Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin. On Complicity and Compromise (2013)
Introduction: A Messy Moral Landscape
1.1 Two Voices, One Problem
At the end of a medical information session in a very poor war-torn country, a young soldier came up to me. He asked whether he should use condoms when engaging in rape. I answered ‘yes’. I was in little doubt that he should use condoms all the time, and in even less doubt of his duty not to rape. But was that the right answer to that specific question? That seemed debatable. Assuming it is anyway better for a woman to be raped without getting an infection or anunwanted pregnancy, rather than being raped with those added harms, I should answer ‘yes’. But would answering ‘yes’ make me complicit in rape? Should I instead have lied about the efficacy of condoms, hoping for a deterrent effect? Would not answering at all been any better for myself, or for him, or for any subsequent person he raped?
The setting in which this question was asked—a long-standing, horrifying conflict in a very poor part of a country, in which rape was used as a military strategy—is what philosophers call ‘non-ideal circumstances’. But at some times, in some places, the circumstances are so very far from ideal as to call into question this designation, together with any ordinary intuitions concerning appropriate moral standards.
Such situations constitute the humanitarian conundrum. Is it better to avoid any involvement with evildoers whatsoever, even if that means failing to aid people in need under their control?Or is it better to deal with evildoers,maybe even in ways that contribute to their wrongdoing, if that is the only way to get humanitarian assistance to those in need?
The term ‘complicity’ is often used—and as we will show, sometimes misused—to convey that sense of having somehow done wrong, despite at the same time having tried (even if successfully) to do good. Carefully defining the term ‘complicity’ and properly tracing all of its moral implications will be the recurring preoccupations of this book.
1.2 How to Think about Complicity
As is already clear from those examples, ‘complicity’ is loosely employed in ordinary discourse as a catch-all term referring indiscriminately to the whole multitude of sins arising from ‘what...I...do by way of contribution to what you do’, when you do wrong.
The generic term ‘complicity’ is used to describe what are, in truth, several distinct practices. Among those that we characterize more precisely in Chapter 3 are ‘connivance’, ‘contiguity’, ‘collusion’, ‘collaboration’, ‘condoning’, ‘consorting’, ‘conspiring’ and ‘full joint wrongdoing’.
Lumping all those phenomena together under thegeneric label of ‘complicity’ is morally misleading, as we shall show. Those terms are not all interchangeable. Each points to a distinct way of engaging with someone else who is committing a wrong; each differs not only in degree but also in kind.
First comes the question of whether the act in question should actually count as a case of complicity with wrongdoing at all. Complicity, as we will be using the term, necessarily involves committing an act that potentially contributes to the wrongdoing of others in some causal way. There are things worse than complicity—such as committing the wrong yourself. (That’s what is done by the people we will call ‘co-principals’.) And there are things that fall short of complicity (such as doing things with, to or for a wrongdoer that could in no way make any causal contribution to his wrongdoing).
Second comesthequestion ofwhether complicit agents are morally respon sible for contributing to the wrongdoing of others. Does the nature and extent of their involvement with the wrongdoing cross the minimum ‘responsibility threshold’? The answer to that question, we shall argue, must be based on an assessment of what the agents involved could and should have known at the time of acting
Third comes the question of how bad that act of complicity was and how much moral blame attaches to it. Determining that involves answering vari ous questions. Conspicuous among them are ‘how bad was the wrongdoing to which your act of complicity contributed?’ and ‘how much of a contribution did your complicity make toward that wrong being done?’
A crucial final question remains even after having determined, through such reflections, whether an act of complicity has been committed and just how bad it was. Was it nonetheless the right thing to do, on balance? The answer to that question will be a function of how much bad was done by the act of complicity, compared to how bad would have been the alternative courses of action available to the agent.
In many circumstances in which people (humanitarians, along with many others) often find themselves, complicity with wrongdoers, while pro tanto [그 정도까지] wrong, may nonetheless be the best thing for them to do on balance. To deny or downplay either of those facts would do the agents involved a grievous injustice.
1.3 Complicity, at a Moral Minimum
Complicity comes on a sliding scale. At one end of the scale (indeed, ‘off the scale’: more than ‘complicit’ on our view) are people who act in unison. We call them ‘co-principals’. They are full partners in the wrongdoing. Just as in a business partnership each partner is legally responsible in full for the all debts of the partnership, so too morally is each co-principal in wrongdoing responsible in full for the wrongdoing. At the other end of the scale are people whose actions are not at all causally connected to the wrongdoing, or people who had no way of knowing that what they were doing could have contributed to the wrongdoing of others. In between are various gradations of causal distance, knowledge, and contribution, and hence of complicity.
Commentators who look at complicity from the perspective of the law are inevitably most interested in the top end of that spectrum. Criminal lawyers focus on the criminals themselves and their accomplices, their direct partners in crime. If each of them committed the crime directly, all acting jointly (each in her own assigned way) in the commission of it, then each of the mistreated as a co-principal in the wrongdoing. When enquiring who else is criminally complicit in the crime, lawyers look first and foremost to people whoservedas the perpetrators’‘support squad’, without themselves taking any direct part in the crime. The law calls those who commit the crime directly ‘principal agents’ and those in their support squad ‘secondary agents’, and we shall follow legal usage in this respect.
There we find agents who are acting with ‘knowledge but not purpose’: even if they did not share in any way the purpose of the wrongdoer, they knew(or could and should have known) that what they were doing would or could contribute to the wrongdoing of others, and they did it anyway.
The morally vexing fact about such agents is this: even if their purpose was wholly different from the wrongdoer’s, nonetheless they contributed know ingly to the wrongdoer’s wrongdoing.16 They bear causal responsibility for doing something that potentially helped the wrongdoer to realize his wrong ful purposes. And that, we think, is sufficient at a minimum toqualify themas morally ‘complicit’ with the wrongdoing to which they contribute in that way.
Similarly, compromise, complicity, and conflict may be subjects that we can study one-by-one, ceteris paribus. Nonetheless, if we are confronted with a compromise carried out with an agent complicit in unjustifiable war crimes, merely transposing each argument without accounting for how they interact morally is a joke in bad taste. [14]
Sensitive to such worries, we have wherever possible linked any stylized examples that we use with the real-world cases from which they are abstracted. Even when this wasn’t possible directly, we at least try to use more realistic examples than the ‘crazy cases’ that so often figure in philo sophical fantasies, to show the efficacy of our reasoning as applied to real world problems. [14]
The first concerns humanitar ian organizations providing assistance in Rwandan refugee camps, working with andthroughtheverymilitias responsible for the genocide in Rwanda. To what extent are those organizations complicit with the wrongdoing of the militias? Was it right for the humanitarian organizations to do what they did, nevertheless? [15]