POLI10702

Registration Number: 8760535

Consent explains why you are morally obliged to obey the law. Does it? Words Count: 1529

No, consent does not explain why we ought to obey the laws because very few actually consent to the government. In this essay, I will rst focus our attention on the source of the question rather than the content of this specic question itself; then we will try to solve the riddle of consent by answering that bigger question. I will be considering only explicit and tacit consent in my work, for hypothetical consent contributes very less to the consent theory. Hypothetical consent says that people would want to consent to the state if they were asked to consider its benets. If we are in search of a theory which could justify our obligation, we should not consider a theory which already faces a serious contradiction, like hypothetical consent faces by anarchists.

Man is born free(Rousseau and Cress, 1987, p.141), this assumption can be traced back in every tradition of consent theory along with the claim that no man is bound to obey the law unless he personally consents to it. If we go with the proponents of consent theory, the puzzle of political obligation can be solved if we assert the premise that we have consented to the laws, or to put it simply; if we willingly ask the state to rule over us, the laws which it makes would be legitimate (Knowles, 2009, p.94). So the question now becomes: Do we consent to the state? This question can be answered in two steps that will follow in our discussion. First, the denition of consent and its relationship with obligation should be clear and secondly we shall check if this relationship still holds in the states case.

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As it might seem to the reader, the natural intuition about the notion of consent is to authorize someones action and on the same time giving him certain rights. When we say that a person has consented to work under me, we mean that the given person has voluntarily and knowingly agreed to work under my authority. As Simmons suggested (Simmons, 1976, p.276), these two conditions are pre-assumed, every time we use the term consent. This should be clear enough that the acts involving violence or force on oneself can never be voluntarily consented. Further being voluntary also makes this act: an act of choice; i.e. the consenter must be presented with a choice to dissent at the time of his consenting in the rst place. Provided the above, one might expect that this sort of consent is enough to generate obligations, but, we must also consider the cases where it is terribly hard to dissent or the consequences of doing so are extremely disastrous. It is crucial to consider these special situations here, but we will see a more clear explanation of these when we move on to the states case.

Now that the notion of consent is clear, we can move further to our second step, which is to verify if our relation with the state can be explained in the way of consent. We need to be careful about our notion of consent, so I will be referring to my last paragraph again and again to check if we are still talking about the same consent that we dened as the only proper way to do it in the rst instance. Consent can be given in two ways, either explicitly or tacitly. There is no point for too much discussion on explicit consent as the number of consenters in this way is too few to be considered. This form of consent is explicitly expressed either through written or verbal methods, and we can easily see that the current form of states do not get consent through this way. This, however, does not mean that no

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Registration Number: 8760535

government can get consent through this way. It is possible at least in theory, to ask everyone if they consent to the states authority, provided a good alternative if they dissent. The latter part is vital because given no good alternative, the act cannot be said as involving a proper consent, as we rst established. My last premise also puts into question, the few people who are thought to be explicitly consenting, if they actually do so? For example, the Asylum seekers who take an oath to abide by the laws of some country, are although promising this but not actually consenting, because they have no good alternative to do otherwise.

One can thereby infer that although explicit consent might explain why he is obliged to the laws sometime in the future, in the current situation, it does not. So we should now consider a wider and blurred notion of tacit consent to proceed with our discussion further. Contrary to the case in explicit consent, tacit consent is expressed by the absence of certain actions as Simmons puts it (Simmons, 1976, p.279). For example, if I meet my friend every day at a certain time, he will expect to see my next day as well. This creates a moral obligation on my part to either express my dissent; otherwise my silence would be treated as if I agree to meet him next day. According to the proponents of consent theory, the same can apply to the states case. Even if we do not consent to the states authority in an explicit manner, the fact that we do not revolt against it and continue using its services, can be treated as our tacit consent to it. But is this truly the case? Taking both situations as parallel, I will point out the distinctions between them and make the situation clearer in the rest of my essay.

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The seemingly similar cases are not so similar. Unlike in the rst case where friend can easily dissent through calling the other and expressing that he will not be coming the next day, in the states case, it seems virtually impossible for a person to dissent to the states authority. One might say that you can easily dissent to a states authority by exiting the state itself. This might seem plausible solution at rst but doing so contradicts the two conditions that I mentioned as crucial for a genuine act of consent. Why? Because if an act of dissent is hard to do, for example, telling the friend to express his dissent by running 100km non-stop, it does not explain that if the person cannot do it, thereby he expresses his consent. Let us take another case from the second condition which says that dissent must not be too detrimental for the consenter. Suppose I ask a prisoner to either work in jail or try to escape and die. He will certainly continue to do the work, not because he agrees to it, but because he wants to live. According to Hume (Hume 1965 cited in Christiano, 2012), the person is merely trying to avoid the terrible cost of escaping and thus in no sense expresses his consent.

Similarly, in the states case, people might have an option to dissent, but it certainly is either hard to perform like travelling to another state or has terrible costs for the person. For he will have to leave his home, current occupation and friends or it might not be possible at all. Thus, the states scenario does not resemble the same situation as that of our friends example. Of course, our example of two friends will lead to the same situation if any of the two conditions are violated.

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One might argue here that maybe we had a chance to dissent, and weve lost it now. This surely does not provide any support to the consent theory, because if we had a chance and we were not made aware of it, would defy our standards of dissent. As I mentioned earlier, a chance of dissent must be provided to the person in the rst place, and the premise that the person is aware of it is automatically embedded in itself. For not doing so, would be like telling the person in prison that you might have escaped safely if you asked for the keys yesterday.

It would be a better idea to make give my argument a formal structure before drawing a conclusion. I will be referring to the paragraphs at the end of my premises and denoting them with a small letter p. Here is how the argument should look like to the reader: P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 C C0 You are only morally obliged to obey the law if the state is legitimate. State can only be legitimate if people consent to it. Consent can be given either in explicit or in tacit manner. Not many people consent to the state in explicit manner. Not many people consent to the state in tacit manner. State is not legitimate. You are not morally obliged to obey the law. p2 p2 p4 p4 p7

It is clear that, since not many people consent to the state, we have a reason not to believe in the consent theory for the time being.

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Bibliography
CHRISTIANO, T. 2012. Authority [Online]. Available: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/authority/ [Accessed 26 Feb 2013]. KNOWLES, D. 2009. Political obligation: a critical introduction, GB, Routledge Ltd. ROUSSEAU, J.-J. & CRESS, D. A. 1987. Basic political writings, Indianapolis, Hackett Pub. Co. SIMMONS, A. J. 1976. Tacit Consent and Political Obligation. Philosophy & Public Aairs, 5, 274-291.