Political Obligation

Richard E. Flathman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367369347
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000706840
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Under what conditions are obedience and disobedience required or justified? To what or whom is obedience or disobedience owed? What are the differences between authority and power and between legitimate and illegitimate government? What is the relationship between having an obligation and having freedom to act? What are the similarities and differences among political, legal, and moral obligations?..."

Originally published in 1972, Professor Flathman discusses these crucial issues in political theory in a lucid and stimulating argument. Though mainly concerned to develop his own modified utilitarian standing point he also reviews both the classical and modern literature from Plato and Hobbes to Hare and Rawls. The treatment is philosophical but it is frequently related to practical issues of civil obedience and disobedience and in particular focuses on the relation between law, obligation and social change.

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The Study of Language and the Study of Politics

A LARGE PART of the discussion of political obligation in the following chapters is based upon an examination of the uses of concepts that figure prominently in the practice. We will analyze uses of “obligation” itself, of “rule,” “authority,” “reason,” “freedom,” “consent,” and a number of other concepts. Use of this approach to understanding a political practice rests on a number of assumptions concerning language and its relationships to thought, action, society, and other “realities.” The purpose of this chapter is to identify some of these assumptions as they are understood here and as they will operate in the chapters that follow. The matters we will discuss in this chapter are controversial and there is a large and sometimes technical literature concerning them.¹ The present discussion is necessarily partial and schematic. Its primary purpose is to identify the bases of and the limitations upon claims advanced in later chapters. Some of this information can be gleaned from the later discussions themselves, especially by readers familiar with the controversies concerning language and its relevance to philosophy. Readers well versed in these matters, and readers not interested in them, might wish to proceed directly to Chapter Two.

1. A generous selection of the important writings concerning language and its relationships to thought, action, and other realities is available in Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Rorty’s volume also includes a comprehensive bibliography and an introduction by the editor which attempts to identify major issues and the prominent positions concerning them. Rorty’s bibliography lists several other useful anthologies on the subject.

I. LANGUAGE AND MEANING

WE BEGIN WITH what may be the most significant fact of all; namely, that human beings communicate with one another in language. Indeed in countless cases they do so successfully and without difficulty. Thus I write this sentence with every confidence that anyone who knows the English language will know what it means, with every confidence that it will have the same meaning for the reader that it has for me. How is this possible? How is it possible that the language A uses can so often have the same meaning for millions of people who do not know A as it has for him?

Sometimes it is made possible by A’s explaining what he means by the language he uses. But even in the small number of cases in which such explanations are offered this answer raises the question of how the statements explaining the meaning of the first statement can have the same meaning for others that they have for A. And so on. The communication we ordinarily take for granted depends on there being a large number of cases in which our meaning needs no explanation. However we account for this fact, the fact itself must not be forgotten.

Very baldly, there can be such cases because the system of spoken and written symbols that we call language is governed by conventions that establish the correct uses of the concepts and other units of which the language consists. Knowing a language consists of knowing the conventions that govern it. B can know what A means when he uses the language because A and B both know the conventions governing the language. A means what he says; he means what is said when the language he speaks is used in the way he is using it.

The type of conventions that will be of greatest interest here are those that govern the use of concepts. Sometimes called semantic rules, these conventions determine when we can properly use one concept rather than another—for example, “obligatory” rather than “obliged” or “X is good” rather than “I like X.” To say that a concept can or cannot be used in a particular context is, among other things, to say that it can or cannot be combined with other concepts in various ways. Thus when a convention establishes that we can use, say, “obligation” in a particular set of circumstances (including linguistic circumstances), it places limits on what we can go on to say after we have used “obligation.” For example, if A says “B has an obligation to do X,” he ordinarily cannot, or cannot without making a special explanation, go on to say, “but he doesn’t have to do X if he doesn’t feel like it.” Owing to the conventions governing “obligation” and “doesn’t feel like it,” combining the concepts in this way is misusing the language. In the absence of a special explanation for combining them in this way, A’s remarks will be puzzling to other speakers of the language. Because there is a sense in which we can or cannot use concept Y having used concept X, many writers have been inclined to speak of the “logic” of language and the “logic” of particular concepts in language. Whether the use of “logic” is warranted will depend on the force of the claim advanced in using it and on the particular conceptual relationships to which it is applied. What is important at this juncture is that the conceptual relationships we are discussing when we talk about conventions are not merely regularities detected by observers. An observer may indeed detect them, but what he is detecting are conventions which users of the language follow when they speak.

