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Many questions central to political philosophy are naturally focused on political institutions. What rights and liberties should the state grant its people? What makes a state legitimate? Are non-democratic polities possibly just? What kinds of equality should the state concern itself with, and how much inequality is too much?
But political philosophers and scholars in related fields have also turned their attention to the citizens who live under such institutions. From a legal perspective, a citizen is a person who is an official member of a political community and who therefore has certain de jure rights and privileges and legitimate expectations of her government. One important question for political philosophy, then, is whether and how these benefits impose obligations on citizens. In other words, what do people as citizens owe to their governments and/or societies?
What Are Our Civic Duties?
Answers to this question are frequently offered in terms of a civic duty or duties. We might think at a minimum that citizens have a duty to obey the law. The most finely crafted laws are worth little when they are routinely ignored, and a government cannot possibly detect and punish every infraction, at least without unacceptably prevalent surveillance and restrictions of freedom. So, a legal order needs a critical mass of people who routinely obey the laws even when they could get away with breaking them. It seems to follow, then, that citizens have an obligation to obey the law simply because it is the law. We already have a moral obligation not to commit murder, regardless of whether it is illegal or not. But when the law commands us to do things that are in themselves neither right nor wrong (e.g., register for selective service, drive on the right side of the road, display our house numbers on our front doors), we have a civic duty to obey.
Or so the thinking goes; but even this minimal answer has its opponents. For one thing, it is also plausible that there are sometimes good reasons to disobey the law - maybe even a moral obligation to do so. This is why we see the many instances of civil disobedience during the civil rights movement as especially heroic examples of good citizenship. Also, the arguments...