Moral Taint

The discussion of the last section revealed that an accomplice does not always bear moral responsibility for the outcome for which the principal actor bears responsibility. In this section, it will be my contention that, when the accomplice fails to bear responsibility for such an out­come, the accomplice can still be tainted by the wrongful actions of the principal actor.

The basic idea is that a moral agent who commits a wrongdoing sometimes taints those to whom he or she is closely connected. An entire family, for example, can be tainted by the crim­inal actions of a son or daughter. Not only are their reputations damaged, but on a deeper level, their moral integrity is affected.

Anthony Appiah, the first to introduce this notion in the philosophical literature, believes that moral taint is produced when the wrongful actions of another produces harm, and the contagion of this wrongdoing is transferred to someone with no involvement. Consider the events of the Holocaust. Ordinary German citizens bore no responsibility for these events, but Appiah believes they were nevertheless tainted by the actions of Nazi officials. This means that they experienced a loss of moral integrity. Someone’s own moral integrity, according to Appiah, is affected when someone else produces harm and some connection exists between these two persons (Appiah, 1991). Moral taint is a phenomenon that involves one’s links to others in the community.

Appiah’s primary example of moral taint is the issue of divesting shares of stock in firms doing business in South Africa in the 1980s. Someone holding shares in these companies bore no responsibility for the harm produced by apartheid, but he or she was nevertheless tainted by the persons who practiced apartheid. Those purchasing shares in these companies experienced a diminishing of moral integrity, and, according to Appiah, it was appropriate for them to experi­ence shame.

It might be objected that the notion of moral taint is flimsy, that it is hard to see how it impugns one’s integrity, and that there is no reason to care if one is tainted by the misdeeds of another. I believe Appiah would be happy to concede that it is flimsy, at least compared to the notion of moral responsibility, and that it impugns one’s integrity to a degree that is perhaps vanishingly small. But from this it does not follow that there is no reason to care whether or not one is tainted. Suppose that in the 1980s, I was shocked to learn that I was a stockholder in a company that did business in South Africa, and I immediately sold the stock because I was conscientious about doing the right thing. Thus, I had a reason to care about the fact that I was tainted, because I believed that my own integrity was somewhat impugned. Even if Appiah is mistaken in thinking that one’s integrity is affected whenever one is tainted, one can still have a good reason to care.

I suggest that moral taint can shed light on situations where an accomplice falls short of bearing moral responsibility for the harm produced by the principal actor. When the complicity of a moral agent takes the form of commanding, counseling, consenting, and participating, he or she normally bears responsibility for the resulting harm. But when the complicity takes one of the other five forms, a person’s contribution to the sequence of events might be limited enough that he or she falls short of bearing responsibility for the outcome. On occasions when this happens, one may be tempted to suppose that one has done nothing wrong and that nothing has happened to affect one’s moral integrity. But one of the lessons to be learned from Appiah’s account of moral taint is that an accomplice can be tainted by the wrongful actions of a prin­cipal actor, and the moral integrity of the accomplice can as a result be affected. To prevent being tainted in situations such as these, one can attempt to distance oneself from the principal actor and his or her wrongful actions.⁸

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