Where Complicity and Collective Responsibility Intersect

Having surveyed the issues of complicity and of collective responsibility, it is time to examine whether and under what conditions a group of moral agents can be complicit in the wrong­doing of others, and simultaneously qualify as a collective responsible for the outcome produced (at least in part) by the wrongdoing.

Let A be an individual moral agent who commits a wrongdoing, and let B be a group of moral agents. Four possibilities can be distinguished as follows:

(1) The agents comprising B are not complicit in A’s wrongdoing, and they are not collect­ively responsible for the outcome O produced by A’s wrongdoing (or for the failure to prevent O).

(2) The agents comprising B are not complicit in A’s wrongdoing, but they are collect­ively responsible for the outcome O produced by A’s wrongdoing (or for the failure to prevent O).

(3) The agents comprising B are complicit in A’s wrongdoing, but they are not collect­ively responsible for the outcome O produced by A’s wrongdoing (or for the failure to prevent O).

(4) The agents comprising B are complicit in A’s wrongdoing, and they are also collect­ively responsible for the outcome O produced by A’s wrongdoing (or for the failure to prevent O).¹⁰

Examples of each possibility will now be examined.

Suppose that A is a Nazi official in a concentration camp, and A issues an order that a group of prisoners be executed. The agents comprising B are residents of a nearby town who have no knowledge of the events taking place in the concentration camp. Clearly, these residents are not complicit in A’s issuing the order, and clearly, they are not collectively responsible for the resulting executions. Thus, this is an example of possibility (1).

Suppose that A fires a revolver at another person in a public building and leaves the room where the shooting occurred. A few minutes later, a group of persons enter the room and notice that someone has been shot.

Suppose that A and two friends, at A’s instigation, plan a bank robbery. The plan calls for A to enter a bank with a loaded revolver and demand cash from a teller, while one friend stands watch and the other friend drives the getaway car. When A demands cash from a teller, a security guard appears out of nowhere. In a panic, A fires at the security guard and leaves the premises, whereupon all three leave the area in the getaway car. The friends, let us assume, have no oppor­tunity to either assist in or prevent the shooting of the security guard.

Here, it is reasonable to judge that A is the principal actor in a scheme to rob a bank and A’s two friends are accomplices. They never actually succeed in robbing the bank, but nevertheless the two friends are complicit in the attempted robbery of the bank. Now consider the injury of the security guard, the outcome of A’s wrongdoing. Surely, the two friends have nothing to do with this state of affairs (though they might well be tainted by it), and hence it would be mis­taken to judge that they are collectively responsible for it. I believe this situation is an example of possibility (3).

An adaptation of the previous example produces an instance of possibility (4): as before, A initiates a plan to rob a bank, and two friends agree to serve as the lookout and the getaway driver, respectively. This time the robbery is successful, and the outcome consists in acquiring $3,000 in cash, which they split in equal shares.

As a basis for my contention, I offer the following: both friends perform contributing actions toward the bank robbery by assisting in A’s plan to make the robbery successful. Their intent is to support the efforts of A, and they are complicit in A’s wrongdoing. In addition, both friends are acting with the intent to acquire cash. Their overall motivation is the successful robbery of the bank, and for this reason their actions to contribute to the robbery (including the intent itself) are qualifying actions. Because they perform acts that contribute to the successful robbery—that is, acts that increase the antecedent probability that the robbery will be successful—they belong to a collective that bears responsibility for the robbery.

Appendix

Perhaps the individualist will grant that those contributing to the outcome are accountable for it in some sense, but reject judging that they form a collective that bears responsibility for it. Possibly, the individualist fears the concept of an abstract object, such as a collective, bearing moral responsibility. If this captures the individualist’s position, the situation could be described in the following fashion.

First, let A(x,y) denote a relation of accountability that represents the manner in which the individualist is agreeable with the claim that person x is morally accountable (in some sense) with outcome y Second, let R(x,y) denote the relation of moral responsibility, such that R(x,y) is true if and only if x is morally responsible for outcome y. The individualist described in the previous paragraph will presumably say that, in the example of the abandoned building, the teenagers throwing stones all bear relation A to the outcome (broken windows), while only a subset of them bear R to it.

Now let Q(x,y) pick out the relation person x stands to outcome y when and only when x performs a qualifying act with respect to y.

(1) Necessarily, Q(x,y) if and only if R*(x,y).

Now it is beyond controversy that

(2) It is possible that A(x,y) if and only if Q(x,y).

Then it follows by the rules of modal logic that

(3) It is possible that A(x,y) if and only if R*(x,y).

What this shows is that the relation of accountability that is acknowledged by the enlightened individualist may designate the same moral agents as accountable for an outcome as collectivism (the version defended above) finds to have membership in the collective responsible for the same outcome. In other words, the accountability relation accepted by the enlightened indi­vidualist may shadow the relation of being collectively responsible for an outcome. While this is not a point of earth-shaking significance, it does strike me as a point worth making, one that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been made in the literature.

