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This chapter is concerned with political obligation, i.e. with one's obligation to obey the laws of one's own country. Here, it is suggested that such an obligation (or one's ‘allegiance,’ as I prefer to call it) varies from system to system; it is one thing in Plato's republic but something quite different in a democratic system of rights. We are concerned, then, with the allegiance of a typical citizen, when acting in character, within a given system of political principles and institutions.

It is argued that citizens have an obligation, a system‐specific duty, in a democratic system of rights to conform to the civil rights laws there. This institutional duty is then extended to take in one's duties towards some non‐rights laws (e.g. tax laws), but it never embraces literally all laws in that society. In the course of the analysis, the views of both John Simmons and John Rawls are criticized.

Democratic institutions provide an example of an inherently imperfect procedure for making civil rights laws; the connection between such institutions and such laws represents at best only a probabilistic tendency. In the end, then, we find that citizens have no duty to conform to all non‐defective rights laws simply in so far as they are enacted laws; The typical citizen can be civilly disobedient with respect to some civil rights laws (subject to certain constraints, e.g. nonviolence) while still satisfying fully the conditions of allegiance in a democratic system of rights.

We return in this chapter, to the issue of the justification of political authority; it is argued here that the notion of political authority is internally justified in a given political system if the main elements in that notion —that is, the title to issue rules, a reasonable presumption of compliance, and the government's rightful monopoly in the use of coercive force – are actually ingredient in the theoretic structure of the system under review. Thus, it is the coherence of the background theory (the coherence of a democratic system of rights), in which each of the authority elements can be shown to have a necessary place that justifies authority in that particular political system.

In developing this line of argument, we come to see that the priority rule (from Ch. 7) has to be modified. We do so by introducing the notion of basic rights: such rights are those civil rights (e.g. freedom of political speech or liberty of conscience) that have passed the double test of being enacted by legislative majorities and of being affirmed and, then, supported over the years by checking devices (such as judicial review). They are rights that have survived the scrutiny of time and experience and public discussion; they have been winnowed by the self‐correcting character of the democratic process, and now continue to enjoy a very high level of social consensus support. Basic rights, as understood here, are the rights that have the top priority in a democratic system of rights.

Arguments are developed here that allow us to rank the relevant disparate options. This ranking involves two main steps: (1) putting option (a) ahead of option (b) – that is, putting (a) policies and laws that are in the interests of each and all ahead of (b) policies and laws concerned with things that are in the corporate or collective interest, such as GDP, though these things are not necessarily in the interests of each person there; and then (2) putting options (a) and (b) ahead of option (c), putting them ahead of policies and laws that help mere majority interests or even hurt minority interests (with the proviso added that allowed instances of (c) must be compatible with the first two options—otherwise they are simply excluded).

Thus, where democratic institutions stay in line with that which justifies them, they will in fact tend to produce civil rights laws and they will not act so as to supersede such rights. There is a deep affinity between the idea of civil rights as justified and that of justified democratic institutions; the two are mutually supportive; accordingly, they can form a coherent system. In this system, democratic institutions must, where they stay true to their own justifying rationale, be constrained so as to observe the established priorities; taking such an approach has implications for institutional design (it can, for example, provide for a justification of judicial review that is compatible with democratic ideals).

The chapter concludes by considering certain troubling problems that arise for democratic theory: problems such as cyclical majorities and strategic voting; these problems are not negligible but they can be dealt with given the resources of a democratic system of rights.

The internal coherence of any system of political institutions and ideas is only one of the considerations we must have in mind in an account of ultimate justification; there is also the idea of a critical moral justification for it. Thus, the book turns, last of all, to the subject of the possibility and character of such vindication for a system of rights.

Two principal theories are canvassed in this regard: the indirect utilitarianism of J. S. Mill and more recent utilitarian thinkers and the contractarian moral justification elaborated by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice (and for several years thereafter). The utilitarian theory is set aside first; it is fundamentally unable to provide a principled justification for the priority of basic rights over policies justified by considerations of aggregate benefit or general well being. And Rawls's contractarianism is set aside as failing in one of its own self‐appointed tasks: it cannot provide an objective basis for assessing competing political or moral theories

These two failures to provide, from among leading contemporary moral theories, a critical moral grounding for a democratic system of rights do not serve to establish the creditability of philosophical anarchism; but it is clear, nonetheless, that more than was initially thought to be involved will be required in order to do the job effectively.

The chapter and the book, conclude with a brief survey of the tasks of political theory and of what has been accomplished to date. The idea of a system of rights is one of the great ideas of political philosophy and, unlike many of these ideas, it is still a living one; so, some suggestions are made about the way forward.