 How can the state’s mere willing that a person perform a certain act create a moral obligation to do so? One response is to construe the successful exercise of practical authority not as the creation of moral obligations ex nihilo but as a justified claim to deference to the state’s judgment regarding what its subjects have independent reason to do. The characterization of this deference within a person’s deliberation is a matter of some dispute. H. L. A. Hart and Joseph Raz, for example, argue that law is preemptive; law does not merely offer a consideration for or against a potential course of action, to be weighed against any and all other relevant considerations. Rather, law aims to exclude from an agent’s deliberation at least some of the considerations favoring or opposing the conduct at issue, considerations that in the absence of the law it would be permissible to take into account (Raz 1979, chaps. 1 and 2). Rival views of the manner in which political obligation functions in a person’s deliberation reject the exclusionary element of Raz’s account of the duty to obey the law, arguing that political obligations are simply weighty moral reasons that are balanced against all of the other reasons a person has to perform or not perform a given act (Perry 1989). On neither account, though, is a person’s political obligation taken to provide her with an absolute duty to obey the law. Raz, for example, notes that law need not exclude all of the first-order reasons a person might have for performing a given act (1986, p. 46). Nor does he claim that the first-order reason the law provides for not performing a given act will always outweigh or defeat non-excluded first-order reasons a person has to perform that act. In other words, the duty to obey the law is a prima facie or pro tanto reason for action, from which it follows that the bearer of a political obligation may not always have a conclusive or all-things-considered reason to act as the law demands.