Citizens' Moral Responsibility

I have explored so far the idea that states are corporately morally responsible for their wrongful policies. But what about their citizens? Much attention has been paid in recent years to the question of the responsibility of individual group members for collective harm in general, and for state harm in particular.

I’ll examine these debates first with relation to moral responsibility and then with relation to remedial responsibility. As I noted in the introduction, the idea that citizens are to blame for their government’s actions raises concern for normative individualism, given that one of its key tenants is that guilt, or blame, may attach only to offending actors, in light of their own state of mind and actions. As Joel Feinberg famously put it, ‘there can be no such thing as vicarious guilt’ (Feinberg 1968: 676). Blaming a citizen for the wrongdoings committed by her government, just because she is a citizen of that state, violates this widely accepted principle. However, on the other hand, even supporters of the idea of corporate moral responsibility warn against it becoming a form of blanket exoneration for all citizens, who might use it to argue that they are ‘only acting on behalf of the truly responsible party, the State itself’, and are therefore immune from either moral or criminal liability (May 2005: 139).

Clearly, even when it is the state that commits a serious wrongdoing, there will be at least some individual members within the state who will share the blame.³ This applies most clearly to high-level officials and policymakers, who have prominent influence on the state’s decisionmaking process. One interesting puzzle in this context concerns the gap between policy-makers’ actions and the actual wrongdoings: often policymakers are not the direct perpetrators of the wrongs committed on behalf of the state.

They contribute to the shaping of the state’s decision to, for example, engage in an unjust war, but they do not fight or commit human rights violations on the ground. Are they morally responsible for acts that they themselves have not taken part in? Scholars of international criminal law suggest that the answer to this question is positive: leaders of states are responsible for crimes committed by their soldiers when they have ordered these crimes, and even when they are merely aware of them and failed to prevent them (May 2005:139-143).

In his discussion of the normative foundations of prosecutions of crimes against humanity, Larry May goes even further. He argues that central policymakers such as heads of state are morally (and criminally) responsible for the very collective wrong the state commits — e.g. engagement in an unjust war - because they are the ones who set the intentions of the state, so its criminal state of mind can be attributed to them (140). However, this claim is in tension with the corporate moral agency I have described earlier. As we saw, on that account, the state’s mind is not reducible to the state of mind of any of its individual members, including its policymakers. Precisely for that reason, as Tracy Isaacs suggests, all members of an organization, including policymakers, share responsibility for their contributions to the state’s collective wrongdoing (Isaacs 2011: 106—111). These contributions might be central and even essential for the wrong to have taken place, and such factors will increase the seriousness of the relevant individual wrongdoing. Only in some very rare cases, an individual might be in such a pivotal position within the state as to be morally responsible for the state’s wrong itself (as were the three criminals in my earlier example). And even then we should not assume that holding such individuals responsible for their contributions to the state wrongdoing substitutes holding the state responsible as well.

Holding policymakers morally responsible for state wrongdoing may seem fairly straightforward.

But what about ordinary citizens?⁴ Do they share the blame for what their government does? In answering this question it is worth noting that the line between ‘policymakers’ and ‘ordinary citizens’ is not that easy to draw. At least in democratic states (and to an extent in some non-democratic states as well), citizens can be ‘policymakers’ too in the sense that they contribute to the decision-making process and to the execution of state policies: they vote for the political parties in charge and have various other formal and informal channels of influence on their political representatives. They also pay the taxes that are used to execute state policies, and they contribute to the state apparatus by obeying the state laws. If, as we saw, policymakers can be morally responsible for their contributions to state wrongdoing, should not ordinary citizens be blamed as well? A negative answer to this question might follow from Young’s analysis of backward-looking responsibility. As I mentioned earlier, Young warns against holding ordinary individuals to blame for their participation in collective structural injustices which, she explains, are ‘produced and reproduced by large numbers of people acting according to normally accepted rules and practices’. In such scenarios each participant’s contribution to the outcome is untraceable, and therefore it is not at all clear that it makes any difference for which one can be blamed (Young 2011: 100). For example, it is impossible to draw a direct causal link between a single citizen’s income tax payments and her state’s engagement in, say, violations of the codes of just war in the course of a military operation. The state mechanism is such that specific contributions are not linked to specific outcomes.

Furthermore, Young points out that most participants in structural injustices do not act with the relevant guilty state of mind. Their contributions to the ongoing injustice are the outcomes of habitual conventions and practices.

