, there has been no sustained effort to link the two in a fair-play theory of political obligation and punishment. This book undertakes such an effort. This introduction explains why such a theory is an attractive possibility and how the argument for it unfolds in the succeeding chapters.

scholarly journals A FAIR PLAY ACCOUNT OF LEGITIMATE POLITICAL AUTHORITY

Legal Theory ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Tosi
Keyword(s):  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
State Legitimacy ◽  
Cooperative Scheme

ABSTRACTThere is an emerging consensus among political philosophers that state legitimacy involves something more than—or perhaps other than—political obligation. Yet the principle of fair play, which many take to be a promising basis for political obligation, has been largely absent from discussions of the revised conception of legitimacy. This paper shows how the principle of fair play can generate legitimate political authority by drawing on a neglected feature of the principle—its stipulation that members of a cooperative scheme must reciprocate specifically by submitting to the scheme's rules.

Fairness, Political Obligation, and the Justificatory Gap

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiafeng Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Prima Facie ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Moral Duty ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Solid Ground ◽  
The Law ◽  
Democratic Procedure

The moral principle of fairness or fair play is widely believed to be a solid ground for political obligation, i.e., a general prima facie moral duty to obey the law qua law. In this article, I advance a new and, more importantly, principled objection to fairness theories of political obligation by revealing and defending a justificatory gap between the principle of fairness and political obligation: the duty of fairness on its own is incapable of preempting the citizen’s liberty to reciprocate fairly in ways other than obeying the law. This justificatory gap is unaffected by the ongoing debate between the voluntarist and the nonvoluntarist accounts of fairness, and it cannot be bridged by the two arguments that are perhaps implicit in Klosko’s account, namely the presumptive benefits argument and the democratic procedure argument.

scholarly journals MULTIPLE PRINCIPLES AND THE OBLIGATION TO OBEY THE LAW

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 524 ◽  
Author(s):  
NKIRUKA AHIAUZU
Keyword(s):  
Title Page ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
General Obligation ◽  
Normative Problem ◽  
The Law ◽  
Principle Theory

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>[</span><span>George Klosko’s multiple principle theory of political obligation is a re- cent formulation for the existence of a general obligation to obey the law. In the paper, I argue that the generality requirement of the obligation to obey the law gives rise to normative and factual problems of, respectively, motivation and comprehensiveness. I aim to show that whereas the multi- ple principle theory may solve the factual problem of the generality re- quirement, it does not solve its normative problem which I characterise as a first-personal implication of the question, ‘why should I obey the law?’</span><span>] </span></p></div></div></div>

Fair Play and Its Rivals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dagger
Keyword(s):  
Political Obligation ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Play Theory ◽  
Political Obligations

Proponents of the fair-play theory of political obligation face challenges not only from those who reject or discount the possibility of political obligations, such as philosophical anarchists, but also from the advocates of competing theories of political obligation. This chapter supports the case for fair-play theory by demonstrating its superiority to its three principal rivals among such theories. Those three rival theories are grounded in either consent, association, or natural duty. All three have their attractions, but they are also vulnerable to serious objections. Their attractions, moreover, often derive from an implicit reliance on considerations of fair play.

On Using the Concept of Hypothetical Consent

1989 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 793-808
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Subjective Meaning ◽  
Hypothetical Consent ◽  
The Right ◽  
As If

AbstractThis article argues that the concept of hypothetical consent advanced by Hanna Pitkin has little force as a basis for political obligation. It reformulates the meaning of hypothetical consent by emphasizing the subjectivity of consent, and it points out how this subjective meaning expresses the right of actual citizens to dissent. It suggests how subjective hypothetical consent can be used from the perspective of a sovereign as a standard that requires the sovereign to treat citizens as if they had consented, although they have not consented. It concludes by arguing that although this standard may appear to corrode political authority, instead it enhances political authority. It drives the sovereign to relinquish the claim that citizens are obligated to obey, and to treat them so they will have reason to obey.

1. Political authority and obligation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Hyams
Keyword(s):  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Obligation ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Military Conscription ◽  
The Law ◽  
Philosophical Anarchism

This chapter examines the various approaches that political theorists have used to answer questions surrounding political authority and obligation. It considers arguments in favour of political authority and obligation as well as anarchist positions, which claim that we are not obliged to obey the law. To illustrate these themes, the chapter presents a case study that explores military conscription as a problem of political obligation. The concepts of consent, fairness, community, morality, and philosophical anarchism are also discussed. The chapter includes Key Thinkers boxes that feature Plato and Robert Nozick. Based on the arguments that have been put forward, it seems clear that the state is justified at least in so far as it seeks to enforce morality.

Justifying Punishment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Dagger
Keyword(s):  
Political Obligation ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Play Theory ◽  
Legal Punishment ◽  
Theories Of Punishment ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Communicative Theories

Chapter 5 is the first of the three chapters of Playing Fair that make the case for fair play as the basis for a compelling justification of legal punishment. As it was with the discussion of political obligation, so it is necessary to begin this part of the book by clarifying key terms and confronting fundamental challenges to the enterprise of justifying punishment itself. The chapter thus begins with the questions of what is punishment and what are its proper aims. The latter question is usually answered by reference to retributivism and/or deterrence, and I try to place fair-play theory in this context by linking it to communicative theories of punishment while distinguishing it from Jean Hampton’s expressive version of retributivism. The chapter concludes with responses to those who would, for various reasons, abolish punishment altogether.

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