Associative Political Obligations

Abstract

It is claimed by philosophers as diverse as Burke, Walzer, Dworkin, and MacIntyre that our political obligations are best understood as or communal obligations -- that is, as obligations that require neither voluntary undertaking nor justification by external moral principles, but rather as local moral responsibilities whose weight derives entirely from their assignment by social practice. This paper identifies three primary lines of argument that appear to support such assertions: conceptual arguments, the arguments of nonvoluntarist contract theory, and communitarian arguments (which emphasize both an identity thesis and a normative independence thesis). However, each of these lines of argument fails to show that political obligations are associative obligations.