Whose fault is it? An account of complicity in unstructured collective harms

Abstract

Many of the major challenges facing global society can be characterized as unstructured collective harms (for example, global warming and structural discrimination).These harms are collective in the sense that they arise as the result of the actions of, or interactions between, multiple agents, where no single agent can control the outcome, and they are unstructured in the sense that there is no coordination or intention to cause harm among the agents involved. But it is not clear how we should determine who is morally responsible for these harms. In this paper, we propose an answer to the question of who is complicit in an unstructured collective harm. Our answer builds on but develops existing proposals by drawing together literatures that speak to different aspects of the question. First, we argue that the notion of causal contribution needs to be broadened to include the idea of causation as production. Second, we draw on the literature on moral taint in order to introduce additional objective (external) grounds for complicity in unstructured harms, such as benefitting from harm. Third, we discuss how the voluntariness and foreseeability conditions are best interpreted in this context.

Keywords: unstructured collective harms, complicity, co-responsibility, moral taint