Kutz (2000) Complicity (2) The Deep Structure of Individual Accountability

Kutz, Christopher (2000). Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

2.1 Introduction

My aim in this chapter is to define a conception of individual ac countability for individual harms that overcomes the limitations of the individualistic conception I discussed in Chapter 1, particularly the way it excluded the significance of the accountable subject's relations to others.

Instead, as I argue here, our practices of accountability are both positional and relational.

I focus upon what I have called the retributive or desert-based model of individual accountability, which is relationally and causally solipsistic. I will analyze the shortcomings of this model by comparing it with our actual practices and will then suggest a nonretributive alternative conception of responsibility that better fits those practices. [17]

In the sense in which I want to use it, accountability is somewhat narrower in meaning than responsibility.

Responsibility bears two distinct senses, an internal and an external sense.

Internal Responsibility (nonrelational)	External Responsibility (relational) = accountability
Given a certain relation of an agent to a harm, the first sense of responsibility refers to a set of internal psychological competencies a person must have in order to be answerable for the harm.	The second sense of responsibility refers instead to a set of normative, external affiliations, the duties of the agent to other surrounding agents

Agents are accountable to others for a harm as a function of their relations to others, as well as of everyone's relation to the harm or wrong. Accountability and responsibility in this sense are deeply related but not synonymous: Responsible agents are candidates for accountabil ity, but may not necessarily be accountable for what they have done. (The bank teller who, at gunpoint, empties the cash drawer is para digmatically responsible but not accountable.)

According to a retributivist, or desert-based, model...What agents have done is a function of their wills, where will stands for the complex of practical motivations, including desires, intentions, and reasons, that culminate in actions. Facts about agents' wills - what they have intended, what motivated them, the reasons for which they acted - determine the responses they deserve.

Although this model does not exclude associative forms of accountability, it does disfavor such forms, because associative accountability typically depends more on the social or structural relations agents bear to one another than on facts about their wills. Associative accountability, the concern of later chapters, is not principally at issue here. However, this chapter is centrally concerned with the feature of the retributive model that makes it disfavor associative accountability: its solipsism.

Retributive models of accountability are solipsistic in the sense that responses are warranted exclusively by the agent's desert, with out regard to the position of the respondent in relation to the agent...This relationship plays no role in retributi vist judgments of accountability. So, by describing retributivist con ceptions of accountability as solipsistic, I mean they fail to take into account the relation between the respondent and the agent.

This assumption that any act deserves a uniquely determined response is at odds with one of the most striking features of our practices of accountability: the dependence of any response upon the perspective of the respondent. Guilt, for example, is not merely self-directed blame; and a spectator's indignation differs not just in form but also in content from a victim's resentment.

 

2.2 

As a normative concept, accountability consists in a warrant for certain kinds of typically interpersonal responses - attitudes, sanctions, and claims - that serve this social function.

A response is warranted if it is permitted or required by the governing moral or social norms. If I am accountable for a harm, then other people are warranted in respond ing to my relation to that harm in certain ways. To be held (properly) accountable is to be subjected to such warranted responses, and to hold oneself accountable is to subject oneself to them. [20]

If I carelessly break a neighbor's vase at a party while dancing on his grand piano, my neighbor is warranted in resenting my carelessness and asking for an apology, though not in, say, smashing my glasses. Reciprocally, an apology or restitution is warranted on my part (and perhaps even obligatory).

But my accountability does not end with a simple interaction between my neighbor and myself. There are countless other positions from which other agents may respond to my act.

For example, other guests at the party may also feel indignant at having their pleasant evening disrupted by my loutish behavior, and they may expect a public display of contrition for their sake, though they could not appropri ately feel personally aggrieved in the same way as my neighbor.

Perhaps some of the guests are relatives of my neighbor, however, and they may take the event more personally than friends and ac quaintances present.

Retributivists often claim that desert maintains an equilibrium in rightful benefits and burdens: What I gain through acting wrongfully is paid back through a proportionate deprivation.

In this sense my "gain" in breaking the vase was the taking of an undue liberty with regard to the possessions of another, and I must compensate for this liberty by being constrained to apologize and make restitution. But the inadequacy of this idealized notion of corrective balancing is immediately obvious, first of all in the radically different nature of the response warranted from the ill gotten gain.

If my wrong was an undue liberty with another's property, it is hard to see how anything other than either purely economic compensation, or a similar liberty by others with my own posses sions, could effect an equilibrium. The impermissibility of such an answering liberty is inexplicable, as are the crucially important social responses of resentment, accusation, apology, and contrition.

