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Political obligation is the moral duty (if any) to obey the law simply because it is law. Multiple grounds have been proposed: consent (one is obligated because one agreed), fair play (one benefits from a cooperative scheme and must contribute), natural duty (justice requires supporting just institutions), and associative obligation (membership in a community generates loyalty). Each account faces objections — consent theories cannot explain non-consenters; fair-play theories struggle with unwanted benefits; natural duty accounts sever the link between obligation and one's particular state. The question matters practically: it governs when and why law-breaking is wrongful.
Treat this as an applied ethics problem: work through each candidate account, identify its strongest case, and then reconstruct the most powerful objection. Rawls (natural duty), Hart (fair play), and Simmons (consent skeptic) are the key interlocutors.
Your prerequisite — political authority and legitimacy — asks when a state's power is *justified*: when does the state have the right to make and enforce law? Political obligation asks the complementary question: when do *you* have a moral duty to obey? These questions are related but distinct. A state can be legitimate (its rule-making is justified) without your having a strong duty to follow every edict. And you might have prudential reasons to comply with law — you want to avoid punishment, you want the social order to hold — without having any specifically *moral* duty. Political obligation is the moral duty question, quite apart from what's strategically rational.
Consent theory, associated with Locke and early Rawls, grounds obligation in agreement: you are bound because you agreed to be. Express consent — a naturalization oath, say — seems to generate genuine obligation. The problem is that virtually no one in any society has expressly consented to their government. Theorists of tacit consent argue that remaining in a country amounts to consent. But this requires that you know consent is an option, have real alternatives, and face no prohibitive costs of leaving — conditions that clearly don't hold for most people in most societies. The more theorists try to save consent theory from this objection, the thinner the concept of "consent" becomes.
Fair-play theory (H.L.A. Hart, Rawls) shifts the ground to reciprocity. When people cooperate under a scheme that benefits everyone — maintaining roads, enforcing contracts, upholding security — each person who accepts those benefits is obligated to bear their fair share of the burdens. A.J. Simmons presses the hardest objection: merely receiving benefits doesn't generate obligation, especially when you never requested them and couldn't easily refuse them. If your neighbor mows your lawn without asking, you don't thereby owe them payment. The question is whether citizens really *accept* the benefits of their state in the relevant sense, or merely receive them passively.
Natural duty accounts (Rawls's mature theory) hold that all persons have a natural duty — not derived from consent or fair play — to support and comply with just institutions. This avoids the problems of consent and fair play, but it severs obligation from any special relationship to *your* state. If you have a natural duty to support just institutions, you might owe as much to a just foreign state as to your own government, which seems strange and loses the particularity people feel toward their own polity. Associative theories (Dworkin, communitarians) argue that membership in a community — family, civic society — generates genuine obligations of loyalty and mutual concern that can't be reduced to consent or fair play, just as adult children owe special obligations to parents they didn't choose. Each of these accounts reflects a deeper commitment in moral theory — about whether obligations require voluntary undertaking, whether membership and identity matter morally — which is why political obligation connects to your broader work on moral responsibility and Hobbesian and Lockean accounts of the state's foundations.
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