Citizens' Remedial Responsibility
I now turn to examine the question of citizens’ remedial responsibilities. As we saw in previous sections, it is commonly assumed that when a state commits a wrongdoing, it incurs forwardlooking remedial duties to address that wrong, including investing resources to end the wrong, compensation to its victims and investing resources in correcting the factors that led to the wrong (e.g.
faulty decision-making procedures and culture). On the corporate account, these duties fall on the state in the first instance. But in order to execute them, clearly the state must draw on its citizens’ resources, e.g. in the form of increased taxes or reduced services. This has been referred to as the ‘distributive effect’ of state responsibility (Pasternak 2011). Is there a normative justification for it?One affirmative answer to this question is provided by Stephanie Collins (2016). As we saw earlier, there are various factors that determine which agents are responsible for putting a bad situation right, including moral responsibility for the wrong, benefit from the wrong, association with the victims and even mere capacity to act. Collins argues that once we identify the source of the state’s remedial duties to put the bad situation right, we can justify the distribution of the burden amongst the citizens, as long as it is done in accordance with the same factor that grounds the state’s remedial duties. For example, if the source of the state’s remedial duties is its moral responsibility for the wrongdoing, then citizens who also share moral responsibility for the wrong should be expected to share the burden, in proportion to their level of blame. Here, as we saw in the previous section, various factors will determine citizens’ level of blame and corresponding share of the burden: the centrality and proximity of their contributions to or omissions from the state wrongdoing; the extent to which they knew, or should have known that they were contributing to a wrongdoing; how enthusiastically they were acting; and the extent that they could have avoided contributing in this way (Lepora and Goodin 2013: chapter 4).
Collins’ ‘source-tracking’ model gives a sound rationale for why, and when, citizens are remedially responsible for the state’s wrongful policies, and — importantly — her rationale is compatible with normative individualism, as each citizen’s burden is determined in light of their own actions and omissions. But one difficulty this model faces is that it is hard to implement in practice, given the size of the state, its complex structure and the varying levels of blame of the different actors within it. Collins (352) points to some ways of addressing these difficulties. For example, she argues that taxation can target activities that we consider wrongful contributions to state wrongdoing (e.g. in the context of climate change injustice, the state can raise resources by taxing polluting activities). However, even if these proposals are implemented, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that given the highly complex structure of the state, and the type of information the source-tracking model requires, it is going to be impossible to fully implement it. Indeed, if we look at political practice (e.g. the cases of German and Iraqi reparations I mentioned earlier), we find that usually states deviate from this model and instead use resources from the general tax pool to pay for their wrongdoings. Does doing so constitute a wrong against the citizens who are not to blame for their government policies (e.g. those who protested against the wrong), or who bear less blame than, say, high-ranking policymakers? Or can a distribution that does not track blame be normatively justified? In the rest of this section I will explore two models that offer a positive response to this question.
The first model is developed by Anna Stilz (2011), and revolves around the idea of democratic authorization. Stilz’s starting point is Kant’s theory of legitimate state authority. Kant famously argues that all persons have a basic, natural right against unjust interference from other agents, and also a basic, natural duty to respect the freedom of others.
These rights and duties justify the existence of the state, because they can only be respected under a joint political authority which will coordinate individuals’ actions and subject them to shared laws. A state that performs these functions has the right to be obeyed by its subjects, and it is also authorized by them, in the sense that they grant it the right to act in their name. But not any state that subjects citizens to its laws is authorized by its citizens. Rather, the state must pass a threshold of moral acceptability: it must respect its citizens’ basic liberal freedoms, guarantee their equality before the law, comply with basic requirements of distributive justice and give all citizens equal democratic rights. Stilz argues that when a state complies with these conditions, its policies are authorized by each of its citizens, even those who disagree with a specific policy. For even when a citizen disagrees with a specific policy, given that the state crosses the threshold of moral acceptability the policy remains a ‘plausible interpretation’ of what the state may do in her name. In that specific sense, each citizen’s will is ‘implicated’ in the state’s policies, and each citizen ‘has a reason to “own up” to what an authorized state does’ (Stilz 2011: 198; cf. Parrish 2009). Owning up means accepting a share of the task of discharging the state’s remedial responsibilities when it acts wrongly. Importantly, each citizen’s share of the burden need not necessarily be determined by her level of moral responsibility.6 What grounds citizens’ remedial duties is the fact that as free and equal members of the state, their will is implicated in their government’s actions. Stilz’s model seems well placed to justify a distribution of the burden that is spread amongst all citizens. Even citizens who protest against the unjust policy of a reasonably just state are implicated in it, and ought to share the burden.However, one lingering worry concerns this account’s core claim that citizens authorize the reasonably just state to act in their name, and that therefore they are implicated in its actions.
