Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age

by
Format: Hardcover
Pub. Date: 2000-10-09
Publisher(s): Cambridge University Press
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Summary

We live in a morally flawed world. Our lives are complicated by what other people do, and by the harms that flow from our social, economic and political institutions. Our relations as individuals to these collective harms constitute the domain of complicity. This book examines the relationship between collective responsibility and individual guilt. It presents a rigorous philosophical account of the nature of our relations to the social groups in which we participate, and uses that account in a discussion of contemporary moral theory. Christopher Kutz shows that the two prevailing theories of moral philosophy, Kantianism and consequentialism, both have difficulties resolving problems of complicity. He then argues for a richer theory of accountability in which any real understanding of collective action not only allows but demands individual responsibility.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction
1(16)
The Deep Structure of Individual Accountability
17(49)
Introduction
17(3)
Social accountability as an example of the fundamentally relational nature of accountability
20(5)
The relational bases of moral accountability: conduct, consequences, and character
25(21)
A complication: the dynamics of accountability
46(3)
The irreducibility of accountability
49(4)
Ethical functionalism without consequentialism
53(3)
Nietzsche's challenge
56(3)
Legal accountability and the limits of response
59(5)
Conclusion
64(2)
Acting Together
66(47)
Introduction
66(2)
Methodology: generality, reducibility, and functionalism
68(6)
Collective action as intentional participation
74(7)
The contributory content of participatory intentions
81(4)
The reducibility of collective action to individual intention
85(4)
Collective action: the minimalist approach
89(7)
Participation and the perspective of command
96(7)
Ascribing collective actions
103(4)
Attributing collective intentions
107(5)
Conclusion
112(1)
Moral Accountability and Collective Action
113(33)
Introduction
113(2)
Common sense and the disappearance of moral accountability: Dresden
115(9)
The inadequacy of moral theory to collective wrongdoing: individual consequentialism
124(5)
The incompatibility of collective consequentialism and individual accountability
129(4)
Kantian universalization and marginal contributions
133(5)
Understanding collective action and individual accountability
138(6)
Conclusion
144(2)
Complicitous Accountability
146(20)
Introduction
146(1)
Whether complicit actors are less culpable than direct actors
147(17)
Conclusion
164(2)
Problematic Accountability: Facilitation, Unstructured Collective Harm, and Organizational Dysfunction
166(38)
Introduction
166(2)
Complicity without participation
168(23)
Collective accountability and holistic responses
191(11)
Conclusion
202(2)
Complicity, Conspiracy, and Shareholder Liability
204(50)
Introduction
204(2)
Epistemic constraints upon legal accountability
206(3)
Criminal complicity doctrine and the scope of liability
209(11)
Justifying complicitous accountability
220(16)
Against the limited civil liability of shareholders
236(17)
Conclusion
253(1)
Conclusion: Accountability and the Possibility of Community
254(7)
Notes 261(50)
Bibliography 311(14)
Index 325

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