Our visiting scholar Mark Nelson will give a presentation entitled “A. John Simmons and the Case of the Lucky Canadian” as part of the CRÉ’s Midis de l’éthique.

To join via Zoom, click here (Meeting ID: 872 6976 7843; Passcode: 5753130).

Abstract

One of the enduring questions of political philosophy is the question of Political Obligation, and one of the most promising answers to this question is based on the idea of fair play.  Despite its promise, however, the argument from fair play for political obligation faces some well-known challenges.  In this paper, I consider a less well-known but serious challenge:  that, on an intuitive reading, the fair play argument for political obligation yields counter-intuitive results about who is (and who is not) subject to a duty of political obedience to particular states.  I shall explain how this problem arises for the Fair Play Argument (FPA) given a general and unqualified reading of the Principle of Fair Play (PFP).  I shall then consider A. John Simmons’s attempt to qualify the principle, noting that it saves the PFP, but makes it unfit for use in an argument for political obligation.  I shall then propose what I take to be a more natural way to qualify the PFP, concluding that even this superior reading of the PFP makes the FPA dependent on some rather dubious assumptions.  But first a brief sketch of the question of political obligation and some of the main answers to it.