A Sense for Political Community: Obligations and Motivations in Time of Covid-19 Pandemic

The aim of this chapter is to focus on individuals’ motivations to comply with the rules of a given political community. Being compliant entails a sort of inner obligation to adhere to them. Such an obligation is to be construed not only as a legal one but even as a political one. In turn, a political obligation implies a moral attitude or disposition towards the community the rules of which are being complied with, i.e., a perception of being committed to a community by acknowledging the value of social cooperation for multiple reasons. Our task is to investigate the relationship between compliance with the rules and motivations for complying with them in the specific situation of Covid-19. Dealing with this issue means having a few tasks in mind. First, we need to describe briefly how people faced the rules issued during the pandemic, i.e., whether and how they accepted to obey the rules, which rules and to what extent. We will refer to the Italian context as an exemplar case, although the normative issues raised, we believe, are generalizable. Second, we will assess the reasons provided by some people by grouping them: we will identify moral reasons, prudential reasons, opportunistic reasons, social reasons, but also content-independent reasons when there is no direct connection between the reasons and the actions for which they are reasons (Raz 1986, 35). In this case, obedience to the law is granted for the very duty to obey it. Third, we will wonder whether such reasons for compliance are convincing enough: in fact, many people did not share the restrictions and followed them only partially and passively. In the face of such a situation, sanctions have been adopted backed by the harm principle or even by invoking impure paternalism. Hence, reasons for compliance should be further investigated and the very notion of political obligation needs to be enlarged. Fourth, with this purpose, we will explore the role of regulated emotions – as opposed to immediate ones – in motivating people to comply with rules and norms that are not necessarily those they avow, and the different attitudes individuals have towards the impositions coming from their own group or from others by assuming a parallelism between this issue and the general attitude towards in- and out-groups. The final goal is that of investigating if and to what extent the wider political community can be properly felt as such by individuals and to wonder whether it might incorporate the strong motivation we feel towards the members of our own group.