Are there any conventional obligations?

Monti, Ezequiel

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1352325223000071

Are there any conventional obligations?

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Citation

Monti E. Are there any conventional obligations?. Legal theory. 2023;29(2):90-121. DOI: 10.1017/S1352325223000071

Abstract

There are reasons to believe that conventional obligations are impossible. Thus, it could be argued that for me to have an obligation to Φ in virtue of the fact that a convention so requires, it must be the case that I have a convention-independent obligation to do something else such that, given the existence of the convention, Φing is a way of doing just that. But, then, my obligation to Φ would not really be conventional at all. On closer inspection, so-called conventional obligations turn out to be no more than a specification of what our nonconventional obligations require given the circumstances. In this paper, I shall argue that contra to what this argument suggests, there can be genuinely conventional obligations. To do so, I develop a second-personal account of conventional obligations, according to which obligations are grounded by conventions in virtue of an explanation that does not follow the indicated pattern.