For Green, and for almost everyone else who has pondered it, the problem of political obligation is a moral problem, and the obligation in question is a kind of moral obligation.
Attention to the ambiguity in the referent of the term "political" may also support a pluralistic or multi principle solution to the problem of political obligation; e.g., a membership justification for the duty of citizens to obey the law, and a consent justification for the duty of foreigners to do so (see §5).
In the twentieth century political philosophers devoted themselves at least as much to the analysis of the problem of political obligation, and to the concepts it involves, as to full-scale attempts to devise theories of the obligation to obey the law.
Arguably, certain solutions to the problem of political obligation fare better when "political" refers to the status in virtue of which a person has the obligation than when it refers to the entity to which she owes it, or vice versa.
There the issue is usually presented as "the public's right to know"; but for the biographer it is a problem of his obligation to preserve historical truth as measured against the personal anguish he may inflict on others in doing so.
This essay begins, therefore, with a brief history of the problem of political obligation.
Most of these approaches focus on Locke's doctrine of consent as a solution to the problem of political obligation.
There is no single answer to the problem of political obligation, as they see it, because the problem has more than one aspect.
Whether a plurality of principles is necessary or even desirable, in sum, remains one of many open questions with regard to the vexing problem of political obligation.
The problem of political obligation, then, is not simply the question of whether a person has a reason to do that which the law would have her do.
