Parfit's Moral Arithmetic and the Obligation to Obey the Law
Though consequentialist theories of political obligation have been widely criticized in recent years, a series of arguments presented by Derek Parfit, in Reasons and Persons, are now believed to have given this position new life.
A utilitarian account of political obligation
One of the core issues in contemporary political philosophy is concerned with ‘political obligation.’ Stated in an overly simplified way, the question being asked when one investigates political obligation is, “What, if anything, do citizens owe to their government and how are these obligations generated if they do exist?” The majority of political philosophers investigating this issue agree that a political obligation is a moral requirement to act in certain ways concerning political matters (e.g., a moral requirement to obey the laws and support one’s country). Despite this agreement about the general nature of what is being searched for, a broad division has arisen between political obligation theorists there are some who take political obligations to actually exist (“defenders of political obligation”) and there are some who take there to be no general political obligation (“philosophical anarchists”). While there is debate within the camp defending political obligation about what it is that generates the obligations, the common core of all “defender theories” is the fundamental idea that one has a moral requirement(s) to support and obey the political institutions of one’s country. Despite utilitarianism’s status as one of the major ethical theories, historically, it has largely been dismissed by theorists concerned with political obligation. Within the contemporary debate it is generally accepted that utilitarianism cannot adequately accommodate a robust theory of political obligation. The overarching objective of this dissertation is to challenge this general dismissal of a utilitarian account and to build upon the two accounts that have been developed (R.M. Hare’s and Rolf Sartorius’) in offering a robust utilitarian theory of
An Essay on the Nature and Significance of the Normative Nature of Economics
It is conventional in economics to distinguish between the normative and the positive. The normative has to do with goodness and badness, and with what ought and ought not to be done;1 and the positive has to do with objective description and/or explanation, with what is and with what is necessary given some normative end. The normative has to do with desirability; the positive has to do with truth (in the sense of either descriptive accuracy or serviceability of a means to a given end).2