The Social Creation of Morality and Complicity in Collective Harms: A Kantian Account (original) (raw)

Moral Dilemmas and Collective Responsibilities

Essays in Philosophy, 2009

In this paper, I work within Ruth Marcus's account of the source of moral dilemmas and articulate the implications of her theory for collective responsibility. As an extension to Marcus's work, I explore what her account means for the moral emotions and responsibilities of those complicit in perpetuating unjust systems of a nonideal world from which moral dilemmas arise. This move necessitates shifting away from the primacy of control. That one is born into unjust systems one had no hand in establishing does not excuse one from responsibility to mend them. Similarly, even if one's personal contribution in the perpetuation of unjust systems is negligible -- the injustices would continue whether one participated or not, and one's resistance would do little-to-nothing -- one nevertheless retains responsibility. This expanded sense of responsibility necessitates a specialized sort of moral emotion -- one that, like agent-regret or tragic-remorse, transcends the criterion of agentic control, but nevertheless can be classified neither as agent-regret nor tragic-remorse.

Kant and the Problem of Morality

2022

This book examines the significance of Kant’s moral philosophy in contemporary philosophical debates. It argues that Kant’s philosophy can still serve as a guide to navigate the turbulence of a globalized world in which we are faced by an imprescriptible social reality wherein moral values and ethical life models are becoming increasingly unstable. The volume draws on Kantian ethics to discuss various contemporary issues, including sustainable development, moral enhancement, sexism, and racism. It also tackles general concepts of practical philosophy such as lying, the different kinds of moral duties, and the kind of motivation one needs for doing what we consider the right thing. Featuring readings by well-known Kant specialists and emerging scholars with unorthodox approaches to Kant’s philosophy, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, politics and ethics. It will also appeal to moral theorists, applied ethicists and environmental theorists.

Moral Responsibility for Distant Collective Harms

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2015

While it is well recognized that many everyday consumer behaviors, such as purchases of sweatshop goods, come at a cost to the global poor, it has proven difficult to argue that even knowing, repeat contributors are somehow morally complicit in those outcomes. Some recent approaches contend that marginal contributions to distant harms are consequences that consumers straightforwardly should have born in mind, which would make consumers seem reckless or negligent. Critics reasonably reply that the bad luck that my innocent purchase contributes distantly to harm provides insufficient grounds for moral blame; moreover, such distant and seemingly inevitable collective effects are not by themselves obvious reasons for agents to refrain from acting. Granting these criticisms, I argue that the harm that agents do through knowing contributions to distant collective harm actually builds on the morally sparse agential phenomenology of everyday purchases and decisions: contributors who knowingly disregard distant harms, rather than being reckless or negligent about consequences they should have foreseen, very directly perpetuate the moral invisibility and the lack of recognition from which the global poor generally suffer. This provides agents with clearer moral reasons to refrain from knowing participation in unstructured collective harms, and clearer reason to bear them in mind in acting.

Sustaining the Individual in the Collective: A Kantian Perspective for a Sustainable World

Kantian Review, 2022

Individualist normative theories appear inadequate for the complex moral challenges of climate change. In climate ethics, this is especially notable with the relative marginalization of Kant. I argue that Kant’s philosophy, understood through its historical and cosmopolitan dimensions, has untapped potential for the climate crisis. First, I situate Kant in climate ethics and evaluate his marginalization due to perceived individualism, interiority and anthropocentrism. Then, I explore aspects of Kant’s historical and cosmopolitan writings, which present a global, future-orientated picture of humanity. Ultimately, Kant’s philosophy offers a unique take on the climate deadlock capable of sustaining the individual in the collective.

Solidarity and social bonds. A kantian perspective

González, A. M. 2022 "Solidarity and Social Bonds: A Kantian perspective", in Jose Maria Torralba& Alejandro N. García & Patricio Fernández (eds), Ways of Being Bound. Perspectives from Transcendental Philosophy and Realist Sociology, Springer, pp. 119-135. ISBN: 978-3-031-11468-7, 2022

This chapter explores Kant’s potential contribution to the clarification of some problems that have haunted the concept of solidarity since it was first invoked in the context of the French third Republic, as a way to confront the challenge of social integration. Some of those problems revolve around the naturalistic fallacy (does solidarity merely refer to the fact of human interdependence or does it involve a duty?), while others concern the nature of that duty, its relation to justice and beneficence, and the tension between institutionalized solidarity and solidarity as a personal virtue. While Kant never spoke directly of “solidarity”, the author argues that his moral philosophy provides us with the conceptual elements necessary to refine that notion, shedding light on the above mentioned paradoxes. In order to do so, she starts by focusing on Kant’s approach to community in terms of “reciprocal interaction,” to highlight the nature of moral communities and the structure of moral reciprocity, in which the distinction between obligatory and meritorious duties plays a decisive role. González argues that the reciprocity of moral bonds constitutes the building block of Kantian moral communities; that reciprocity, however, is grounded on a normative notion of humanity: on the one hand, human beings are rational beings, able to legislate, and as such worthy of respect; on the other, they are also animals endowed with reason, hence able to set ends for themselves, and endorse the ends of others –which makes them both the object and subject of love. This dual notion of humanity, as well as the duty of humanity, presents itself as the obvious reference point for any attempt to offer a Kantian perspective on solidarity. This perspective, however, would be incomplete were we not to expand our view beyond the realm of individual interactions and consider humanity as a whole: Kant speaks of the duty to promote the highest good in a moral community as a duty “sui generis, not of human beings toward human beings but of the human race toward itself.”

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.

Responsibility, Violence, and Catastrophe

People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

Mea Culpa, Sua Culpa, Tua Maxima Culpa: Collective Responsibility and Legal Judgment

Revista Direito UFMS

Ascertaining litigation for crimes reaching the dimensions of crimes against humanity remains an elusive quest. This is despite the precedents set by post-WWII trials in international criminal law and post-conflict justice. Ranging from the contribution of Nuremberg to the substantive development of international criminal law, to the philosophical evaluation of legalism in post-conflict systems of justice, the persistent significance of the Nuremberg legacy is indeed worthy of attention. In this article, the Nuremberg legacy is reexamined from the perspective of collective responsibility for mass crimes. The Nuremberg Judgment is counted as the benchmark in international law for the definition and adjudication of individual accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity and redefined the nature of legal responsibility. However, concurring with Karl Jaspers, I argue that for such crimes, the judgment cannot emanate from the courtroom alone. In this vein, the paper revisits theories of collective responsibility and culpability. Due to the extensive nature of harm involved in historic injustices, I posit that individual responsibility argument waged against historic justice claims carries forward a great deficit. Historic injustices and the harms they generate are best understood as collective harms. The response to such harms must have a collective component as well, and the remedies offered are only meaningful in a social and political context. One common form of such harm, constitutive harm, significantly differs from the aggregative accounts of harm generally used by standard * The author wishes to thank Professor Carl Ehrlich for introducing her to Karl Jaspers' thought and sharing his late father Professor Leonard Ehrlich's pathfinder work on Jaspers, who was a student of the philosopher himself, with great generosity.