Kutz, Christopher (2000). Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4.1 Introduction
We turn now to the central issue: individual moral accountability in the context of collective action. The most important and far-reaching harms and wrongs of contemporary life are the products of collective actions, mediated by social and institutional structures. These harms and wrongs are essentially collective products, and individual agents rarely make a difference to their occurrence. So long as indi viduals are only responsible for the effects they produce, then the result of this disparity between collective harm and individual effect is the disappearance of individual accountability. If no individual makes a difference, then no individual is accountable for these collec tive harms. And since institutions and social groups consist ulti mately in nothing but individual agents, no one is accountable for what we do together.
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The relationships that systems of accountability are supposed to fos ter (and, in part, constitute) instead are sapped by undiscriminating reproach.
This thesis about the need to restrict judgments to individualistic bases is often confused with a more disputable claim. The disputable claim is that the object of accountability must also be individualistic, and in particular that what agents are accountable for must be an act, consequence, or characteristic of the subject of the judgment of ac countability. The object of accountability is analytically distinct from the basis of accountability. If I willfully hit you, then I am accountable for that blow and its consequences. I am also accountable for the attitude of hostility I manifest by that action: you will rightfully take my attitude into account in your future dealings with me. My deci sion to strike you, assuming my capacity to govern myself according to moral norms, warrants you in holding me accountable. By con trast, if I tell my little brother to hit you, then the object of my accountability will be his blow and the harm it does, while the basis of my accountability will still be a fact about me, namely my telling him to hit you. Responses of accountability are always functions of the basis and the object of accountability - as well as of the position of the respondent
4.2.1 Commonsense Principles and the Object of Individual Accountability
Individual Difference Principle: (Basis) I am accountable for a harm only if what I have done made a difference to that harm's occurrence. (Object) I am accountable only for the difference my action alone makes to the resulting state of affairs.
Control Principle: (Basis) I am accountable for a harm's occur rence only if I could control its occurrence, by producing or preventing it. (Object) I am accountable only for those harms over whose occurrence I had control.
The philosophical question is what follows ethically from individ uals' participation in a wrongful collective act, an act whose underlying harm is overdetermined with respect to individual contributions. The question is manifestly practical as well as theoretical, for reflective agents might come to understand that they have obligations of disobedience, repair, or prevention; victims must decide whether they can legitimately press their claims; and bystanders must decide whether and on what terms to return the perpetrators to the fold.
The Complicity Principle: (Basis) I am accountable for what others do when I intentionally participate in the wrong they do or harm they cause. (Object) I am accountable for the harm or wrong we do together, independently of the actual difference I make
No participation without implication. Where the individualistic principles exculpate, the principle of complicity implicates. It spec ifies an individualistic basis (participation) that grounds, rather than precludes, accountability for collective harms..
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