 One upshot of Gilbert’s account is that it entirely separates the existence of political obligations from the justice or injustice of the political community’s institutions and laws. On her account, individuals can acquire genuine obligations in the sense of owing something to another even when their suitable act of willing is coerced or the content of what they agree to owe another is immoral. With respect to political obligation, then, neither state coercion (i.e., the absence of voluntary consent) nor the injustice of a state’s laws or institutions precludes its citizens’ acquisition of a genuine obligation to obey its laws. But why think that a promise extracted at gun point generates any reason to do that which one promised, or that a voluntary agreement to torture babies generates a genuine (albeit not conclusive) obligation to do so? Or, if coerced or immoral owing-obligations are genuine but always defeated or trumped by moral-requirement-obligations, one might wonder why we should posit their separate existence at all? One possibility is that doing so is necessary to render intelligible the response of the promisee when the coerced promisor reneges on her promise; we can understand why the promisee feels betrayed even if we do not think he is justified in feeling that way. This response, however, treats Gilbert’s account of political obligation as an explanatory theory, not a justificatory one (Lefkowitz 2007; for a response, see Gilbert 2013, pp. 406–7).