Particularly in Anglophone twentieth-century scholarship, these remarks have engendered a view of Socrates as endorsing civil disobedience in certain circumstances, and so have framed the question of civil disobedience and the grounds for political obligation as arising in Plato.
A major challenge facing proponents of epistemic Evidentialism is to find an adequate motivation for it: if there are not sufficient prudential or moral grounds for the obligation to believe on sufficient evidence, then what is the source of its normativity?
Our actual felt experiences of reverential respect play a significant role in some of these explanatory accounts; what justifies accepting our experience of respect for humans (or other beings) as grounds for an obligation is its coherence with our other moral beliefs (Buss 1999, Margalit 1996, Gibbard 1990).
Although commonsense morality seems firmly committed to special obligations, and seems firmly committed to an understanding of such obligations that cannot be accommodated by consequentialism, difficulties remain in trying to provide some grounds for such obligations.
A second objection to strict moral cosmopolitanism gives contractarian grounds for our obligations to fellow-citizens.
There seems to be a consensus, however, that the most sophisticated attempts to provide a utilitarian grounding for political obligation, such as those of Rolf Sartorius (1975, chaps. 5 and 6) and R. M. Hare (1976), have proved unsuccessful (e.g., Simmons 1979, pp. 45 54; Horton 2010, pp. 60 69).
According to Locke, reason is the primary avenue by which humans come to understand moral rules, and it is via reason we can draw two distinct but related conclusions regarding the grounds for our moral obligations: we can appreciate the divine, and thereby righteous, nature of morality and we can perceive that morality is the expression of a law-making authority.
So for Kant, the contingency of the ground of obligation offered by moral sense theories renders those theories inadequate; only a priori determining grounds will do.
Second, what are the grounds for an individual's obligations to the morally central group?
