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. 

① Aristotle, for example, when discussing the concept of the "voluntary,' gave the example of someone ordered by a tyrant to do something shameful, lest harm come to his family. On its face, this is a case of forced collaboration, in which an essential feature is that the plan to do wrong originates with one person, and is completed by another. But Aristotle ignores this relational feature, in effect reducing the problem of shared responsibility to the purely individualistic question of whether the threat was grave enough to defeat any element of choice. If the threats were more than human fabric can bear (at least relative to the badness of the crime demanded) then we cannot say the agent has acted voluntarily; and so, on Aristotle's account, there is no question of imputing [전가하다, 씌우다] shame to the person. Responsibility appears wholly a function of individual choice.

② Immanuel Kant likewise reduced cases of apparently collective responsibility to questions of individual choice and action. Kant in famously claimed that it would be wrong even to lie to a murderer who asks whether your friend has taken refuge in your house. Kant transforms the example into a case of complicity when he argues that if, intending to deceive the murderer, you said your friend "was not at home when he had really gone out without your knowing it, and if the murderer had then met him as he went away and murdered him, you might justly be accused as the cause of his death." By contrast, "if you have held rigorously to the truth, public justice can lay no hand on you, whatever the unforeseen consequences may be." His reason for this surprising conclusion is that by lying, but not by telling the truth, you make the murderer into an instrument of your will, and so assume responsibility for the harms arising from that instrument. Now Kant may well have mistaken the implications of his own theory; but the essential point for our purposes is to notice that, like Aristotle, Kant answers the question of responsibility purely in terms of facts about you, in this case what you intended and what you caused, and without regard to the aims and acts of the murderer. A virtuous will, in Kant's view, seems to insulate [절연 처리를 하다, 보호하다] from responsibility, while only a vicious will implicates [연루되었음을 보여 주다]. What Primo Levi called "the gray zone" of collaboration with evil is artificially transformed into the sharp light of duty and the darkness of its violation.

 

The responses called for by complicitous relations to harm and wrong also seem to conflict with a set of principles of commonsense morality and moral psychology that limn [묘사하다, 그리다] our common, nonphilosophical understanding of individual accountability. [3]

 

① Individual Difference Principle: I am only accountable for a harm if something I did made a difference to its occurrence. If substantially the same harm would have occurred regardless of what I have done, I cannot be accountable for it.

② Individual Control Principle: I am only accountable for events over which I have control, and whose occurrence I could have prevented.

③ Individual Autonomy Principle: I am not accountable for the harm another agent causes, unless I have induced or coerced that agent into performing an act.

Together, these principles of accountability define

an individualistic conception of moral agency. [4]

This conception of accountability is individualistic in three respects: ① its subject is an individual moral agent; ② the object of accountability, or the harm or wrong for which the subject is reproached, is ascribable to that subject alone; ③ and the basis of accountability, or the grounds for holding the subject accountable, consists primarily in facts about that subject, such as the subject's causal contributions or the content of the subject's intentions.

Paradigmatically, individual moral agents are reproached, or reproach themselves, for harms ascribable to them and them alone, on the basis of their intentional actions and causal contributions.

The other two aspects of this conception of moral agency, the individualistic object and basis of accountability, reflect a commitment to what I call evaluative solipsism. This evaluative solipsism has two elements, relational and causal.

Relational evaluative solipsism

Causal evaluative solipsism

1. Questions of accountability are resolved without reference to the nature of the agent's relations to particular others, whether fellow actors, victims, or bystanders. 2. Considerations of what others do, or of how they may be warranted in responding to what the agent does, play no role in the evaluation. 3. Kant's discussion of lying to the murderer was solipsistic in this sense: The special relation of trust between you and your friend, and of opportunism [기회주의] between the murderer and you, made no difference to the permissibility of your lie. 4. Such a conception of accountability is essentially retributivist or desert-based[행위자의 공과(功過)에 따라 책임을 할당하는]: its primary question is what treatment the agent.