Those who perform them do not intend to contribute to the wrong, and they don’t engage with ‘explicit reflection on the wider implications’ of what they do (107). Not only that, but third, refusing to contribute to the state apparatus can be extremely difficult. Ordinary citizens participate in their state in a wide variety of ways, and it is hard to see how one can entirely abstain from making such contributions. Even if that were possible, it is likely to entail high personal costs. Given all these difficulties, one might draw the conclusion that pointing the finger of blame at citizens for the wrongdoings of their governments is misguided. And it might also be counterproductive: rather than motivating citizens to act against the wrong they are part of, a ‘rhetoric of blame in public discussion of social problems [...] usually produces defensiveness and unproductive blame-switching’ (Young 2004: 378—379). As I noted earlier, Young suggests that we should instead engage in a different ‘forward-looking’ strategy, which assigns all citizens the role of bringing an end to their state’s wrongdoing, regardless of their share of the blame for it.

Young offers a powerful critique against backward-looking responsibility in the context of collective structural harms. However, might she be letting ordinary citizens off the hook too quickly? In answering this question we should separate her strategic and substantive critiques against the ‘rhetoric of blame’. Whether or not blaming ordinary citizens is politically counterproductive is by and large an empirical question, which cannot be settled here. But it’s worth noting that some commentators argue that blame (and praise) can actually play a constructive role and incentivize actors to ‘seek good actions in the future and avoid bad ones’ (Nussbaum 2013: ii).⁵ Setting this strategic question to the side then, Young’s substantive critiques of the backward-looking model of responsibility have been critically examined in recent debates.

Some authors suggest, pace Young, that attributing blame for participation in structural injustices is possible: first, because a contribution need not make a traceable difference to the outcome in order to satisfy the causality condition of moral responsibility (for extended discussion see for example Kagan 2011; Nefski forthcoming); second, because individuals who contribute to a collective wrong need not necessarily intend to commit that wrong: it suffices that they are aware that their actions contribute to some wrongdoing (Lepora and Goodin 2013: 80—81); and third, all agree that if citizens have no choice but to contribute to their state wrongdoing, they are excused. But it is far from clear that all citizens are equally coerced to contribute to their state’s wrongdoing. More affluent citizens, for example, often have the resources to cope with the legal and financial costs of civic resistance to state injustice, including the refusal to contribute to the state apparatus (Thoreau 1991). In fact, as Eric Beerbohm (2012) has argued, especially in democratic states, where public officials are acting in the name of the citizens, citizens, and especially those with the resources to do so, have a democratic duty to engage in political activity to ensure that their representatives act justly. Beerbohm’s notion of democratic duty is closely related to Young’s claim that citizens have a forward-looking political responsibility to resist structural injustices. But, as Beerbohm points out, what follows from it is that, when citizens negligently fail to comply with their forward-looking political duties (i.e. assuming that the costs of such engagement are not too high for them), they become blameworthy for their failure, and for its consequences. Young’s plausible assertions about forward-looking duties then have important backward-looking implications which might be overlooked, given the sharp conceptual distinction she draws between forward- and backward-looking responsibility: if one has a duty to resist injustice, and one fails to do so without a reasonable excuse, then one becomes morally responsible for her contribution, via omission, to the ongoing occurrence of the injustice (Nussbaum 2013: xxi).

To conclude the point, on the one hand, sweeping attributions ofblame to whole populations (as from the terrorist in the example that opened this chapter) are wrong and misguided. Holding citizens and policymakers responsible for state wrongdoing must take into account their own actions, omissions, intentions and choices. But, on the other hand, ordinary citizens cannot use the collective nature of state wrongdoing as a shield against attributions of personal blame. Given their citizenship status and their inevitable contributions to the state apparatus, each citizen has a special responsibility to ensure that unjust policies are counteracted. What, and how much, each citizen is expected to do is a complex and difficult question. But clearly citizens who have the capacity to act and yet do nothing to resist unjust policies, even when the costs of resistance are fairly low, share some blame for the consequences. Given the limited scope of their actual and potential contributions, the scope of their blame will be fairly low. But it may justify some moral responses: self-reproach and shame (Abdel-Nour 2003), and some moral censure from fellow or other citizens.

27.4

<< | >>

↑

Source: Bazargan-Forward Saba, Tollefsen Deborah (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility. Routledge,2020. — 538 p.. 2020

Citizens' Moral Responsibility

More on the topic Citizens' Moral Responsibility: