Lepora and Goodin (2013) On Complicity and Compromise (5)

Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin. On Complicity and Compromise (2013)

 

Responsibility for Complicity A Minimum Threshold

Wrongdoing, whether by doing wrong yourself or by contributing to the wrong done by others, must always involve a certain sort of act together with a certain sort of mental state. The issue that lies at the heart of this chapter is precisely which sort.

The ‘intention’ side: you do not need literally to share the wrongful purposes and intentions of the wrongdoer to be liable for moral blame for being complicit with his wrongdoing

The ‘action’ side: you need not participate with the wrongdoer in some joint action Contributing knowingly to his wrongdoing, without in any sense ‘joining him’ in committing it, is in our view enough for you to qualify as morally complicit with that wrongdoing.

A minimum standard for what is required for you to count as complicit: that is enough to make you morally responsible for being complicit at all—it is enough to cause you to have morally ‘a case to answer’, even if in the end you are able to give a perfectly adequate moral defence of what you have done.

5.1 Minimum Standard of Complicity

This distinction, clear though it seems, is often overlooked in discussions of the moral responsibility attached to complicity. Responsibility for a complicit action is often said, for example, to depend on the agent’s intentional participation in a principal’s wrongdoing; or complicity is said to occur when one contributes to wrongdoing in order for that wrong to be performed and to succeed in its purpose.

Christopher Kutz, for example, talks in terms of a participatory intention as being the defining feature of what it is to take part in (and be complicit in) a joint action.7 But in seeking an analysis of compli city in a weakened account of group agency, Kutz is led to elide the essential distinction between participatory and contributory actions.8 Participating is contributing by joining in with others and ‘doing your part’ towards the collective end that they share. But there are various other ways in which one might contribute towards what others are doing, without joining in with them as a co-participant in any way.

it is (a) not the intention to share in a joint action with him, still less (b) an intention to pursue a purpose that you share with him.

(a’) contributing to his wrongful actions, and doing so (b’) knowing that you contribute to his doing wrong.

Contributing to another’s project is something you do from the outside, participating in it is something you do from the inside.

A Boy Scout comes to my door asking for a donation to his Scout troop’s project; I give him some money. I have ‘contributed to’  the Boy Scouts’ project without in any sense joining the Scout troop, participating in it or acting together with it. Or for another example: the UK is at war with Germany, and asks the US to loan it some ships; when loaning the ships, the US can ‘contribute to’ the British war effort without joining in the war or participating ‘together with’ the UK as an ally under a joint command structure.

Thus a contributory action, rather than a participatory one, is what we deem to be minimally required to constitute complicity.

Within the realm of mens, knowledge of the wrongdoing and knowledge that one’s actions contribute towards the wrongdoing are the only necessary mental elements that are required for one to qualify as complicit.

Thus, in our view, voluntarily performing an action that contributes to the wrongdoing of another and knowing that it does so (but without necessarily sharing the other’s wrongful purpose), represent the necessary actus and mens conditions, respectively, that are minimally required for one to be complicit with the wrongdoing of another. Those minimum conditions are characterized by the simultaneous presence of (A) a contribution that is neither involuntary nor accidental, (B) knowledge or culpable ignorance of the contributory role of one’s actions, and (C) knowledge or culpable ignorance of the wrongfulness of the other’s act to which one is contributing. Joining in the other’s wrongful action or sharing in his wrongful purpose or intentions are clearly even worse. But that would be much more than is minimally required for the situation to constitute one of complicity

5.2 What Might Mislead Some People to Demand More

5.2.1 Platitudes in Their Place

There, it is standardly said that ‘“acting” is always “acting under a description”’. That description, in turn, encodes an intention. Thus, philosophers of action are keen to distinguish between ‘doings’ and mere ‘happenings’... ‘Actions’ are the products of intention and of will. Mere ‘events’ are not.

‘no moral responsibility without intention’.

‘no legal guilt without intention’

Clearly, some intention has to be present for it to constitute an act for which one can be held to account at all, morally or legally. The question merely concerns the content of the intentions.

On our view, to be subject to blame for being complicit with wrongdoing, people must ‘(1) voluntarily do something that they foresee will contribute to the wrongdoing’. That involves their intending to do whatever their contribution involves (e.g. signing the cheque).

On the view opposed to our own, to be complicit people must also ‘(2) intend the successful execution of the wrongdoing and all that follows from it’ (e.g. the recipient cashing the cheque, buying weapons, and killing lots of people). Note well, however, this crucial fact: on either account, an intention of some sort is clearly present.

5.2.2 Legal Doctrine

Which is the correct standard of an accomplice’s complicity—whether‘with the purpose of’ (or equivalently ‘in order to’) is required, or whether ‘know ledge without (necessarily) purpose’ should suffice—was regarded very much as an open question by the American Law Institute when drafting its Model Penal Code under the guidance of Chief Reporter Herbert Wechsler.

5.3 Arguments from Conseqentialism and from Deontology

Moral philosophers in the analytic tradition bifurcate sharply between consequentialists and deontologists. In the real world, folk morality tends to be more relaxed. If you have good intentions but end up producing bad consequences, you are often forgiven. Similarly, if you produce good conse quences despite your bad intentions, you are likewise often forgiven. The textbook battle between consequentialism and deontology is thus something of a caricature of actually operating moral codes in the real world.31 Still, these are the terms in which debates within moral philosophy are conducted. Accordingly, we will here say something to suggest to each side of that (perhaps pseudo) debate that they should adopt our position rather than the other on the minimum definition of complicity.

5.3.1 Contributory Acts are Tainted by the Acts to which they Contribute

You did not intend to do wrong (kill the fat man). But you did give a match to Sam, knowing that Sam would use that match to do wrong. There is wrong in play, by virtue of Sam’s wrong-making intentions. And even if all you yourself intended was to give Sam the match, Sam’s wrong-making intentions bleed into your own (or at least they do so long as you knew the use to which Sam would put it). They do not overwrite your own or render your own completely irrelevant. But when contributing to the enactment of Sam’s wrong-making intentions, his intentions cannot be kept wholly separate from yours.

5.5 What is at Stake?

Return nowto thequestion of whether, when, and under what circumstances it might morally be permissible to be complicit with and to contribute to the wrongdoing of another. Imagine someone who is herself acting with good intentions, but must do something that she knows will contribute to the enactment of the bad intentions of someone else in order to pursue the good. What should we say about the plight of such a person?

In our view, a more nuanced perspective is required (even from the point of view of a thoughtful deontologist, as we have just argued). Acting on good intentions and producing good outcomes is always good, pro tanto. But it is always less good when it also involves contributing to the enactment of bad intentions and producing bad outcomes. Those are pro tanto bads. On balance it might still be the right thing to do. But—to repeat what has been said in Chapter2—we must always remember that which is on both sides of the balance as well as taking note of what is the case overall, on balance.

In short, we think that the best way of explicating the morality of the situation is to acknowledge that you are engaging with and indeed contributing to wrongdoing, even if you do so only in order to do more good on balance. We think that is a better way of explicating the morality of the situation than to deny that you are doing anything wrong at all by contrib uting to wrongdoing, on the grounds that your own intentions are pure