Questions: Consent Theory and Political Obligation

Question 1

Hume argued that because virtually no citizen has explicitly consented to state authority, consent theory implies almost no one has a genuine political obligation to obey the law. Locke's response to this challenge was:

• A. To abandon consent as the basis of legitimacy and ground obligation in natural law instead
• B. To invoke tacit consent — continued residence in a territory and use of its roads and protections constitutes implicit agreement to state authority
• C. To appeal to hypothetical consent — what rational agents would agree to under ideal conditions generates actual obligations
• D. To distinguish legitimate from illegitimate states, arguing only the former generate obligations regardless of consent

Answer: (B)

Locke's solution to the empirical consent problem was tacit consent: by remaining in the territory, using public goods, and benefiting from state protection, citizens implicitly signal their agreement to be governed. This avoids requiring a formal ceremony of consent. However, Hume's challenge anticipates the standard objection to this move: if you lack a genuine option to leave (or face prohibitive costs), the 'choice' to remain does not constitute meaningful consent — it looks more like coerced acceptance. The tacit consent gambit preserves the form of the consent model while eroding its substance.

Question 2

The objection that hypothetical consent cannot ground real political obligations holds that:

• A. The hypothetical agents in the original position do not resemble actual citizens closely enough to make the inference valid
• B. Being told you would have agreed, under idealized conditions, does not obligate you in the way that actually agreeing does — hypothetical agreement is not genuine consent
• C. Hypothetical consent theories are circular: they build the desired obligations into the design of the hypothetical situation
• D. Hypothetical consent is only valid for private contracts, not for political institutions that exercise coercive power

Answer: (B)

The core objection is that consent derives its moral force from being a real, voluntary act of self-binding. A hypothetical agreement — 'you would have consented if placed in these idealized conditions' — is not something the agent actually did. It cannot create the same kind of obligation that actual agreement creates. This is why Rawls was careful to frame his project as determining principles of justice rather than grounding political obligation through consent: he recognized that hypothetical contractors don't actually bind real citizens. The objection doesn't say the hypothetical is worthless — it might tell us what principles are *fair* — but it denies that this generates the specific duty to obey.

Question 3

The appeal of consent theory as a basis for political obligation is that it grounds state authority in something morally significant — voluntary agreement — rather than in superior force, tradition, or mere utility.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is consent theory's central normative attraction. If authority derives only from power or historical accident, then subjects have no genuine obligation — they comply under threat. But if authority derives from consent, then subjects are self-governing in an important sense: they have voluntarily taken on the obligation. This resonates with liberal values of autonomy and self-determination. The entire tradition of social contract theory — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau — appeals to this intuition that legitimate authority must in some sense reflect the will of those governed.

Question 4

Locke's tacit consent theory succeeds in grounding genuine political obligation because remaining in a territory is clearly a free and voluntary choice that signals meaningful agreement.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is precisely the objection critics level against tacit consent. For consent to obligate, it must be genuinely voluntary — the alternative (not consenting) must be a real and available option. But leaving one's country of birth is often not a realistic option: it may be prohibitively expensive, require giving up family, career, and culture, and involve emigrating to a state whose authority one also hasn't consented to. When the alternative to 'consenting' is so costly as to be practically unavailable, continued residence looks less like voluntary agreement and more like acquiescence under constraint. Genuine consent requires genuine alternatives.

Question 5

Why does the move from actual consent to hypothetical consent resolve the empirical problem faced by consent theory, but introduce a new philosophical problem?

Model answer: Actual consent theory faces an empirical gap: virtually no citizen has ever explicitly agreed to be governed. Hypothetical consent resolves this by asking not 'did citizens agree?' but 'would rational agents agree under appropriate conditions?' — a question with a definite (and positive) answer regardless of history. The new philosophical problem is that hypothetical agreement cannot generate genuine obligations in the way real agreement does. What actually obligates a person is their own voluntary act of self-binding; being told they would have agreed, under idealized conditions, doesn't produce a real obligation any more than being told you would have signed a contract obligates you to its terms.

The deeper tension is between what consent theory needs (a real obligation) and what hypothetical consent can deliver (a claim about what is fair or what rational agents would accept). Some philosophers, like Rawls, embrace this and give up the consent framing entirely — using the hypothetical construction to derive principles of justice rather than to justify political obligation. Others, like Simmons, take the empirical failure of actual consent to imply that most people in most states have no strong political obligation, and that this is the honest conclusion the theory demands.