Conclusions
This chapter has provided a review of recent debates on states’ and citizens’ collective responsibility. As we saw, recent philosophical literature on the nature of corporate agency has given a boost to the idea that states are morally responsible agents, and that when they do wrong they are the appropriate subjects of moral reactions, from resentment to anger and even criminal punishment.
On the other hand, as I emphasized throughout, we should be careful not to conflate our moral reactions to the state with our moral reactions to its citizenry as a whole. Moral blame attaches only to citizens who wrongly contributed to, or failed to prevent, their state’s wrongdoing, in proportion to the centrality of these contributions to the wrongdoing. But according to at least some models, remedial responsibility can be distributed amongst all, or nearly all, citizens in light of their membership status in the state (assuming the state complies with the conditions I outlined).These assertions have important pragmatic implications. For example, they can help to assess the various demands for compensation for state wrongdoing with which I opened this chapter. As we saw, most of these demands were targeted at wrongdoer states, in light of their atrocious actions. However, at the same time, given the corporate nature of the state and the distributive effect, it was the populations of these countries who felt the impact of burden. The analysis here cast doubt on the normative justification of this burden in some of the cases: Iraq, for example, was ruled at the time of its invasion of Kuwait by a highly oppressive and brutal regime. Given its treatment of its own population it is highly questionable whether the population should have been held remedially responsible for the regime’s crimes.9 This is not to deny that the victims of this state’s atrocities ought to have been compensated.
But the discussion here suggests that when the state fails to meet certain conditions, the international community ought to look for alternative compensation schemes that would not excessively burden the population of the wrongdoer states (see some suggestions in Fabre 2016: 166—168). On the other hand, the analysis suggests that were the democratic states that participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq demanded to pay compensation for the serious harm they inflicted on the Iraqi population, then the distributive effect of that burden could be justified to American and British citizens, in light of the democratic nature of their state and/or their participation in it. Furthermore, many of these citizens, who regularly contribute to the democratic state and who had sufficient information about its policies, share at least some level of blame for the wrongdoings committed on their behalf.Notes
1 My focus here is on responsibility for wrongdoing. States and citizens can be responsible for policies which are not wrongful and even praiseworthy, and that responsibility may carry with it various entitlements (e.g. to the fruits of a beneficial policy).
2 For a review of these critiques see Wendt 2004.
3 List and Pettit note that, conceptually, there can be cases where a group agent is to blame but none of its citizens will share the blame (166). But in reality it is hard to see how such cases can come about.
4 Another important question, which I lack the space to discuss here, concerns the moral responsibility of non-citizens for state policies: for example, the responsibility of migrant communities for the policies of their hosting states, or the responsibility of diaspora communities for the policies of the state with which they have strong cultural ties.
5 The impact of blame would change from context to context. For example, post-conflict societies often avoid using a blame-based model when apportioning reparations for the crimes committed during a recent conflict, precisely because of concerns about the disastrous political effects this model might bring, including instigation of further conflict.
6 Stilz is careful to separate moral blame and forward-looking task responsibility. She thinks that, given that many citizens have done nothing wrong, and object to their states policies, they do not share blame for what it does. Nevertheless, the state is authorized to act in their name, and in that sense their will is implicated in its actions and grounds their task responsibility (Stilz 2011: 194—195)
7 Another influential work that understands citizenship as collective action is offered by Margaret Gilbert (2006).
8 On this weak-endorsement view, a citizen need not harbor especially positive views of her state. The citizen may be indifferent to her state, or have merely instrumental reasons to take part in it. Such weak attachments are sufficient to ground genuine participation.
9 For analysis of the German case see Jubb 2014. The CARICOM committee claims raise additional challenges about state responsibility for past wrongdoing. See Butt 2008 for a good starting discussion on this issue.
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