1. The object of evaluation is solely what an individual has caused or meant to cause, as captured by the Individual Difference Principle. 2. States of affairs to which an individual has made no significant contribution lie outside the bounds of assessment. Thus, causal relations that depend upon sets of individual acts, but upon no particular individual act, fall outside the bounds of individual normative evaluation as well. 3. This aspect of the individualistic conception is strongly supported phenomenologically: our sense of ourselves as agents emerges from the experience of making changes in our en vironment. The distinctive contribution of causal solipsism is to translate this point about the experience of action into the sole basis of normative evaluation.

Practices of accountability comprise a system for protecting and maintaining social interests, and these underlying interests are routinely violated so long as the accountability system remains solipsistic. These violations are frequently the products of what can be called I-We problems, in which I participate in a harm caused by something we do, but am not personally accountable for that harm, because of the insignificance of my contribution. The individualistic conception drives a wedge [쐐기] between me and us, between private and public. Since individuals are only accountable for local effects, responses aimed at individuals are inappropriate. But since there is also no legitimate moral subject corresponding to the we, responses to collective harms find no proper target.

I-We Problems
structured collectives	unstructured collectives
1. structured groups, such as business groups, government bureaucracies, political organi zations, and criminal conspiracies. 2. Individual members of such groups often do bad things on behalf of their groups, and members with special responsibilities are sometimes called to account for what they have done. Sometimes the group or organization as a whole is also held accountable: Corporations are fined, governments make reparations, and so on. 3. The trouble is that these forms of collective or ministerial accountability fail to provide the kind of individual moti vational considerations necessary to prevent such harms from occur ring in the first place. 4. Particular culpable agents who regard a group as primarily accountable for what they do and who inhabit a microculture of covert support consider being held accountable as an incidental cost attached to their institutional role, rather than as a warranted response addressed to them personally.	1. relations among large and uncoordinated sets of individuals. This is the familiar class of "public goods" (and "public bads") problems. Grave harms occur because of what large numbers of people do or fail to do. 2. Say that the use of some widely available and cheap refrigerant causes a hole to develop in the ozone layer, and this hole causes increases in skin cancer among northern Australians. People individually do little to foster this outcome and can do nothing to prevent it. But people collectively bring it about and could have averted it. If what I do doesn't make a difference (or makes no perceptible difference) to what we bring about together, then I can't be accountable for what we have done, and so I have no reason to attempt repair or prevention.

Thus, the problem with relational and causal solipsism is that they make the individual's role in collective agency disappear.

However, from the perspective of those affected by a harm, the harm itself is salient, and a collective agency made up of individual members often easily identifiable. If a system of accountability is to afford us some protection from the serious harms we can so easily bring about together, it must therefore move beyond the first-personal perspective implicit in the individualistic conception, in order to accommodate the perspectives of all the parties to the harm.

A possible route to a solution would be to seek to overcome the individual subject of accountability, to substitute a we for the I; this is the path of communitarianism.

Because individuals are the ultimate loci of normative motivation and deliberation, only forms of accountability aimed at and sensitive to what individuals do can succeed in controlling the emergence of collective harms. The oughts of morality and politics must apply to me [???]

How to include such an assessment? The two most prominent theoretical elaborations of accountability, Kantian and consequentialist, help little in comprehending the terrain of complicity.

For the Kantian, causal solipsism, which also characterizes the deliberative framework of the Categorical Imperative (CI) test procedure, poses an immediate problem. Kantians' central question is whether they might successfully act on their maxims in a world in which everyone does likewise. But cases of overdetermination of a harm, or marginal contribution to it - in other words, the possible insignificance of an individual's participation - generate notorious difficulties for the procedure.

Consequentialism, meanwhile, permits any form of accountability that maximizes aggregate welfare, including individual accountability for collective harm. But such flexibility is a dubious advantage, since it means that accountability for collective harms, like all forms of accountability under consequentialism, is conceived of purely instrumentally, in relation to maximal welfare.

