Volume 29, Number 3
February 2025
ARTICLE

Political Obligation and Political Recognition

Volume 29, Number 3, February 2025, Pages 502–526
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v29i3.3647
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Abstract

The problem of political obligation may roughly be characterized as the philosophical challenge of establishing that there is a general obligation to obey the law as such. In this paper, I defend the recognitional account of political obligation, which consists of the following three claims: (1) citizens of a liberal polity have obligations to recognize one another as free and equal moral members of their own political community and communicate this recognition; (2) under certain conditions, having respect for the law of one’s own state is a crucially important way of affording and communicating such recognition, and so we are obliged as citizens to have such respect under those conditions; and (3) being obligated to have respect for the law entails having a general obligation to obey it. Taken jointly, these claims show how the following three concepts—political recognition, respect for law, and political obligation—are united in a normative nexus that yields a demanding but deeply attractive interpersonal ideal for political life. I then characterize some forms of “meta-skepticism” about political obligation that question the concept’s importance for political philosophy. I conclude by arguing that one virtue of the recognitional account is that it justifies a philosophical interest in political obligation even if these meta-skeptical views are true.
Copyright © 2025 Dan Khokhar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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