As we just saw, according to Stilz, the authorization is objective — it is grounded in the characteristics of the state itself and not in the citizens’ subjective perceptions of their citizenship status. But, as David Miller (2004: 245) points out, a core guiding principle in matters of distributing collective responsibility is that ‘as far as possible, we want people to be able to control what benefits and burdens they receive’. Arguably, the claim that citizens authorize their state and share responsibility for its policies regardless of their own subjective attitudes to these policies is an overly restrictive requirement, which gives citizens too little control over the extent of their remedial responsibilities.A different attempt to explain citizens’ remedial responsibilities, which does pay attention to their internal attitudes, revolves around the concept of collective action. There is by now a very rich literature on the meaning and normative implications of this concept (see Roth 2017). One influential model within that literature is offered by Christopher Kutz (2000). He suggests that ‘[c]ollective action is the product of individuals who orient themselves around a joint project’ (67). Kutz argues that all participants of collective action share a participatory intention to act as part of the group or to contribute to a collective outcome. Furthermore, he argues that when agents intentionally participate in a collective action, they become the ‘inclusive authors’ of that act — part of the ‘we’ who performed the act. As such, they are complicit in it and remedi- ally responsible for its outcomes (122). These obligations, he explains, ‘mirror the nature of their participation’ as members of a joint venture (201).
Like much of the literature on collective action, Kutz’s analysis focuses primarily (but not exclusively) on relatively small-scale groups like military units and business corporations. However, some authors (e.g. Jubb 2014; Pasternak 2013; cf.
Kutz 2002) have argued that the model of participatory intentions could be scaled up to the state itself, and can explain why citizens are remedially responsible for their state’s policies.7 The idea here is that the state is a site of collective action, and that citizens are acting together in their state, as they perform their various roles in it (paying taxes, obeying the law, voting, etc.). Performing such actions amounts to orienting oneself around a collective project, that of maintaining the authority of the state and its ability to execute its plans. As participants in the state itself, citizens are inclusive authors of its policies — they are part of the ‘we’ who decides upon and executes these policies. They therefore ought to share in the task of undoing the wrongful impacts of their state policies.Like Stilz’s democratic-authorization model, this model can justify a distribution of the burden that does not track each citizen’s personal moral blame. The explanation is related to the subjective, intentional feature of participation in collective action. When people decide to orient themselves around a joint project, they take certain risks upon themselves: when we act together with others, we lose some control over the action and its consequences. Sometimes the result is beneficial to us, but sometimes it incurs unexpected burdens on us. This will be the case, for example, when a source-tracking distribution of the burden of the type Collins envisions is too difficult or too costly to implement. In such scenarios, it is not unreasonable to expect of all citizens who intentionally participate in their state to also participate in the task of assisting their state in discharging its remedial responsibilities. This would simply be a burden that they risk having when they engage in collective action of this type. But given that the justification for this burden revolves around citizens’ intentional stance, it gives citizens more control over the scope of their liabilities than Stilz’s objective account.