This instrumental conception fails to make sense of the special nature of associative wrong doing. In order for moral agents to be genuinely motivated by responses of accountability, they must understand and acknowledge the basis of those responses. This demand can only be satisfied by a response of accountability that is grounded in an explanation of the wrongness of participating in a collectively harmful act. A purely contingent, instrumental basis for reproach will always be, in a deep sense, alien to a moral agent's self-understanding [This is not a particualr problem for the consequentialist approach to collective wrong doing; he instead points out the general defect of consequentialism].

Samuel Scheffler has recently written that, in a world of essentially supra individual processes and harms, the moral philosopher's task is to provide a theory with "a set of clear, action-guiding, and psychologically feasible principles which would enable individuals to orient themselves in relation to the larger processes, and general conformity to which would serve to regulate those processes and their effects in a morally satisfactory way.

Similarly, Gerald Postema has argued that moral theory in general and consequentialism in particular must reorient themselves around what he calls a "plural deliberative perspective" Such a perspective would, among other things, allow us to see that something's being a collective responsibility does not entail that it is not an individual responsibility, but that it is therefore an individual responsibility, at least of the individuals who compose the collective. This book's task is to develop such a perspective and to give it a philosophical foundation. I want to make our individualistic ethical concepts at home in a collective world.

To do this, I will try to show how conceptions of collective action and of individual responsibility both rely on a common notion of participation. My strategy accordingly has two components. ① First, I will try to expose the structural and substantive complexity of our practices of individual accountability. [...] Rather, an accurate picture must register the views of all participants in transactions surrounding a harm.

I believe it [a "relational and positional" conception] forces us to discard a picture of accountability that sees judgments of account ability as external outputs, or verdicts, of a process of moral evalua tion, which are then used as premises in a separate process of justify ing liability. Rather, judgments of accountability (and the further responses, attitudes, and demands they support) are elements of a unified, dynamic system of social life, themselves constitutive of the goods and relations they protect.

Tying accountability conceptually to warranted responses has some further virtues. Put roughly, on the one hand, the community may be better protected against the individual. On the other, the individual may be better protected against the community. By shifting from the agent's perspective to the respondents', harmful collective relations among individual agents can assume a normative significance otherwise lost from view. Since desert, individually conceived, is no longer a necessary element in the justification of others' responses, restrictions on accountability imposed by desert no longer obtain. Thus, the harms to the community in which individual agents play systemic roles become salient features to which the individual must respond, prospectively and retrospectively. However, because individual desert is also no longer sufficient to warrant responses, individuals are also protected from the community they affect. An individual may deserve a nasty fate without any respondent being warranted in bringing that fate about.

② Thus, the second crucial step in my argument is providing a theory of agency that explains our capacity for collective action, both in its weakly coordinated and fully cooperative forms.

Philosophers studying col lective action have tended to focus only on the fully cooperative form, the string quartet paradigm. Such examples inevitably gener ate a conception of collective action thick with mutual obligations and egalitarian [평등주의의] dispositions: an account unsuited to the depersonalized, hierarchic, bureaucratic, but nonetheless collective institutions that characterize modern life.

I offer instead a minimalist analysis of collective action, weak enough to cover cases ranging from scenes of coordination at a traffic intersection to the carefully planned group bank robbery, but deep enough to reveal the structure of individual intentions that make such collective action possible. This I call the participatory conception of collective action, for its centerpiece is a distinctive, individual, instrumental intention to play one's part in a joint act. The act's content therefore makes ineliminable reference to the concept of collective action.

individual, intentional participation in a collective act warrants individual accountability for the consequences of that act. [11]

I interpret the elements of the accountability system, and particularly judgments that one is responsible, in terms of those judgments' role in constituting and fostering the relations with others that make our lives good, materially, emotionally, and psychically.

This weak kind of instrumentalism stands opposed to a concep tion of accountability that sees judgments of responsibility as merely reflections or realizations of independent moral facts, which I take as the metaphysical hard core of retributivism.

I think little sense can be made of the idea that we are simply accountable for wrongs, rather than that we are due particular kinds of responses from particular others. If any generic content can be attributed to an inherently frag mented concept like accountability, that content comes by reference to the function of the network of social practices and commitments in which judgments of accountability find their point.