Language is governed by conventions, using the language consists of following the conventions, and making sense in the language is possible if the conventions are respected. If these propositions are true, it follows that an account of the conventions governing the language is an account of the manner in which people who know the language speak (insofar as they do so and insofar as they make sense). Insofar as the conventions are the same for all who use the language, the speech of any person who knows the language is, in principle, evidence concerning the conventions. With the implied qualifications, it is evidence that will support generalizations about the language. Thus if we investigate the speech of A, we investigate more than the speech of A. (Recall that the child usually does not have to test the knowledge of the language gained from his parents or teachers against the way others speak.)

II. USE VERSUS ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE

ALTHOUGH WE CANNOT GO into the host of questions raised by the foregoing remarks in any detail, it is imperative that we identify (as opposed to develop) some of the main qualifications that need to be entered against them. Doing so will indicate some of the claims that we will not be advancing in the following chapters.

There are a number of respects in which we must qualify our suggestion that the speech of a single speaker will support generalizations about the language. Let us take as an example one of the generalizations that we will advance later, namely that “obligation” is ordinarily used where there is (a certain kind of) rule forbidding or requiring a specified form of conduct. We will argue that this is one of the conventions or semantic rules governing the use of the concept “obligation.” But very little thought shows that this convention does not hold for all uses of the concept. To begin with a somewhat technical case, Professor Peter Geach has argued that rules of this type almost never hold for statements that express counter factual conditionals. Thus if I say: “If Smith had an obligation to do X, it would be wrong for him not to do it,” my use of “obligation” does not depend on there being a rule requiring Smith to do X.² A more familiar example would be that a speaker might use “obligation” knowing there is no rule but hoping that using the concept will hasten the development of one. Or he might use it to convey the impression that there is a rule when he knows that there isn’t one.³ Then too there are various ways in which concepts are stretched for special purposes—e.g., in writing poetry; there are the problems about “unintended” meaning emphasized by psychoanalytic theory; and there is the obvious fact that subgroups of a society put the language of the society to special uses unfamiliar to other speakers.

One of our objectives below will be to identify major exceptions and qualifications to the various semantic rules we will put forward, thus rendering more precise our statement of them and the conditions under which they hold. It is not our expectation, however, that we can come up with a scheme or set of rules that accounts for all “correct” or “appropriate” or “established” uses of the concept. We cannot prove that such a schema is never available, but our “sense” or “impression,” based upon analysis of a few concepts, does not engender such an expectation. With Wittgenstein we do not see ordinary language as a “strict calculus” in which every appropriate move is determined or at least covered by a tightly drawn rale. The “sense” or “impression” of language which will underlie our discussion of political obligation is very close to the understanding stated by Peter Strawson a number of years ago. We cannot defend it in general terms here (Strawson defends it eloquently in the work from which the passage is quoted), but it will be well if the reader bears it in mind as he reads the chapters that follow:

In discussing the logic of ordinary language I have frequently used the word ‘rule’. The word is not inappropriate: for to speak of these and other ‘rules’ is to speak of ways in which language may be correctly or incorrectly used. But though not inappropriate, the word may be misleading. We do not judge our linguistic practice in the light of antecedently studied rules. We frame rules in the light of our study of our practice. Moreover, our practice is a very fluid affair. If we are to speak of rules at all, we ought to think of them as rules which everyone has a license to violate if he can show a point in doing so. In the effort to describe our experience we are continually putting words to new uses, connected with, but not identical with, their familiar uses; applying them to states of affairs which are both like and unlike those to which the words are most familarly applied. Hence we may give a meaning to sentences which, at first sight, seem self-contradictory. And hence, though some have incautiously spoken of the violation of type-rules as resulting in sentences which, though neither ungrammatical nor self-contradictory, are nonsense, it is in fact hard to frame a grammatical sentence to which it is impossible to imagine some sense being given; and given, not by arbitrary fiat, but by an intelligible, though probably figurative, extension of the familiar senses of the words and phrases concerned.⁴

