Responsibility in Cases of Structural and Personal Complicity: A Phenomenological Analysis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Complicity and Conditions of Agency
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2018
In his groundbreaking study Complicity, Christopher Kutz introduces the notion of 'participatory intentions' (individual intentions whose content is collective) to explain an agent's complicity with groups or organisations. According to Kutz, participatory intentions allow us to hold individuals morally accountable for collective wrongs independent of their causal contribution to the wrong and its ensuing harm. This article offers an alternative account of complicity. Its central claim is that an agent's complicity might be due to the dependence of his professional role on the normative principles that make up the organisation or institution in whose practices he partakes. In other words, there might arise a constitutive failure in an agent's attempt to ascribe to himself a non-complicit professional identity. I use the case of SS-Judge Konrad Morgen in order to illustrate this understanding of complicity. The phenomenon of complicity is commonly conceived and discussed in individualis-tic categories. There are two individuals, P and A; P is the principal agent and A, the accomplice, is somehow involved in what P does. In criminal law, this is spelled out as follows: P is the principal perpetrator of a crime and A, the accomplice, is complicit in the crime either by being an accessory before or after the fact, or by aiding and abetting P's criminal act. 1 In the moral sphere, complicity is defined as an agent's participation in the morally wrongful activity of another person. A's complicity consists in his or her encouraging or enhancing actions of P that violate basic moral standards and norms. 2 In most cases, complicity requires an agent's intentional involvement. In order for A to be accused of a crime committed by P, A must wilfully partake in P's crime in one of the ways mentioned above. Likewise, complicity in moral wrongdoing presupposes A's intentional support of P's moral transgressions. Complicity is thus tied to a specific mental attitude of one person towards the actions of another. 3 The objection has been raised that the individualistic framework unduly restricts the scope of complicity. 4 Complicity often takes the form of an agent's affiliation with groups and corporate group agents. What, then, determines our understanding of complicity in the case of agents belonging to organisations or institutions, particularly organisations and institutions that are engaged in corrupt and harmful prac-tices? How should we define complicity in these cases? To what extent can and should intentional attitudes be the main determinants of complicity given that complex institutional structures often make it hard to trace and ascertain such a subjective mental element? This article seeks to develop an alternative to a primarily intention-based account of complicity. 5 Its central thesis is that an agent's complicity might result from the
Being implicated: On the fittingness of guilt and indignation over outcomes
Philosophical Studies, 2021
When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related but importantly different answer: What is required for fitting guilt and indignation is that the agent is relevantly implicated in that outcome: that the agent’s morally substandard responsiveness to reasons, or substandard caring, is relevantly involved in a normal explanation of it. This answer, it is further argued, makes sense because when an agent’s substandard caring is so involved, the outcome provides a lesson against such caring, a lesson central to the function of guilt and indignation.
The implications of being implicated. Individual responsibility and structural injustice
ethic@ - An international Journal for Moral Philosophy
Within the global justice debate the demandingness objection is primarily aimed at utilitarian theorists who defend a version of the 'optimizing principle of beneficence' to deal with the problem of global poverty. The problem of demandingness, however, is hardly ever raised within the context of the dominant institutional theories of global justice that see severe poverty as a human rights violation. Nor are the fundamental underlying questions posed by many of these theorists. Which specific responsibilities do individual moral agents have regarding institutional and structural forms of injustice (1)? Which political spheres, organized public spaces, or political practices are necessary to create a setting in which these responsibilities can be discharged (2)? Does a 'defensible and psychologically feasible conception of responsibility' (Scheffler 2002, 62) exist that is restrictive-yet demanding-enough to deal with the complex challenges of our globalizing age (3). This paper addresses questions (1) and (3) on the basis of a critical analysis of Iris Marion Young's social connection theory of responsibility.
Agency, Complicity, and the Responsibility to Resist Structural Injustice
Journal of Social Philosophy
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On Blame and Punishment: Self-Blame, Other-Blame, and Normative Negligence
Law and Philosophy
Punishment should, at least normally, be reserved for blameworthy actions. But to make sense of that claim, we need an account of blame and of why it might license or even call for punishment. Doug Husak, in whose honor this paper is written, rejects quality of will theories of blame as relevant to criminal punishment—what I call “criminal blame.” He offers instead a reason-responsive account of blameworthiness, according to which blame applies to wrongful actions chosen by agents who knew that what they were doing was or was likely to be wrong (they saw the reasons not to do it), and who nonetheless acted wrongly because of weakness of will. I agree with Husak about quality of will theories, but I argue that weakness of the will is often exculpating, and that when it is not it is because of normative negligence with regard to the reasons to steel one’s will. Thus, I argue his reason responsive account fails too. I offer instead an account of blame the key idea of which is that criminal blame is normatively appropriate as a way of communicating the importance of self-blame. Self-blame properly responds to normative negligence. Moreover, it comes with the emotion of guilt in which an agent experiences a kind of suffering for her unexcused wrongdoing. Punishment, based on criminal blame, reinforces the importance of guilt for maintaining a community of mutual respect. Note, this is a substantially updated version from the one posted in January 2021, which was an update of one posted in August 2020.
The puzzle of responsibility under oppressive threat
Rechtsphilosophie-Zeitschrift für Grundlagen des Rechts, , 2025
Coercion is generally taken to diminish the voluntariness of one’s action and, correspondingly, to cancel or diminish one’s responsibility for action by undermining one’s autonomy. In this essay, I analyze cases of “oppressive coercion”, in which the coercive threat builds on an oppressive normative practice or social schema. How to treat such cases? Are they dyadic or collective? What sorts of responsibilities are in place? In contrast to widespread arguments, I argue (i) that oppression is not an exculpatory condition for the coercer, (ii) that the victim of conditional threat retains the normative power to refuse the coercer’s deal, and (iii) that precisely this power raises the puzzle of distributed responsibility. To address this puzzle and identify the victim’s scope of responsible agency, I propose a dynamic model of institutional agency, in which moral responsibility for oppressive coercion is rationally negotiated and distributed across individuals and institutional agencies. Finally, I argue that this approach vindicates the normative act of claiming responsibility for action as a key mode of self-affirmation and resistance.
Blame, deserved guilt, and harms to standing
Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility, ed. Andreas Brekke, Cambridge UP, 2022
Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering.
Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, 2020
This article offers a justification for accommodating claims of conscience. The standard justification points to the pain that acting against one's conscience entails. But that defense cannot make sense of the state's refusal to accommodate individuals where the law interferes with their deeply meaningful but nonmoral projects. An alternative justification, we argue, arises once one recognizes the connection between conscience and moral address: One's lived moral convictions determine when and with what force one can hold others to account. Acting against one's convictions can undermine one's standing to blame others who act in similar ways. When the state compels someone to act against conscience, it renders her complicit in conduct she takes to be wrong and thereby impairs her ability to condemn similar conduct in the future, in a manner akin to the hypocrite. The reason the state should not compel people to act against conscience, then, is that doing so would undercut their moral standing.
Introduction to Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity (2)
parallax, 2023
This essay introduces the second part of a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity." The issue joins a wave of work over the last two decades addressing indirect forms of participation in injustice and links that work to ongoing discussions in what became known during the same period as affect theory. The collection thus focuses on grey zones of responsibility and complicated structures of emotion and feeling – and especially on what we can learn by tracking their interplay.