Obligation To Obey The Law Essay

authority, or state, is in the business of ensuring compliance with its dictates by means of the official use of coercive power. A state is morally legitimate only if it is justified in using coercion as a means of ensuring compliance with its laws. But, Dworkin insists, the use of such coercion is justified only if there is a general moral obligation to obey the law. Thus any argument for the legitimacy of the state must demonstrate the existence of a general obligation to obey the law.

Dworkin argues that there are at least possible legitimate states, because there are attainable circumstances under which such an obligation would obtain. The obligation to obey the law is, according to Dworkin, an “associative” obligation. He defines

Safety regulations provide an important and wide-ranging example of this. Laws controlling drug and health-care quality, setting safety standards for cars, establishing traffic regulations, and regulating many other areas of our lives make use of expert knowledge not available to most people. Of course, what the best course of action is in a particular case—how fast to drive on a particular road, or which medicines to give to a sick child—does not depend on the existence of the law; in this case, as in the more straightforward case of murder, the law should reflect the reasons that apply anyway. But it is arguable that we sometimes have a moral obligation to obey laws based on expertise, instead of acting directly on our evaluation of the reasons those laws should reflect. This may be because our actions are more likely to correspond to the balance of moral reasons if we follow the law than if we rely directly on our own judgment. If this is sometimes the case, then the law has made a difference to what we ought to do; for now it is sometimes true that we ought to obey the law, regardless of which course of action we should have taken in the absence of it.