Conclusion
Where are we to locate prospective and retrospective responsibility in international relations? I answered this question by starting with the (admittedly large) assumption that all and only moral agents can bear responsibility.
I offered a characterization of moral agency, which I suggested was straightforwardly applicable to many states and (somewhat less straightforwardly) to some intergovernmental organizations. Things are less promising, however, when it comes to holding responsible a group whose members hold no goals in common (such as “the affluent”), or even groups that are united around a common cause (such as “the West”).Let me close with two important caveats. First, states’ and IGOs’ moral agency does not imply that states or IGOs are moral saints that should go unquestioned or unchallenged. Precisely because they have the capacity to deliberate upon morally good reasons, we should hold them accountable for their decisions—both good and (perhaps more often) bad. Second, members of non-agent groups can have responsibility (prospective or retrospective) for acting upon those non-moral collective agents—and upon non-agent collectives—in such a way as to transform them into collective moral agents. Likewise, non-members (including various moral collective agents) can have responsibility for such transformation of collectives. In this way, the fact that some entities in international politics do not themselves bear responsibility does not let anyone “off the hook” in the long run. Instead, by limiting our responsibility-ascriptions to those entities that are moral agents, we can be surer that we make demands only on those entities with the capacity to respond.
Notes
1 I thank Deborah Tollefsen and Saba Bazargan-Forward for pressing me to clarify this.
2 Erskine (2001: 82—3) considers but ultimately rejects a similar conclusion for “quasi-states”.
“Quasistates” are moral agents on my criteria, which are more permissive than Erskine’s.3 The idea that IGOs are agents accords with public international law (Crawford 2012: 169—70). I’ve argued elsewhere that moral agency applies to even more informal groupings, such as some “coalitions of the willing” (Collins 2014; see also Erskine 2014).
4 I add this condition because it rules out the G7 and G20 as IGOs. While this deserves argumentation, it allows me to focus on the strongest examples, to demonstrate that at least some IGOs are moral agents.
5 I thank Richard Collins for pressing IGO diversity and encouraging the “some” claim.
6 In the sense defined in section 23.2—there is also a natural sense in which only states are “members” of the UN.
7 The most general aim of the United Nations is provided in Chapter I of its Charter (UN 1945).
8 The most general aim of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) is “to enable police around the world to work together to make the world a safer place” by giving them “access to the tools and services necessary to do their jobs effectively” and “facilitating international police cooperation even where diplomatic relations do not exist between particular countries” (INTERPOL 2019).
9 I therefore agree with Brown: “there is no body that acts for the society of states as a whole” (2001: 98, emphasis original). However, in opposition to Brown, this is not because UN organs are not moral agents. It's rather because “the society of states” is not an agent, and no agent can act on behalf of something that is not itself an agent.
10 Arguments of this kind are made by May 1992: 109; Isaacs 2011: 145-51; and Wringe 2010: 222. These authors could be interpreted as arguing that each of the individuals in the group has a responsibility with the same content, rather than that the responsibility is group-level. Given this possible interpretation, I am considering this argument independently from its presentation by these authors.
I thank Deborah Tollefsen and Saba Bazargan-Forward for pressing the alternative interpretation of these authors.11 Young (2011: 180-1) implies something like this, though again one could make the “shared content of individual responsibilities” rather than the “group-level responsibility” interpretation ofYoung.
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