Kutz (2000) Complicity (4) Moral Accountability and Collective Action

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.