Political obligation and the civil dead

Abstract

It is commonly held in the current literature on political philosophy that political obligations are binary: subject to certain conditions, either one has an obligation, or one does not. As a result, the literature does not take into account features that may affect the extent to which one might have an obligation - such as whether one is a member of a state - and therefore offers a rather blunt tool for how we can understand our political obligations. In this thesis, I propose a gradated account of political obligations, where political membership, as constituted by the right to vote, is a basis for a more stringent political obligation that exists over and above the general obligation to obey the law held by all people within a state's jurisdiction. I arrive at this position after examining the individual components of my argument: the right to vote, the obligation to obey the law and the relationship between the state and its constituent members. My argument is that those who have the right to vote have a stronger overall obligation to obey the law than the disenfranchised. Such an account is therefore a departure from our ordinary understanding of political obligations as being binary, but it provides an account of understanding political obligations in a way that more accurately reflects the different relations in which different people stand to the state.