In other words, does positional dependence imply perspectival subjectivism, the claim that the warrant for a normative judgment or response depends entirely upon the preferences or beliefs of the individual respondent?

Answer: Positional dependence as I have characterized it only holds that the standards governing warranted response depend upon the structure of relationships between respondents and agents. But respondents in different positions may be variously correct or mistaken about what those standards warrant without there being one correct response, just as differently placed listeners might be variously correct or mistaken about the pitch of a moving train whistle without there being one pitch all listeners ought to report. In ethics, as in acoustics, the subjective and objective perspectives are not contraries but complements. The objective perspective is what gives the subjective its normative character, transforming attitudes into claims, and preferences into warrants.

More concretely, my host's demand that I apologize and make repair may be peculiar to him, but it is objectively his right to make that demand, because the social norms that govern our relations will be endorsed as authoritative by all members of the relevant norma tive community. [24]

 

2.3

The positionality I describe in both the moral and social spheres falls into three main types: that of agents, victims, and onlookers. Even if there is more variety within these types in the social case, there should be little question that moral accountability at least reflects these principal divisions. (Otherwise, to pick an obvious example, the asymmetries between proper self- and other forgiveness would be inexplicable.)

Accountability must be understood in terms of a multiplicity of relations among agents. In this section I extend the argument to the case of moral accountability, or accountability for the infringement of morally protected interests. By "morally protected interests" I mean the interests of agents in autonomy, substantial well-being, integrity of property and person, and fair consideration. These are interests that the standards of common sense, Western, secular morality protect and promote.

The three principal bases of accountability, consist ing in how agents act, what they cause, and who they are, I call reasons of conduct, reasons of consequence, and reasons of character.

2.3.2 Accountability Warranted by Reasons of Conduct

We are sometimes morally accountable for the manner in which we act to wards other people - generously, malevolently, carelessly - in dependently of the consequences of our actions. Though the kind of conduct we find morally objectionable is often linked to a risk of harm, it is our conduct that is faulty, whether or not it actually results in harm.

What about our relations to others provokes these responses? One group of theories, labeled "Quality of Will" theories by T.M. Scanlon, explains the reasons why wrongful conduct provokes responses of resentment, blame, and guilt in the context of specific interpersonal relations. Quality of Will theories divide into two sorts. The first, expressivist theories, focus on the way responses convey attitudes and sentiments between agents. The second, cognitivist theories, em phasize instead the content of judgments of wrongful conduct, and the role this content plays in agents' understanding of the character of their relations to others. Since our reactions to others clearly have both attitudinal and judgmental components, I will draw on both expressivist and cognitivist approaches in exploring accountability for conduct. But I depart from traditional expressivism and cognitiv ism by using these theories to show the dependence of particular responses upon the nature of the moral relationship between agent and respondent.

Peter Strawson's famous lecture, "Freedom and Resentment," contains the best purely expressivist account of the role of blame and resentment, and the way those reactions depend upon concrete forms of interpersonal relations.13 According to Strawson, our prac tices of accountability are made up of natural patterns of emotional reaction, or "reactive attitudes," to the welcome and unwelcome attitudes of others manifested in their conduct towards us.14 The object of our welcome or censure is the attitude or "quality of will" the agent expresses. When I blame you for slapping me on the back of the neck, I am venting my resentment at the hostility implicit in your act. When I am grateful to you for courteously holding the door for me, I am expressing my delight at the good will you demonstrate. My responses to your actions flow principally from my assumptions about the sentiments expressed by your conduct, not the conse quences produced by it. Thus, when I discover that the attitude to which I am reacting is absent or different than I had supposed, my reaction naturally transforms. If I discover that you slapped my neck in order to swat away a bee, then I will no longer resent the action as an attack upon me. Or if I discover that you have been merely care less in swinging your hand around, I may revise my resentment to focus upon your disregard rather than your hostility. My reactions similarly shift when the attitude is present, but has a suspect etiology - perhaps an effect of your paranoid delusions. Now I do not resent your hostility, but try to understand it, because it no longer expresses your considered sentiments, but only the state of your mental health. [27-28]

Thus, Scanlon's characterization of Strawson's theory as a "Qual ity of Will" theory is misleading in an important sense. This charac terization implies that Strawson's understanding of accountability rests exclusively upon the internal will, rather than on the external affiliations, of the moral agent. But it should now be clear that the attitudes and expressions of agents only warrant response given a certain understanding of the nature of the relationship between agent and respondent. In Strawson's very rough terms, the relationship must be either participatory or potentially participatory: The agent to whom we respond must be someone with whom we will or could cooperate in social life. Agents' attitudes and expressions both indicate and constitute the nature of a participatory relationship. In general, we care about our relationships with others in virtue of the ways they make our lives good, both as good things in themselves, and as vehicles for promoting our interests. So the responses charac teristic of accountability are warranted by the point and demands of the relationship. This allows, as Strawson acknowledges, a necessary variability in warranted responses depending upon the nature of the relationship in question. What might constitute callous indifference between friends or lovers is simply good manners between commer cial transactors.

