Essay On Obligation To Obey The Law

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Political thinkers have often regarded that the human nature is chaotic in nature and that individuals cannot exist without the politic. Almost all political philosophers acknowledge that the only way to escape the state of nature is through a government which has some method to enforce compliance with laws and some degree of centralization. There can be two reasons for obeying a law: a prudential and a moral reason. The prudential reasons to obey the law doesn’t prescribe a moral duty upon the individual and has no moral justification unlike the moral reasons of following a law. The modern liberal philosophy is based mainly with the importance of consent. For example, consent is powerful enough to turn battery into boxing. That being the case, the ideal method of establishing a moral duty to obey the law is through an individual’s own consent to be governed by that law. Here the importance is laid to the consent of the individual to be governed by the law because if the individual himself gives the consent to be governed then there exists for him a moral duty to obey the laws as well. Here the natural and positivists law approaches on the…show more content…
As life became unbearable, people make a social contract which constituted an all-powerful sovereign and also involved the surrender of all their rights to him. This contract was the very basis for law in the Hobbesian state. Since the sovereign became all-powerful, he commanded obedience from his subjects and any disobedience on their part would have led to a breach of the social contract and might result in disintegration of the society. Hobbes makes it a duty for people to obey the rules of the commander citing it as the best way for the subjects to achieve their interest. However, this theory of his which talks of unqualified obedience has been criticized on the grounds that it might lead to total
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