Reasons for Obedience

Text by professor Timo Airaksinen

Too many different sources of positive obligation may lead to inconsistencies. The prince's demands can be impossible for me to realize on conscientious grounds, and thus I refuse to act. This is not automatically wrong because active obedience cannot be required: to refuse in this case is not an act of disloyalty if I can successfully explain why I refuse. Such an explanation is available only in the positive case. The negative moral laws are strict, so that to violate them "in the least degree is a vice or sin." (PO 18). On the other hand,

[S]ince it must be confessed that in all cases our actions come not within the direction of certain fixed moral rules, it may possibly be still questioned, whether obedience to the Supreme Power be not one of those exempted cases, and consequently to be regulated by the prudence and discretion of every single person rather than adjusted to the rule of absolute non-resistance. (PO 17).

Indeed, in some cases a person may judge himself what to do. "Things of insignificant and trifling concern are, for that very reason, exempted from the rules of morality." Also, some practical issues are more particular than general:

Numberless rules there may be for regulating affairs of great concernment, at certain junctures, and to some particular persons or societies, which, notwithstanding, are not to be esteemed moral or natural laws, but may be either totally abrogated or dispensed with; because the private ends they were intended to promote respect only some particular persons, as engaged in relations not founded in the general nature of man, who, on various occasions, and in different postures of things, may prosecute their own designs by different measures, as in human prudence shall seem convenient. (PO 18).