Once these very general moral standards are seen as flowing from, and being justified by, a particular conception of a relationship and not merely a generalization of self-directed concern, we have a basis for understanding why moral agents are inclined towards blame and indignation even when their own interests are unaffected. Through conceiving of myself as a potential participant in a more determinate relationship with any given agent, I attribute signifi cance to the minimal moral standards that govern our respective conduct towards one another. Because our courses of conduct do not in fact conflict, and so my interests are not directly threatened, it would be unwarranted for me to muster the rage or resentment that accompanies more direct interaction. But the wrongful acts of an other, even when I am not the victim, still symbolically affront the standards I value, and the interests those standards protect. And so I react with more than a neutral observation of the wrongfulness of the other's conduct. I react with what might be called righteous indigna tion, at the mere fact that another has acted wrongfully.

On Kant's and Scanlon's accounts, if an agent acted wrongly, then that fact should be affirmed from any perspective.27 But it does not follow from the fact that all must agree an agent acted wrongly, that the responses from all must also be identical. The very fact of a harm creates asymmetries in the positions of respondents. The variance in warranted moral response is less extreme than in the social case. But victims, for example, clearly have a special moral relation to a harm that others lack, simply in virtue of having suffered. Only victims can forgive or demand compensation, and thereby determine the consequent response war ranted by theagent.28 On any satisfactory theory, then, being a victim, agent, or onlooker of immoral behavior must give rise to special kinds of response (and so too must differences within those categories).

I have written thus far only of the varied responses of victims and onlookers to conduct. But the most complicated perspective from which to respond to a harm is that of the agent, because the structure of relationships from which that response flows is the most intricate. The resentment of victims and indignation of onlookers are warranted by the judgment that an agent's behavior fails to conform to standards constitutive of a valued relationship. An agent's response to resentment and indignation, whether these are actual or merely imagined, takes the form of shame and guilt. Agents' self-reflexive responses are reactions to the attitudes of others toward the agents' own attitudes, and so, when fully spelled out, may involve as many as four distinct figures: the agent as actor, as respondent, as onlooker, and the actual victim.35

Thus self-reflexive responses such as guilt are especially inflected by the particular moral and social relationships among agent, victim, and onlooker. Guilt can move an agent to feel an obligation to offer repair and compensation. Gestures of repair, whether in the concrete form of compensation or the abstract form of apology, are warranted by the standards of mutual respect and concern internal to the partic ular moral and social relationship between agent and victim. The abstract and idealized terms of the background moral relationship only inform responses between total strangers, and then only moti vate the least personal forms of apology or compensation. The actual responses guilt engenders are rather a function of how the agent understands his or her thicker, social and moral relationships to the aggrieved. If, for example, there is special trust between two family members, then the agent may warrantably feel that more serious repair is required, something beyond cash payment or a quick apology.

2.3.2 Accountability Warranted by Reasons of Consequence

Sometimes an agent's mere causal linkage with a harm may warrant a response from others.

In particular, the striking asymmetry in accountability for consequences between the responses of agents, on the one hand, and victims and onlookers, on the other, has not been fully appreciated. Agents can reproach themselves for faultless conduct that causes a harm, when neither their victims nor onlookers reproach them. This asymmetry, or extreme positional dependence, of responses to consequences reflects the deep role that causal relations have for agents in structuring their understanding of themselves. Those affected by the agent, in contrast, care less about causal rela tions in the absence of faulty conduct.

While conduct-based responses are warranted by the way that agents' behavior manifests attitudes of respect, contempt, or in difference regardless of whether that conduct causes harm, consequence-based responses are warranted by the fact of a harm regardless of whether the conduct was faulty. Causality, in isolation from conduct, indicates nothing about how agents have previously viewed their relations with others.

A person's act is typically one item among enormously many causally relevant events and conditions that are jointly sufficient for an event's occurrence. As many philosophers have argued, whether that act is highlighted as noteworthy ("the cause") by the agent or another depends in part upon its relation to stable background con ditions, its role in durable structures of events, and its susceptibility to intervention or control. The relevance of the agent's intervention in the cat and Oedipal cases is obvious. But I want to suggest that, in more difficult cases, agents' social and moral relations to others are especially important to agents' seeing their acts as causally connected to harms.

