This article aims to provide some insight into the nature and content of the theory of associative political obligation. It does this by first locating the view in the wider debate on political obligation, analyzing the view in terms of four central elements that are shared by many of its versions, and then discussing important criticisms that have been made of each of these, as well as some rejoinders by defenders of the theory.

In his recent book Killing in War, McMahan develops a powerful argument for the view that soldiers on opposite sides of a conflict are not morally on a par once the war has started: whether they have the right to kill depends on the justness of their war. In line with just war theory in general, McMahan scrutinizes the ethics of killing the enemy. In this article, I accept McMahan's account, but bring it to bear on the entirely neglected, but (...) nevertheless interesting, issue of what the military call killings or, as I refer to such acts here, internecine war killings. I focus on the case of the soldier who is ordered by his officer, at gunpoint, to go into action or to kill innocent civilians, and who kills his officer in self-defence. I argue that, at the bar of McMahan's account of the right to kill in self-defence, the officer lacks a justification for attacking the soldier as a means of enforcing his order, and the soldier thus sometimes (but not always) has the right to kill his officer should the latter so act. (shrink)

Paternalistic behaviour directed towards a person’s informed and competent decisions is often thought to be morally impermissible. This view is supported by what we can call the Anti-Paternalism Principle. While APP might seem plausible when employed to show the wrongness of paternalism by the state, there are some cases of paternalistic behaviour between private, informed, and competent individuals where APP seems mistaken. This raises a difficulty for supporters of APP. Either they need to reject APP to accommodate our intuitions in (...) these cases, or provide grounds for thinking that paternalistic behaviour between certain private individuals is different in a morally relevant sense. In this paper, I explore several possible morally relevant differences, and find all of them unsatisfactory as grounds for maintaining the plausibility of APP. (shrink)

Dominic Wilkinson’s defence of identity-relative paternalism raises many important issues that are well worth considering. In this short paper, I will argue that there could be two important differences between the first-party and third-party cases that Wilkinson discusses, namely, a difference in associative duties and how the decision relates to the decision maker’s own autonomous life. This could mean that identity-relative paternalism is impermissible in a greater number of cases than he suggests.