Utrata legitymizacji prawa według koncepcji Ronalda Dworkina

The aim of the paper is to analyse the answer that Dworkin’s philosophy of law provides to the following question: what is the threshold of wickedness of the legal order that excuses citizens from the moral obligation to obey the law? This is not a problem of civil disobedience (which only contests a particular decision of making or applying the law), but a situation in which the whole political-legal system is the object of moral contestation. The task will be carried out in three steps. In the first one, I will outline Dworkin’s theory of political obligation, situating it in the broader framework of the debate on this obligation. In the second step, I will analyse one of the main elements of this theory, namely the legitimacy of the legal order. As a third step, I will draw attention to a rather — as it seems — surprising similarity between Dworkin’s argumentation and Radbruch’s formula.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Constructivist Theory of Justice

This essay presents the normative foundation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s constructivist theory of justice in three steps. First, I show that for Du Bois the public sphere in Anglo-European modern states consists of a dialectical interplay between reasonable persons and illiberal rogues. Second, under these nonideal circumstances, the democratic ideal of autonomy grounds reasonable persons’ deliberative openness, an attitude of public moral regard for others which is necessary to construct the terms of political rule. Though deliberative openness is the essential vehicle of construction, reasonable persons only have a pragmatic political obligation to forge ties of deliberative reciprocity with likeminded persons whom they trust will listen and not harm them. Finally, I present Du Bois’s defense of black suffragists’ support of the 19th Amendment to illustrate pragmatic political obligation in action. I sketch successful democratic engagement that reconstitutes a nonideal public sphere.

CONSENT TO UNJUST INSTITUTIONS

John Rawls wrote that people can voluntarily acquire political obligations to institutions only on the condition that those institutions are at least reasonably just. When an institution is seriously unjust, by contrast, attempts to create political obligation are “void ab initio.” However, Rawls's own explanation for this thought was deeply problematic, as are the standard alternatives. In this paper, I offer an argument for why Rawls's intuition was right and trace its implications for theories of authority and political obligation. These, I claim, are more radical than is often thought.

3. Politics

‘Politics’ examines Hume’s political thought as developed in Book Three of A Treatise of Human Nature, his essays, and The History of England. Hume wrote about his ideas on political obligation. Hume also engaged with 18th-century party politics and as a result, developed a self-consciously ‘moderate’ approach to the political questions of the day. Hume considered a number of economic topics in the Political Discourses and came up with a revisionary theory of money. Hume faced some stylistic challenges as he moved from philosophy to history. He then made a pessimistic turn in his thinking about politics in the final decade of his life.

Home and World

This chapter interrogates worldschooling parents’ desire to raise their children as global citizens. The analysis reveals three key insights. First, worldschooling parents use global citizenship as a proxy for the uncertain future their children will inherit. Second, they define global citizenship in almost exclusively emotional terms, associating it with feelings like compassion, resilience, gratitude, and comfort with difference. The chapter argues that this focus on the emotional dimension effectively hollows out any political obligation or collective agency that might be associated with global citizenship, converting it instead into a more affective and personalized form of global selfhood. Finally, worldschoolers tend to see global citizenship not as something children are born with but as something that must be cultivated through international travel, exposure to a world of difference, and emotion work. Attentive parents create the “emotional curriculum” that elicits in children a certain temperament, sense of entitlement, and emotional intelligence about their place in the world. What becomes clear is that by teaching their children how to “feel global,” parents are preparing them to feel at home in a world of difference and equipping them with the emotional competencies they will need to flourish in an uncertain future.

Political Obligation

Political obligation refers to the idea that there is a duty to obey the law as well as to support one’s state in a number of other ways—for example, by promoting its interests, by defending it when attacked, by voting, and, more generally, by being an active citizen. These duties can be very demanding and seriously interfere with one’s capacity to autonomously choose how to lead one’s life. As such, their existence deserves close scrutiny. The main attempts to justify the existence of political obligation appeal to the ideas of consent, fair play, gratitude, natural duties of justice, and associative obligations. Each of these theories is shown to struggle either with underinclusiveness or with overinclusiveness. It is normally thought that all and only the citizens of a given state have a duty to obey its laws and support its political institutions, but none of the classic theories seem to be able to justify a duty of this kind. In light of this, two responses are available: one is to give up the idea that there is political obligation, thereby becoming a “philosophical anarchist”; the other is to revise the traditional understanding of political obligation.

Political Obligations and Public Goods

The principle of fairness is a moral principle which states that individuals are under an obligation to contribute towards beneficial cooperative projects. It has been appealed to in arguing that citizens are obligated to pay for public goods that their government supplies. Yet the principle has faced a number of powerful objections, most notably those of Robert Nozick. In responding to some of these objections, proponents of the principle have placed a number of conditions on its application. However, by doing so, they have reduced the number of public goods that the principle can explain obligations to contribute towards, and consequently limited its relevance to questions of political obligation. I argue here that a more permissive version of the principle, with fewer conditions on its application, will perform equally well in responding to Nozick's objections. This opens up the possibility of a theory of political obligation that relies more heavily on the principle of fairness than has previously been thought possible.

On the Surprising Implications of Coercion Theory

According to much of self-labelled coercion theory, the state is both the ground of egalitarian demands of distributive justice, and the (sole) domain to which such demands apply, in virtue of its exercise of coercive power which only distributive equality can justify. This article argues that, when properly unpacked in its theoretical commitments, coercion theory has surprising implications both within and beyond borders. Within borders, coercion is either *fully* justified by its necessity for autonomy; or it is not, in which case egalitarian distributions cannot do the trick, either – although *political* equality might. Beyond borders, the view turns out to have significantly demanding global implications, contrary to how it is often presented. It indeed differs from global egalitarianism simpliciter, but it gives rise to an interesting, complex set of cross-border obligations which reach far beyond the ‘global sufficiency, domestic equality’ picture. This surprising account of the implications of coercion theory rests on a crucial insight: when closely examined, the view turns out to be grounded in a natural duty of justice account of political obligation.