Fairness

Abstract

I began my discussion of contemporary theories of political obligation with theories that anchor political obligation in morally significant transactions between particular individuals and the government. In the chapters that followed, we observed a departure from this approach to political obligation. A growing number of theories of political obligation conceive of political obligation, not as a matter of a vertical relationship between each particular citizen and her government, but rather as a matter of horizontal relationships among citizens. Along these lines, it has been argued that political obligation arises out of relationships between individuals bound to one another by natural duties (the natural duty approach) and out of relationships that social practices, including political association, establish between individuals who participate in them (the linguistic argument and the associative approach). I have also signalled that transactional approaches to political obligation, originally formulated in vertical terms, undergo a similar development. Recall that in the formulations that the theories of consent and gratitude have received in the works of, respectively, Leslie Green and A. D. M. Walker, ¹ obligations of consent and reciprocity arise on the plane of transactions between citizens rather than on the plane of transactions between each particular citizen and her government.