RT Article
T1 Individual Complicity in Collective Wrongdoing
JF Ethical theory and moral practice
VO 16
IS 2
SP 227
OP 243
A1 Lawson, Brian
LA English
YR 2013
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1785697218
AB Some instances of right and wrongdoing appear to be of a distinctly collective kind. When, for example, one group commits genocide against another, the genocide is collective in the sense that the wrongness of genocide seems morally distinct from the aggregation of individual murders that make up the genocide. The problem, which I refer to as the problem of collective wrongs, is that it is unclear how to assign blame for distinctly collective wrongdoing to individual contributors when none of those individual contributors is guilty of the wrongdoing in question. I offer Christopher Kutz’s Complicity Principle as an attractive starting point for solving the problem, and then argue that the principle ought to be expanded to include a broader and more appropriate range of cases. The view I ultimately defend is that individuals are blameworthy for collective harms insofar as they knowingly participate in those harms, and that said individuals remain blameworthy regardless of whether they succeed in making a causal contribution to those harms.
K1 Kutz
K1 Complicity
K1 Individual
K1 Responsibility
K1 Action
K1 Collective
DO 10.1007/s10677-011-9332-5