Political Obligations in Illiberal Regimes
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Political Obligations in Illiberal Regimes Zoltán Gábor Szűcs1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The paper is organized around two major, but closely interconnected goals. First, the paper’s principal aim is to offer a normative theory of political obligations that is based on certain insights of philosophical anarchism, theories of associative obligations and political realism. Second, the paper aims to offer a normative theoretical framework to examine political obligations in contemporary non-democratic contexts that does not vindicate non-democratic regimes and that does not exclude political obligations from the terrain of moral normativity. The theory of political obligations this paper proposes can be briefly summarized as follows: political obligations are duties of compliance with the political authority claims of those who exercise political power. Their primary ground is membership. The mere fact of membership has moral weight in its own right and it is also inseparably embedded into a rich context of moral reasons for action that includes general reasons; ad hoc reasons; regime-specific reasons applying to every subject; and regime-specific offices that attribute specific responsibilities to individuals and groups. This rich context of typical moral reasons plays an important role in deciding what needs to be done, all things considered, with respect to the political authority claims. This account attempts to describe compliance in terms of genuine political obligations and also claims to be a plausible and general account. It does not claim to be a theoretically coherent moral justification for political obligations, however, just a theoretically coherent account of the varied sources and limitations of political obligations. Keywords Political realism · Political obligations · Value pluralism · Regime theory · Illiberal regimes · Bernard Williams · Ethics
* Zoltán Gábor Szűcs [email protected] 1
Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Z. G. Szűcs
Introduction This paper is organized around two major, but closely interconnected goals. First, the paper’s principal aim is to offer a normative theory of political obligations that is based on certain insights of philosophical anarchism (Wolff 1970; Simmons 1979, 2001), theories of associative obligations (Dworkin 1986; Horton 1992; Hardimon 1994; Gilbert 2006) and political realism (Sabl 2002; Williams 2005; Geuss 2008; Galston 2010; Sleat 2013). It borrows from philosophical anarchism that there must be something fundamentally wrong with any attempt to provide a theoretically coherent moral justification for political obligations in terms of a single (or just a few) moral principle(s). From associative theories of political obligations, it takes the central role in constituting duties of compliance of the mere fact of membership in political associations. From realism, it borrows a Williamsian distinction between ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ as well as its conflictbased political outlook. Accordingly, it is
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