According to the standard or traditional account, those who hold political authority legitimately have a right to rule that entails an obligation of obedience on the part of those who are subject to their authority. In recent decades, however, and in part in response to philosophical anarchism, a number of philosophers have challenged the standard account by reconceiving authority in ways that break or weaken the connection between political authority and obligation. This paper argues against these revisionist accounts in two (...) ways: first, by pointing to defects in their conceptions of authority; and second, by sketching a fair-play approach to authority and political obligation that vindicates the standard account. (shrink)

Fair-play theories of political obligation hold that persons have a duty to obey the law based on the fact that they benefit from the law and have a duty of reciprocity to comply in return. These accounts are vulnerable to the open-ended reciprocity challenge, according to which persons have discretion over how they discharge debts of reciprocity, such that they may discharge the debts they incur from being members of society in ways other than compliance with the law. I defend (...) fair-play theories against this challenge by arguing that the principle of reciprocity shares a ground with the principle of public equality, and that the latter ultimately requires that legal institutions be arranged in such a way that persons may not exercise discretion over how they discharge the debts of reciprocity that they incur from others’ compliance with the law. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.