 Margaret Gilbert has recently challenged this moralized characterization of political obligation (Gilbert 2006; Gilbert 2013). She maintains that a political obligation is a genuine obligation, by which she means that it provides a person subject to it with a sufficient, though not necessarily conclusive, reason for action that trumps considerations of inclination or self-interest. However, Gilbert distinguishes between two kinds of genuine obligations, or two senses of the term “obligation,” the first synonymous with being the subject of a moral requirement and the second with “owing” something to another (2013, pp. 391–2). Obligation in this second sense describes a normative relationship between two or more parties, one that can be created via a suitable act of will; for example, by what Gilbert calls an exercise of joint commitment. It is the second sense of obligation that Gilbert maintains we ought to employ in our analysis of the problem of political obligation, understood here as the challenge of accounting for the obligations people owe one another as co-members of a given polity. That does not preclude the development of a theory concerning when moral requirements outweigh or defeat people’s political obligations, of course. The theory of political obligation itself, however, ought to be de-moralized.