Obligation and Impersonality

Abstract

Although sociologists conceive obligation as an objective force (the social) that compels individuals to act and think according to pre-defined norms of conduct and ways of reasoning, philosophers view it as an imperative that is met through the agent’s deliberation. The aim of this article is to undermine the standard dichotomy between the deterministically sociological and the moral–philosophical views of obligation by way of contending that Wittgenstein’s view on blind obedience (as analyzed by Meredith Williams) bears a conception of the social. I will then argue that Wittgenstein’s notion of forms of life and the sociological notion of situation refer to the same encompassing phenomenon: obligation. I will finally claim that this phenomenon should be re-specified in terms of impersonality to devise a shared dynamic conception of obligation admitting that a plurality of contextual normative orders monitor collective and individual action in ordinary life.