Reciprocity and the Rule of Law

Fair-play theories of political obligation hold that persons have a duty to obey the law based on the fact that they benefit from the law and have a duty of reciprocity to comply in return. These accounts are vulnerable to the open-ended reciprocity challenge, according to which persons have discretion over how they discharge debts of reciprocity, such that they may discharge the debts they incur from being members of society in ways other than compliance with the law. I defend fair-play theories against this challenge by arguing that the principle of reciprocity shares a ground with the principle of public equality, and that the latter ultimately requires that legal institutions be arranged in such a way that persons may not exercise discretion over how they discharge the debts of reciprocity that they incur from others' compliance with the law.