Indeed, this account is able to explain the remedial responsibilities of citizens even in states that fail to pass the standard of moral acceptability. Consider again the case of Nazi Germany. This regime surely did not pass Stilz’s test of moral acceptability. Yet many people might think that it was not unjustified to impose duties of compensation on its population in the aftermath of the war. As Robert Jubb (2014: 60—61) explains, one way to support this common intuition is by reference to the popular support on which the Nazi regime relied, and the general consensus on its right to rule. Many citizens in Nazi Germany were intentional participants of the regime, and hence shared remedial responsibility for its wrongdoing (regardless of whether their support was morally excused).Given this approach’s emphasis on the import of citizens’ subjective, internal stances towards their state, at least some of its advocates (e.g. Pasternak 2013; for a critique see Jubb 2014) suggest that intentional participation generates remedial duties only when it is genuine. Genuine intentional participation does not mean consent. Clearly, citizens do not consent to become members of their state — most of us are born into our citizenship status, and few of us have the option of giving it up without considerable cost. What I mean by genuine participation is that citizens do not view their citizenship status as something that is forced on them against their will, and that they would give up if they could. When individuals do view themselves as coerced to take part in a collective venture that they deeply resent, it seems wrong to argue that they ought to take responsibility for the outcome; if anything they are the victims of that collective project rather than its inclusive authors. But when citizens endorse their citizenship status, in the weak sense that they do not resent it, and would not have given it up if the opportunity was there, they are genuine participants in this collective venture.8 In reasonably open states, which respect their members’ basic rights, people are free to develop their attitudes towards their citizenship status (Pasternak 2013; for a related account see Miller 2007). And many, indeed most, citizens in such reasonably decent states do not see their citizenship status as something that is forced on them against their will, even when they disagree with their current government’s policies. Consider again the Israeli refusniks’ letter which I mentioned earlier: it seems that these soldiers’ membership in their state is in fact a constitutive part of their identity, and the reason they see themselves under the duty to act when they disagree with its policies.
Unlike Stilz’s democratic-authorization model then, the intentional-participation model seeks to hold citizens responsible and at the same time to give them some control over the extent of that responsibility by leaving open the option that they reject their citizenship status. But here too challenges remain. First, not all agree that the models that explain collective action in the context of relatively small groups can be scaled up to the state: the highly complex and hierarchical nature of the state, which places citizens at a great distance from actual policymaking, casts doubt on the extent to which citizens are indeed intending to take part in each of its actions, and the extent to which its actions are attributable to them (see discussions in Shapiro 2014; Lawford Smith 2019). Second, the model seeks to leave open the door for citizens to negate their responsibility for their state’s actions, but the fact that it relies on the internal attitudes of citizens for doing so raises important challenges: How can policy track these attitudes? And what do citizens need to do in practice in order to show that their participation is not genuine, especially given that, as a matter of fact, most cannot leave their state?
To conclude, I have explored in this section various models for justifying citizens’ remedial responsibilities for their states’ wrongdoing. These various models attempt to balance between, on the one hand offering a justification for the distributive effect that gives citizens adequate control over their responsibilities, and on the other hand offering a model of distribution that states can adopt in practice. As we saw, the various models I discussed offer different answers to the correct balance between these two considerations. But they also share some important insights. First, they confirm that many, indeed most citizens in reasonably just states will share some remedial responsibility for their state’s wrongdoing. Second, they all suggest that we should be much more cautious about assigning remedial responsibilities in states that do not pass some threshold of moral acceptability. Consider the oppressed citizens of a dictatorship like North Korea. While they contribute to their state policies, and at least some of them do so enthusiastically, none of the models I discussed here would support the claim that they are either morally or remedially responsible for their government’s policies. Given the dire conditions in North Korea, it is clear that most ordinary citizens will have valid excuses, from coercion to extreme manipulation, that will exonerate them from moral responsibility for their limited contributions to their state’s policies. And the fact that the North Korean State fails to meet basic standards of moral acceptability implies that its citizens are not genuinely participating in it, and that its actions are not reasonable interpretations of their rights (Jubb 2014). It follows then that often in those regimes that commit the most egregious human rights violations, collective attributions of responsibility to the citizenry are the least plausible.
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