An alternative explanation of political obligation

Natural selection may have guided us into accepting political obligation as a heritable feature in our cognitive system and sociocultural structures.

Political philosophy is a branch in philosophy that studies how society works. One pillar question of this field is political obligation. That is, do we have obligation to obey the law? Seemingly rhetorical and pedantic, this question links to many important and practical social issues such as the legitimacy of laws and states, citizen-police conflicts, and to my personal interest, how morality influences constitution, and vice versa. These issues are particularly relevant to recent unsettling events happening throughout the world.

Despite that Socrates first touched upon this question more than 2000 years ago and that numerous philosophers have studied it since, no answer is yet to everyone’s satisfaction. I’ll offer my own thoughts on this topic in this article.

Let me start with an introduction of the concept.

What political obligation is all about

Imagine that you’re driving on a straight line in a flat and boring desert. There is suddenly a red traffic light in front of you. Will you stop?

You would probably think of no other choice were you in a busy city center. The consequence of hitting someone else, being caught by the traffic camera, or simply getting honked is too dire to be desired. So in this situation, you would probably comply with the law because of “external” pressures.

But when there is no eye or camera on you in the desert, would you do the same just because the law says so, for peace of mind “internally”? If you do stop the car just because the law asks, then you likely agree with philosophers who believe in political obligation.

If you choose to follow the law only when legal consequences are expected, then you agree with philosophical anarchists, who think we don’t have political obligation. The third school of thoughts is political anarchism, a belief that the law and state are to be overthrown all together.

Theories that support political obligation

People have been arguing whether political obligation is true for centuries. There are a number of classical and contemporary accounts that support it. To name a few:

• The gratitude theory argues that we are obliged to obey the law because of the benefit the state has bestowed on us. An objection to this theory can be shown with a simple example. Do you have to pay a stranger just because they mowed your lawn without your permission?
• The fairness theory argues that we are part of a cooperative society and ought to treat each other fairly even if no law governs us.
• The tacit consent theory argues that using public services (roads, sewers, and all) expresses an implicit consent to obey the law. An object to both this and the previous theory is that it is impossible for most citizens to opt out from the consent by moving out of the country or stopping using public facilities.

(You can see a complete list of theories in the reference at the bottom.)

In the end, there hasn’t been a widely accepted theory to support political obligation. For this reason, Philosophical anarchists argue that we haven’t found a reason to obey the law. Some even asserted that the reason can’t exist in principle.

An alternative theory, maybe?

This section reflects my early, and possibly naive and shadow, thought.

I started thinking about political obligation because of my interest in morality and their relations. Indeed, some scholars argue political obligation has something to do with morality. While I haven’t found strong reasons to reject this idea, because it’s easy to imagine a highly developed society where social behavior is guided by both moral standards and the law and they match each other well, I also grew the feeling that morality might not be required for political obligation. (This, in some way, has a parallel to Margaret Gilbert’s propositions. See the reference at the bottom.)

What has instead dwelled my mind is the way human brains make sense of the world and learn to interact with it. I started to hypothesize that political obligation provides cognitive advantages to human brains. Therefore, it is the winning strategy chosen by natural selection. Thus, an answer to a philosophical question may be found in evolutionary theories.

Let me describe my reasoning in three statements. First, political obligation helps the brain build a coherent model of social rules efficiently.

Scientists have long believed that the brain learns by building an internal model that represents the physical world, which includes social norms and laws. We can go so far as to say that any functioning brain requires this model to be coherent and consistent with the physical world. A number of mental disorders have been explained by deformed mental models.

So how does political obligation help mental modeling? Because it allows a coherent yet simple representation of the world. A philosophical anarchist who stops at traffic lights only conditionally requires a bigger mental model with more variables to capture the variation in behavior. In contrast, the mental model of a consistently behaving driver doesn’t need to encode these conditions.

Simpler models also mean lower energy consumption. Like all other living organisms, humans are highly optimized for energy efficiency. So their innate tendency for political obligation shouldn’t come as a surprise to evolutionists.

Second, political obligation allows efficient decision making.

Because of their simpler mental models with fewer rules, it’s easier for people in the political obligation camp to build these rules into “muscle memory”, or the unconscious part of the brain. I doubt an experienced driver ever thinks about stopping when seeing a red light. They just do it.

“Thinking” here is a colloquial term for conscious processing. This kind of processing occurs when the brain selects only one from many (yes, a lot) unconscious thoughts into its executive center, and broadcasts this chosen thought, aka. attention, to the rest of the brain. It effectively commands many (yes, still a lot) other neurons to participate in more deliberate considerations.

This is an expensive and slow process compared to “simpler” decisions the brain makes unconsciously many times a second. It also preempts the executive center from doing any other useful work, because the brain can hold only one attention at a time.

In other words, political obligation leverages unconscious processing, allows faster and more efficient decision making and control of behavior, and frees the brain to do more important work. That is, unless a philosophical anarchist believes their most important work is to think about disobedience.

This provides another significant advantage for natural selection to consider.

Third, political obligation supports social learning. Humans gradually learn to interact with the world and peers through countless action-and-consequence cycles. These cycles teach them to do more things that result in rewards and fewer things that result in punishment. This is called reinforcement in psychology (or reinforcement learning in AI).

Intuitively, reinforcement works best when external feedback is given consistently. If an action, say running red lights, always result in negative outcomes, either due to legal consequences or political obligation’s belief, the brain will learn faster than if it was given different feedback in different circumstances for the same action. Here for brevity, I glossed over a factual inaccuracy that belief isn’t an external stimulus. But I hope you got the idea.

It‘s not difficult to imagine that sociocultural evolution favors apt learners.

Another way to look at it is to examine how the brain learns cause and effect. Strong evidence has shown that brains work just like Bayesian inference systems. It builds probabilistic models iteratively based on observations. If violating the law such as running red lights in the desert doesn’t result in unpleasant observations, the signal it gives the brain would be in conflict with messages observed in public media and street signs that condemn this behavior. Processing these conflicting signals will “weaken” the built Bayesian network, which is to say, the brain will be less capable of making confident decisions.

Avid readers may have noticed a connection between the first statement I made and this preceding paragraph. Indeed, they both discussed how the brain builds its internal models; the former talked about general ideas while the latter a possible mechanical implementation.

Just like many other philosophical topics, political obligation has been a controversial one for a long time. I attempted to provide a possible explanation with my limited knowledge in cognitive and evolutionary sciences. This explanation demonstrates the advantages of political obligation over alternatives. Because of this, natural selection may have guided us into accepting political obligation as a heritable feature in our cognitive system and sociocultural structures.

Reference: Dagger, R. and Lefkowitz, D., “Political Obligation”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition)