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This thesis examines Margaret Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment and argues that it cannot serve as its own normative ground without generating an infinite regress. Joint commitments presuppose rather than constitute a prior “we”: the forms of commitment must already be present in the mind before any particular commitment is entered into. Drawing on Carol Rovane’s notion of a rational point of view, John Searle’s Background and Network, and Ruth Millikan’s theory of proper functions, I argue that joint commitments are best understood as the refined outputs of a cooperative technology embedded in our cognitive and social architecture. This re-conceptualization grounds political obligations not in voluntary agreement but in pre-existing structures of sociality, showing that political obligations are a natural – and less consensual – outgrowth of human social life.