Complicity and Responsibility
As a first step toward tying the discussion of complicity to the topic of collective responsibility, I turn to consider the conditions under which accomplices bear individual responsibility for the outcomes toward which their actions contribute.
When one contemplates the taxonomy of Aquinas, it becomes evident that the nine ways of becoming complicit are not equally serious from a moral perspective. The most serious might be commanding another to commit a wrongdoing and participating in a wrongful scheme initiated by another. These modes of behavior almost certainly cause an accomplice to bear moral responsibility for the outcome, and normally in these situations the principal actor and the accomplice are each morally responsible for the outcome (though they need not be equally responsible for it).Of the other ways of being complicit, counseling someone to wrongdoing, or consenting to the wrongdoing of another, places one within the boundaries of qualifying as morally responsible for the outcome in question. This is partly due to the fact that complicit moral agents are enabling harm,5 or at least facilitating it.6 Normally, a person bears moral responsibility for the harm produced by a principal actor’s wrongful behavior when the person has counseled him or her to this behavior, or consented to his or her engaging in this behavior (assuming consent is something the principal actor believes necessary).
The other five ways of becoming complicit in the scheme of Aquinas involve a less active role for the complicit agent, and for this reason there tends to be less likelihood of this agent’s incurring moral responsibility for the outcome in question. Flattery (encouraging) and receiving (covering for) require action on the part of the accomplice, but except for extreme cases such as providing refuge for an escaped convict, these activities are ordinarily sufficiently benign that one does not incur moral responsibility for the outcome (of course, one nevertheless incurs moral responsibility for one’s actions of encouragement or covering for someone else).
The three remaining ways of becoming complicit—silence, the failure to prevent, and the failure to denounce—require little or no action on the part of the accomplice. In certain cases, failures such as these can cause one to become morally responsible for the outcome in question. If a nurse observes another nurse administering the wrong medication to a patient and does nothing, that nurse presumably bears responsibility for the resulting harm to the patient (recall that Aquinas stipulates that the failure to prevent qualifies as complicity when one has a moral obligation to prevent what happens). In typical situations, however, complicity that takes the form of failing to act does not involve one’s bearing moral responsibility for the outcome, even when the omission is intentional. If I observe a total stranger parking in a no-parking zone and say nothing, that does not make me responsible for the presence of her automobile in that location.
11.3