ABSTRACT
Suppose on the other hand that consent is taken as a sufficient condition for obligation. This would amount to saying that having agreed to the constitution, I am bound by a promise to accept its consequences thereafter. But this may commit me to results I never envisaged nor intended, and which may seem to me so thoroughly immoral that I could not possibly have a duty to submit to them. Is a democrat committed to his constitution, if it becomes the vehicle for anti-democratic revolution? But this is not the main difficulty. We may consent to a government because it suits our interest to do so, even though we know very well that its deliberate intention is to oppress minorities. Though it has majority support, it could still be said that it ought not to have it. Is it then our duty to obey, because we have made a promise; or, is that duty morally void because the promise ought never to have been made, and our duty, instead, to undo the wrong by upsetting the established arrangements at the first opportunity. (Consider in this connection the moral dilemma of the German officers who were bound by an oath to obey Hitler.) This pushes the problem of obligation a step further back. Should we not ask: 'To what political arrangements ought we to consent?' If it could be established that a given set of arrangements deserved our consent, would this not make the fact of consent irrelevant to obligation? iii. Rousseau: consent and the General Will Rousseau's General Will was an ingenious attempt to meet these difficulties. 'Men,' he says, 'are born free and are everywhere in chains . . . What can make that legitimate?'26 Again, the problem is to justify the subjection of otherwise autonomous agents to political authority. Again, any valid obligation must be self-imposed.
