Fair-play obligations and distributive injustice
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118778621 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EJPT
Article
Fair-play obligations and
distributive injustice
Go
¨ran Duus-Otterstro
¨m
Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg,
Sweden; Department of Political Science, Aarhus University,
Denmark; Institute for Futures Studies, Sweden
Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between distributive injustice and political obli-
gation within the confines of the fair-play theory of political obligation. More specifically,
it asks how the distribution of benefits and burdens of a cooperative scheme affects
people’s fair-play obligations to that scheme. It argues that neither a sufficiency-based
nor a proportionality-based approach is capable of answering that question singlehand-
edly. However, the two approaches can be combined in a plausible way. Noting that
some of the duties that go into our fair-play obligations are ‘gradual’ and others are
‘non-gradual’, the article argues that the sufficiency-based approach explains non-
gradual duties such as the duty to obey the law, and that the proportionality-based
approach explains gradual duties like political participation and civic responsibility. Thus,
the article contends that the fair-play theory should be extended beyond the question of
legal compliance and be applied to the duties of good citizenship more generally.
Keywords
Distributive justice, fair play, fairness, political obligation, reciprocity
Introduction
Political obligation is the moral duty of citizens to obey the laws of their state. The
fair-play theory (FPT) famously holds that the basis of this duty is fair reciprocity.
Flowing from the liberal premise that society is a scheme of cooperation among
free and equal persons based on mutual restraint, its distinctive claim is that when
someone reaps the benefits of social cooperation thus understood, she incurs an
obligation or duty (I shall use these terms interchangeably) to shoulder a fair share
of its burdens. We benefit from others’ legal restraint and thus owe legal restraint in
return, on pain of acting unfairly.
1
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(2) 167–186
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118778621
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
Corresponding author:
Go
¨ran Duus-Otterstro
¨m, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Box 711, 405 30
Gothenburg, Sweden.
Email: goran.duus-otterstrom@pol.gu.se
FPT sounds plausible enough for societies that share the benefits of cooperation
fairly. But we know that actual societies almost certainly fall short of this standard.
In practice, important goods like income, education and health care vary system-
atically between groups, leading to marked differences in central indicators of
human wellbeing, such as life satisfaction, health and, ultimately, life expectancy.
2
Since these differences are, at least partly, unjust and remediable effects of the way
social cooperation is structured, they raise important questions about the real-
world applicability of the theory. Do the unfairly disadvantaged really have a
duty to obey the law when the laws contribute to their being worse off than
others, and worse off than they should be?
To answer this question, we need an account of how fair-play obligations relate
to the distribution of benefits and burdens. But proponents of FPT have had sur-
prisingly little to say about this topic, and what has been said is quite tentative and
points in different directions. As a result, it is simply not clear how distributive
injustice affects the duty to play fair. This is a significant gap in our understanding
of FPT.
3
This article fills this gap, offering an investigation into the relationship
between distributions and fair-play obligations.
The article has a critical and a constructive part. In the critical part, I discuss a
problem that besets FPT once we apply it in unjust circumstances, namely that
there is a significant tension between the most plausible approach to the relation-
ship between fair-play obligations and distributions – the principle I call
‘Proportionality’ – and the duty to obey the law. Proportionality is the view
that fair-play obligations are proportional to the benefits received. This entails
that those who gain much from social cooperation owe more by way of fair
reciprocity than those who gain little, which is plausible. The problem is that
such scalar judgments seem out of place when it comes to the duty to obey the
law because that duty is what I will call ‘non-gradual’ – it is not amenable to
degrees in the way it is discharged. Since a non-gradual duty requires the same of
all duty bearers, it is difficult to see how it could be compatible with the idea of
differential fair-play obligations depending on the degree to which someone
benefits.
I shall argue that this is a serious problem for FPT. Indeed, I shall argue that, to
overcome the problem, FPT must say that the law binds equally everyone who
benefits ‘enough’ from social cooperation. I say ‘must’ because I do not regard this
move as particularly attractive. Proportionality provides a more plausible frame-
work for thinking about fair reciprocity than sufficiency. Nevertheless, it is what
FPT must say to handle the duty to obey the law.
In the constructive part of the article, I sketch how fair-play theorists could
nonetheless retain a role for Proportionality by extending their theory to the
duties of good citizenship more generally, like volunteer work, rationing and pol-
itical participation. Since such duties are ‘gradual’ – amenable to degrees in the way
they are discharged – considerations of proportionality could be expressed here.
More specifically, the extent of these duties could be tied to how favourable one’s
ratio of benefits over burdens is. I call the resulting view, where the duty to obey the
law is tied to a threshold of sufficiency and other duties are governed by
168 European Journal of Political Theory 20(2)
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