Complicity

What does it mean to be complicit in diffuse collective wrongs like structural racism, gender-based oppression, or environmental damage, and what responsibilities are entailed by complicity? Moral philosophers have often understood complicity to consist in some degree of inherited culpability, arising from knowing or intentional contributions to the bad acts of a primary wrongdoer. But these theories fail to explain complicity in the foregoing contexts, and cannot justify needed efforts to hold individuals accountable for unwitting contributions to systemic wrongs and injustices. In response to this gap, my dissertation defends a novel reconceptualization of complicity as participation in collectively perpetrated wrongs, including structural injustice. A broad notion of participation – which requires neither intentions nor knowledge (nor culpable ignorance) – can explain the source of complicity across a range of collective wrongs, and capture a variety of actions and omissions including those that merely reproduce or ratify harmful systems. I further demonstrate that complicity does not entail blameworthiness, but that even non-culpable complicity will generate moral obligations and reasons for action, and will make various moral responses and expectations appropriate (e.g. shame, regret, mistrust, criticism, mutual education, reparative and resistant action). While existing theories of complicity cannot explain why and how we hold individuals accountable for unknowing, blameless participation in diffuse wrongs and structural injustice, my view clarifies our actual practices and supports a wider repertoire of ethical responses.