Dagger 4 & 5

Dagger starts out with chapter four by saying that autonomy is a human right regardless of race, nationality, or citizenship and goes to suggest that human rights may be neutral in this respect. But he wants to argue that there is a special relationship between members of a community and members in the same society take priority over others not part of that political community. He explores four ways to justify giving preference to members in the same political community over people who are not part of that political community. The first three arguments he looks are, the argument from necessity, the argument from efficiency and the argument from side effects, all of which in some way miss the point or fail to justify giving priority to fellow citizens. The forth argument, the argument from reciprocity, he successfully, at least from his account, ties autonomy to community bonds. And here he draws on the notion of fair play, by saying first, “political order typically provides benefits for those who belong to it.”(47and second, “qua cooperative enterprise.”(47) So basically we owe preference to fellow citizens because by following the rules of fair play, a community can strive toward fulfilling each other’s interest and cooperate within society to function within a society well.

I personally like the theory of fair play, it’s like we give and we take. But not everyone gives at the same time nor does everyone take at the same time. And he goes on to say that even though some people don’t play fair within a society, since the majority of people do (say pay taxes), the people who do not pay taxes will not bring the downfall of a political community. So basically what he wanted to do in chapter four, or at least what I got from it was, tie autonomy to community and he was able to do this by tying autonomy to human rights, and defended giving preference to members of the same political society, even though autonomy is a human right. The defense was what I was going through already, argument from reciprocity and from reciprocity he was able to derive fair play from it.

In chapter five he goes on to defend fair play from three objections. He concludes by saying, “reciprocity and fairness to them place us, other things being equal, under a general obligation to obey the laws.”(79) Fair play according to Dagger is a cooperative practice within a political society, it is not absolute and can be overridden, and this obligation is not the law. I will be interested to see how he attempts to continue to tie autonomy and civic virtue together, namely, how he will be able to get people to cooperate within republican liberalism and put aside their personal interests for the community as a whole, when required to do so.