Identity, Membership and Political Obligation

Identity, Membership and
Political Obligation
• Political obligation is an “associative” obligation
grounded in membership.
• If we are members of a group, they argue, then
we are under an obligation, ceteris paribus, to
comply with the norms that govern it.
• Nor does this obligation follow from our
consenting to become members, for it holds
even in the case of groups or associations, such
as families and polities, that people typically do
not consent to join.
• Voluntary or not, membership entails obligation.
• Anyone who acknowledges membership in a
particular polity must therefore acknowledge that he
or she has a general obligation to obey its laws.
• At the core of the associative approach is the idea
that political obligation is a form of non-voluntary
obligation on a par with familial obligations.
• In Ronald Dworkin's words, “Political association, like
family and friendship and other forms of association
more local and intimate, is in itself pregnant of
obligation”.
• The same idea, with an explicit analogy between
family and polity, is at work in John Horton's account
of political obligation:
• Polity is, like the family, a relationship into
which we are mostly born.
• that the obligations which are constitutive of
the relationship do not stand in need of moral
justification in terms of a set of basic moral
principles or some comprehensive moral
theory.
• Furthermore, both the family and the political
community figure prominently in our sense of
who we are: our self-identity and our
understanding of our place in the world.
• As members of families and political
communities, on this view, we are subject to
what Michael Hardimon calls “non-contractual
role obligations” —
• that is, obligations that simply flow from “roles
into which we are born” .
• The associative account of political obligation has
at least three attractive features.
• The first is the refusal of its proponents to treat
‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ as two parts of a
dichotomy.
• It is true, they say, that most people do not
voluntarily undertake to become members of a
polity, but that hardly means that membership
has been forced or imposed on them.
• There is a middle ground, and it is fertile soil for a
theory of political obligation, just as it is for those
who believe that being a member of a family
entails obligations that we have neither chosen,
on the one hand, nor incurred against our will, on
the other.
• A second attraction of the associative account is
that it squares with a common intuition, as a
great many people apparently do think of
themselves as members of political societies who
have an obligation to obey their polities' laws.
• This intuition, moreover, points to the third
attractive feature, which is the way in which the
obligation to obey the laws grows out of the sense
of identity that members of a polity commonly
share.
• If this is my polity, and I find myself thinking of its
concerns as something that we members share, and
its government as our government, then it will be
easy to think also that I have an obligation to obey
its laws.
• For Yael Tamir, in fact, “the true essence of
associative obligations” is that they “are not
grounded on consent, reciprocity, or gratitude, but
rather on a feeling of belonging or connectedness”.
• Like the other theories of political obligation,
however, the membership account has met with
considerable criticism, with three main objections
being raised.
• First, the critics maintain that the analogy between
the polity and the family is neither persuasive nor
attractive.
• It is unpersuasive because the members of the
modern polity lack the close and intimate
relationships with one another that family members
typically share; and
• it is unattractive because it raises the possibility that
the paternalism appropriate within the family may
be extended to the polity.
• Second, the critics object that the associative account conflates
the sense of obligation with obligation itself.
• As Wolff and other philosophical anarchists have argued, the
fact that many people feel a sense of identity with and
obligation to their countries does not mean that they really
have such an obligation; nor need one be a philosophical
anarchist to share this conclusion.
• Finally, there is the problem of what may be called group
character. All groups have members, including groups that are
not decent, fair, or morally praiseworthy;
• but if membership is sufficient to generate an obligation to
obey, then the members of unjust and exploitative groups will
have an obligation to obey the rules.
• In the case of the polity, this leads to the unpalatable and
counter-intuitive conclusion that the routinely exploited and
oppressed “members” of an unjust polity are under an
obligation to obey its laws.
• Whether the proponents of the associative theory
can overcome these objections remains, not
surprisingly, a matter of debate.
• In some cases the proponents attempt to meet the
critics head on, as Horton does in the second edition
of his Political Obligation (2010).
• There Horton develops a two-pronged account of
political obligation according to which the polity in
question must supply the “generic good of order and
security” and
• its members must identify with it and acknowledge
its political authority.
• In other cases, proponents attempt to bolster the
associative theory by incorporating elements of
other theories, as in Massimo Renzo's “quasi-
voluntarist reformulation of the associative model,”
with its claim that we voluntarily occupy our roles
even in families and polities as long as “we could
have stepped out of them if we had wanted”.
• To others, however, appeals to membership may be
valuable “as conceptual explorations of the
hermeneutics or the phenomenology of political
association,”
• but they “will not generate political obligations
unless the communities they describe can be
legitimated in accordance with one or more of the
standard repertory of arguments …”.

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