Kutz (2000) Complicity (1) Introduction

Kutz, Christopher (2000). Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

We find ourselves connected to harms and wrongs, albeit by relations that fall outside the paradigm of individual, intentional wrongdoing.

1. Buying a table made of tropical wood that comes from a defoliated rain forest
2. Owning stock in a company that does business in a country that jails political dissenters.
3. Being a citizen of nation that bombs another country's factories in a reckless attack on terriorists
4. Inhabiting a region seized long ago from its aboriginal occupants
5. Helping to design an automobile that manufacturer knowingly sells with a dangerously defective fuel system
6. Administering a national health care bureaucracy that carelessly allows the distribution of HIV-contaminated blood. [1]

 

It is an undeniable feature of our social life that people have a host of morally significant reactions when they stand in such mediated relations to harms-reactions ranging from discomfort to regret to guilt-and that they are judged by victims and onlookers. They are also often punished or compelled to make restitution and repair. These cultural and legal practice, surrounding relations of an agent to a harm that are mediated by other agents, comprise the domain of complicity. [2]

 

Moral philosopher have tended to avoid the problem of collective wrongdoing, a tendency reflected in the origins of philosophical ethics.