Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? by Christopher Wellman

Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? by Christopher Wellman

The central question in political philosophy is whether political states have the right to coerce their constituents and whether citizens have a moral duty to obey the commands of their state. In this 2005 book, Christopher Heath Wellman and A. John Simmons defend opposing answers to this question. Wellman bases his argument on samaritan obligations to perform easy rescues, arguing that each of us has a moral duty to obey the law as his or her fair share of the communal samaritan chore of rescuing our compatriots from the perils of the state of nature. Simmons counters that this, and all other attempts to explain our duty to obey the law, fail. He defends a position of philosophical anarchism, the view that no existing state is legitimate and that there is no strong moral presumption in favor of obedience to, or compliance with, any existing state.

“Both participants have played important parts in the debate over political obligation…and each is eminently qualified to represent his side in the narrower debate that takes place between the covers of their coauthored book…One conclusion seems absolutely clear: the book itself is a winner…Wellman and Simmons both deserve praise for the clarity of their writing and the rigor of their arguments, the result of which is a book that is simultaneously accessible to advanced undergraduates and “must reading” for political philosophers with an interest in the problem of political obligation” Richard Dagger, Arizona State University, Ethics

Andrew Altman is Professor of Philosophy and Director in the Jean Beer Blumenfeld Center for Ethics at Georgia State University. He is the author of Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique and Arguing About Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy, and has published widely on topics in legal and
political philosophy. Along with Professor Wellman, he has co-directed two summer seminars for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Christopher Heath Wellman is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis and Professorial Fellow at CAPPE, Charles Sturt University. He is the author of A Theory of Secession and Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? (with John Simmons).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521537841
ISBN 10	0521537843
Title	Is There a Duty to Obey the Law?
Author	Christopher Wellman
Series	For And Against
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2005-08-01
Number of pages	216
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.