Dan Khokhar

Most requests don’t raise any moral concerns even if granting them would be somewhat burdensome. It’s perfectly ordinary amongst friends to ask for help moving house. But things seem different in other cases. If a boss asks his employee for a backrub in the workplace, it’s plausible that he’s wronged her and that she has a complaint that he asked. But that’s puzzling, given the common thoughts that there’s no harm in asking and that it’s okay to decline a request. In this paper, I argue that a request can wrong a person simply in virtue of the fact that it was made, even if it causes no ordinary harm. Making such a request involves abusing the normative power to request, and such an abuse communicates, or expresses, a distinctive kind of disregard for the requestee and their interests, ones which themselves ground and limit the power. We have a variety of interests in not being objects of this kind of expressive disregard, and so we have legitimate complaints about such requests.

The problem of political obligation may roughly be characterized as the philosophical challenge of establishing that there is a general obligation to obey the law as such. In this paper, I defend the recognitional account of political obligation, which consists of the following three claims: (1) citizens of a liberal polity have obligations to recognize one another as free and equal moral members of their own political community and communicate this recognition; (2) under certain conditions, having respect for the law of one’s own state is a crucially important way of affording and communicating such recognition, and so we are obliged as citizens to have such respect under those conditions; and (3) being obligated to have respect for the law entails having a general obligation to obey it. Taken jointly, these claims show how the following three concepts—political recognition, respect for law, and political obligation—are united in a normative nexus that yields a demanding but deeply attractive interpersonal ideal for political life. I then characterize some forms of “meta-skepticism” about political obligation that question the concept’s importance for political philosophy. I conclude by arguing that one virtue of the recognitional account is that it justifies a philosophical interest in political obligation even if these meta-skeptical views are true.

Much philosophical work has examined both imperatival and non-imperatival forms of address that aim to motivate others to action. But one such kind of address has received relatively little attention: begging. This is partly surprising as begging, both as an individual act and as a widespread social practice, raises acute, yet difficult to articulate, moral and political concerns. In this paper, I identify a central form of the phenomenon which constitutively involves communicating one’s relative powerlessness as a means of motivating one’s target to act. I argue that this form of begging is present in a number of cases that animate many of our pre-theoretic normative worries about begging. I argue that when begging of this kind is bad for the beggar herself, this is so because either (i) the invoked powerlessness is bad for the beggar and thereby gives the action a negative evaluative meaning, or (ii) the invoked powerlessness is good/neutral, but the act of begging precludes or replaces valuable ways of interacting that the parties have reasons to care about in the context. In a slogan, the badness of begging revolves around power and helplessness.