2. See Peter Geach, “Ascriptivism,” Philosophical Review 69 (1960). Reprinted in Rorty, op. cit., pp. 224–26.

3. See below, Chap. 5, pp. 158–59.

It will be objected, however, that the qualifications we have admitted are much more damaging to our original position than we have allowed. We have in effect said that there will ordinarily be exceptions and qualifications to the conventions governing (and hence to generalizations concerning) the use of concepts. But to say this is to continue to claim to be in a position to know how language is used. If we were not in such a position we could not make the generalizations and the necessary qualifications to them. In our original account we rested this claim on two premises: (1) that language is governed by conventions, and (2) that knowing the language consists of knowing the conventions that govern its use. If there is one set of conventions governing the language, and if I know the language, then I am in a position to generalize about it. (Or my speech is evidence that warrants others in generalizing about it.) But if the use of language is diverse and fluid, if it varies from speaker to speaker and context to context, this claim is weakened and perhaps undermined. If we are going to generalize about the use of language we have to get out of our armchair and investigate the diversity and complexity that is the actual use of language.⁵

4. Peter Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory (London: Methuen and Co., 1952), p. 230.

The only possible general answer to this objection is that indeed one must get out of his armchair. But the reason why this is the only possible answer, and the practical implications that follow from it, vary in important respects according to the kind of question one is trying to answer by investigating language. It is pretty obvious that I cannot rely entirely on my own command of English in giving an account of many of the concepts used in discourse among skydiving buffs or among the members of the Black Panther party. I have to learn how to use many of the concepts they employ; I have to learn how they are used by skydiving buffs and Black Panthers.

5. For a version of this argument see the Introduction in J. A. Fodor and J. J. Katz, eds., The Structure of Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964). The principal argument Fodor and Katz advance is that we cannot generalize about language until we have a theory of the structure or “compositional mechanisms” of language or of the language that the generalizations are about. Such a theory, they argue, cannot be developed solely from the armchair. We can readily grant that there are important issues that cannot be decided in the absence of such a theory. Granting as well that we have no such theory, the question is whether there are issues that can be decided, or on which light can be shed, by studying the use of concepts. Fodor and Katz concede that there are cases in which it is “intuitively clear” “what one would say (or not)” in a set of circumstances. Indeed they concede that “clear cases, intuitively determined, provide the empirical constraints on the construction of a linguistic theory” (p. 17). Given these concessions, the least that must be said is that it is difficult to see why they should object to attempts to identify such “clear cases” and to see whether doing so helps us to understand philosophical, political, or other sorts of questions and problems. (I leave aside the question of the adequacy of their characterizations of “ordinary-language philosophy.”)

But what about the skydiving buffs or the Black Panthers? Do they have to “get out of their armchairs” in order to give an account of the concepts they use as skydivers and Black Panthers? Quite clearly they rarely have to do so in order to use the concepts.⁶ But using a concept and giving an account of its use are not the same. The latter requires that we examine what we do when we do the former; it requires us to identify, compare, and classify the circumstances, linguistic and otherwise, in which we use or would use a concept. With all save very specialized or technical concepts there are a very large number of such circumstances. Thinking of any substantial number of them, to say nothing of detecting similarities and differences relevant to the purposes of the analysis, requires industry and skills which the person who uses language but does not analyze its use has no occasion to develop or to employ. The analyst must examine a range of examples in a variety of contexts, search for objections, counterexamples, and ambiguities in the generalizations that the data suggest to him, and seek the implications of his findings for the problems that led him to make the analysis. There are no doubt numerous methods or techniques by which this can be done, and it may be that the techniques used by ordinary-language philosophers could usefully be supplemented by methods more typical of linguists or other social scientists.⁷

6. For arguments on this point see Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say,” in V. C. Chappell, ed., Ordinary Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964).

7. The acknowledged master of the techniques of analyzing language among ordinary-language philosophers was J. L. Austin. His techniques are nowhere better displayed than in his Sense and Sensibilia, ed. G. J. Warnock (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Austin talks about his methods in “A Plea for Excuses.” This paper is available in Austin’s Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (London: Oxford University Press, 1961). It is reprinted in several of the anthologies listed in Rorty’s Bibliography. Austin’s methods are described in greater detail by J. O. Urmson in a paper entitled “J. L. Austin,” which is reprinted in Rorty, op. cit, pp. 232 ff. Austin himself believed that the methods he had employed could usefully be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Original Half Title
• 1. The Study of Language and the Study of Politics
• 2. Obligation and Ideals
• 3. Obligation and Rules
• 4. The Social Bases of Obligation Rules
• 5. Obligation, Stability, and Change: Praise, Blame, and Disinclination
• 6. Obligation, Political Freedom, and Coercion
• 7. Obligation, Consent, and Utility
• 8. The Utility of Obligation
• Bibliography
• Index