Notes

1 On this definition, the accomplice is morally responsible for performing this contributing act, but not necessarily for O. On some contemporary accounts of complicity, the accomplice is always morally responsible for O, but my account follows the medieval tradition of embracing a wider notion of what it means to be an accomplice. For purposes of simplicity, I here ignore complications introduced by proxy agency.

2 Suppose the principal actor is about to commit a crime. A friend of the principal actor is about to prevent him from committing the crime and then changes his mind. The friend's omitting to prevent the crime is not a causal contribution to the crime, hut it is a contribution. The sense of contribution I have in mind is this: he contributes to the outcome by intentionally deciding not to prevent it.

3 The word “quite” implies that specificity in the description of the foreseeable wrongdoing is part of what is at issue. Moral complicity does not seem to require as much specificity as does the law.

4 Reckless moral complicity is possible, of course. The point here is that instances where legal complicity takes place need not be cases where moral complicity is present.

5 To say that a moral agent enables a principal actor to produce harm is to say that the actions of the principal actor would not produce harm in the absence of the agent's involvement and that the agent is aware that his or her actions have this effect.

6 Suppose that a principal actor is performing an action as a means of bringing about a particular harm. To say that an agent facilitates this harm is to say that the agent increases the antecedent likelihood that either the principal actor's action is successfully performed or that the harm is brought about by this action, and doing so in a manner that is morally blameworthy.

7 Paul Ricoeur (1967) uses the term “defilement” to describe this type of phenomenon. In his words it is a “symbolic stain.” If a person is defiled by the stain that attaches to her criminal brother, the defilement that attaches to her is symbolic of the stain. I believe that what Ricoeur describes as stain captures at least roughly what Appiah describes as “taint.”

8 Authors whose recent work appeals to the concept of moral taint include Hud Hudson (1993), Christopher Kutz (2000), Patricia Marino (2001), and Linda Radzik (2001).

9 The notion of a “qualifying act” is introduced in my book Collective Responsibility.

10 A's wrongdoing might produce multiple outcomes, but here I am focusing on the main or most sig­nificant outcome. Offering a criterion for what counts as the main or most significant outcome lies beyond the scope of this chapter.

References

Appiah, K.A. (1991) “Racism and Moral Pollution,” in L. May and S. Hoffman (eds), Collective Responsibility, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 219—38.

Aquinas, T. (1894) Summa Theologica,Torino: P. Marietti.

Bates, S. (1971) “The Responsibility of ‘Random Collectives',” Ethics 81:343—49.

Benjamin, M. (1976) “Can Moral Responsibility Be Collective and Non-Distributive?” Social Theory and Practice 4:93—106.

Cooper, D.E. (1968) “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophy 43:258—68.

French, P. (1984) Collective and Corporate Responsibility, New York: Columbia University Press.

Held,V (1976) “Corporations, Persons, and Responsibility,” in H. Cutler (ed), Shame, Responsibility, and the Corporation, New York: Haven Publications, 161—81.

Hudson, H. (1993) “Collective Responsibility and Moral Vegetarianism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 24:89-104.

Jaspers, K. (1961) The Question of German Guilt, A.B. Ashton (trans), New York: Capricorn Books.

Jedlicki, J. (1990) “Heritage and Collective Responsibility,” in I. Maclean, A. Montefiore, and P. Winch (eds), The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 53-76.

Kadish, S.H. (1985) “Complicity, Cause, and Blame: A Study in the Interpretation of Doctrine,” California Law Review 73:323-410.

Kutz, C. (2000) Complicity: Ethics and Lawfor a Collective Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, H.D. (1948) “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophy 23:3-18.

Lewis, H.D. (1972) “The Non-Moral Notion of Collective Responsibility,” in P. French (ed.), Individual and Collective Responsibility, Cambridge, MA: Schocken Publishing, 116-44.

Marino, P. (2001) “Moral Dilemmas Collective Responsibility, and Moral Progress,” Philosophical Studies 104:203-25.

May, L. (1992) Sharing Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mellema, G. (1994) Collective Responsibility, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Mellema, G. (2006) “Collective Responsibility and Qualifying Actions,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility XXX:168—75.

Miller, S. (2006) “Collective Responsibility: An Individualist Account,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility XXX:176—93.

Narveson, J. (2002) “Collective Responsibility,” Journal of Ethics 6:179—98.

Radzik, L. (2001) “Collective Responsibility and Duties to Respond,” Social Theory and Practice TC: 455—71. Ricoeur, P. (1967) The Symbolism of Evil, New York: Harper and Row.

Smith, K.J.M. (1991) A Modern Treatise on the Law of Criminal Complicity, New York: Oxford University Press. Sverdlik, S. (1987) “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies 51:61—76.