The rest of the world, he intimated, would be left wondering whether the United States intended to obey its treaty obligations or not — which is not a trivial concern when the world also suspects the United States of ignoring its obligations of humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions.
The utilitarian theory, however debates that when a person finally decides to carry out a particular job, then he/she must obey its ethical obligations [ 3].
On the other hand, those who believe that political obligation is fundamentally a problem of showing that those who live in a polity governed by the rule of law do indeed have a general obligation to obey its laws, rather than a bundle of obligations to obey its laws severally, in piecemeal fashion (e.g., Mapel 2005), are likely to see no need for a plurality of principles.
John Rawls relies on this distinction when he argues that most citizens of a reasonably just political society have no general obligation to obey its laws, even though they do have a "natural duty" to support just institutions — a duty that has the general effect of requiring them to obey (Rawls 1999, p. 97).
He maintains that if an authority is legitimate, there is a general obligation to obey its commands but this does not show that there is, in each case, an obligation to obey particular decisions of that authority.
Looking at our time, however, Kramer defines popular constitutionalism as the belief that no one except the parties before the court should feel any obligation to obey its rulings.
When a political authority oversteps the boundaries of the natural law, it ceases to be legitimate and, therefore, there is no longer an obligation to obey its commands.
Anyone who acknowledges membership in a particular polity must therefore acknowledge that he or she has a general obligation to obey its laws.
With respect to political obligations, then, neither state coercion (i.e., the absence of voluntary consent) nor the injustice of a state's laws or institutions precludes its citizens' acquisition of a genuine obligation to obey its laws.
In the case of the polity, this leads to the unpalatable and counter-intuitive conclusion that the routinely exploited and oppressed "members" of an unjust polity are under an obligation to obey its laws.
If this is my polity, and I find myself thinking of its concerns as something that we members share, and its government as our government, then it will be easy to think also that I have an obligation to obey its laws.
