Philosophical Anarchism

A. John Simmons
Wellman & Simmons, Is There a Duty to Obey the Law?

The conclusion to which those arguments point...is that there is (for most persons in most states) no moral duty to obey the law.  This is the position commonly referred to as philosophical anarchism.  Most nontheorists, I've suggested, are probably initially disinclined to accept such a conclusion, perhaps because they think it implies that legal disobedience is routinely or always morally justifiable.  And in one technical sense this is correct. If "disobedience" means literally "not obeying the law"--that is, not doing what the law commands because the law commands it--then the denial of a duty to obey does in fact entail that disobedience... is normally justified.  But if by "legal disobedience"we mean simply "not performing the act (or forbearance) identified by the law as obligatory," then nothing so dramatic about the moral justification for disobedience to law in fact follows from my conclusion.