This is particularly true of omissions, as when my failure to bring a sick child promptly to the doctor results in suffer ing: Whether I am counted the cause depends upon my relation to the child. My seeing myself as the positive cause of another's misery also depends upon my understanding of the structure of our mutual relations. If we are competitors in business and my low prices unin tentionally drive you into bankruptcy, I may see your failure to meet my prices, rather than my own act, as the cause of your demise.51 In contrast, if we are friends and my unintentional act results in your suffering, I am likely to reproach myself for my causal role and do what I can to make amends.

2.3.3 Accountability Warranted by Reasons of Character

Reasons of character are significant aspects of agents' identities, such as motivations, dispositions, commitments, and affiliations, on the basis of which they may be held accountable in relation to a harm or wrong. Unlike reasons of conduct or consequence, which rely upon direct causal or attitudinal links between agent, victim, and harm, reasons of character can warrant response in the absence of any such link. When an evaluator holds an agent accountable for a harm for reasons of character, it means that the evaluator associates the harm with the agent because the harm manifests or symbolizes an endur ing trait of the agent. Reasons of character are also invoked nega tively, to deny accountability. If an agent behaves badly, in a way that is "out of character/' evaluators might be moved to find extenuating reasons for the behavior, in order to excuse it.

A combination of basic shame and identification, or imaginative projection, can handle some of the simple cases of associative ac countability. If a relative or associate of mine is humiliated or acts badly, I may feel ashamed. The most obvious reason for this is that I may be disgraced by association, depending upon the society I in habit. It is still, although decreasingly, the case that to have a family member in disgrace is to be disgraced oneself. Similarly, if while in a restaurant in a foreign country, I hear another tourist speaking loudly and abrasively, I hide my guidebook in shame, not for the other tourist, but for myself as someone in whom the same shameful characteristics are likely to be expected by association with the category "tourist." My own, rather than others', inclusion of myself in the objectionable category may also be a basis for shame. If I think of myself under the description "tourist/' I will cringe when another member of that category warrants disdain. My identity as a co national provides a ground - albeit a weak epistemic one - for the inference that I too share the objectionable trait. I may draw the inference myself, or simply fear that others will. So my shame need not be a function of sympathy with the other, but only identification with the other's role in the transaction. I simply imagine myself as the one acting shamefully.

A related form of identification can also give rise to the phenome non of partial accountability: an urge to repair harms unaccom panied by self-reproach. Because of my identification with a group, whether voluntary or involuntary, I bear a special reparative rela tionship to a harm committed by a member of that group, though I do not imagine myself to be a wrongdoer or feel disgraced by the wrong.58 Contemporary Germans, for example, often claim that they accept collective responsibility without collective guilt, by which they mean all Germans, in virtue of their citizenship, owe duties of commemoration and reparation to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust regardless of any actual complicity.

Instances of counterfactual wrongdoing need not be so spectacu lar as parricide. The problem of the origins of benefits, for example, provides a commonplace example of counterfactual wrongdoing. Benefit accountability is at issue when someone accepts or receives a benefit with whose origins a wrongdoing is associated. If, for example, I learn that a fellowship I have been awarded was endowed by a notorious imperialist who earned his fortune through theft and exploitation, I am likely to keep it but feel guilty, on the principle that it is wrong to benefit from the wrongs of others. But just what sort of wrongness is it that can explain how, although I did not bring about and could not have prevented the harm, I become complicit in it through accepting benefits from it?

Some have suggested that the feeling of complicity manifests itself as an essentially magical belief, for example, that a benefit can bear a moral taint that transfers to its recipient.62

Reasons of character provide a better, nonmagical explanation of counterfactual guilt. Accepting a benefit from a tainted source manifests a certain trait: willingness to be associated with moral compromises. Or, put slightly differently, acceptance transforms the agent's identity by creating an affiliation with the harm. Enjoying a tainted benefit puts one in an ongoing relationship with a wrongful act; it forces the realization that one might have been willing ex ante to trade principles for benefits since one has done so ex post. Doubtless, too great a concern about compromised sources amounts to criticizable piety or self-righteous ness. But there is room for a concern for the character implications of one's commitments that lies between amoralism and self indulgence.63 Self-reflexive responses to reasons of character can play a special role in sustaining and strengthening commitments. Feelings of complicity on the basis of character force agents to study their own associations, to decide whether or not these associations reflect the character they want. In Charles Taylor's phrase, reasons of character provoke "strong evaluation" - second-order reflection on the value of what the agent values.64