Overdetermined collective harms include those resulting from climate change, structural injustice, and unscrupulous consumerism. While no one individual makes the collectively caused harm worse or more likely to occur, their individual acts/omissions together cause the harm. I will argue that if we want to hold individuals accountable for such collectively caused harms, we should appeal not to their putative complicity in the wrongdoing of some collective or other individual, but to their own wrongdoing—specifically, to their violation of what I call a “mixed duty.” A mixed duty is a duty to perform or to refrain from performing certain actions while having (or lacking) certain ends or attitudes, and these include apologizing while feeling contrite, helping the needy while having their well-being as a non-instrumental end, and diverting the trolley onto the sidetrack while intending to save the five on the main track.

In other work, I have defended what I call a “deliberative account of moral complicity,” according to which an agent can become complicit in the wrongful conduct of another agent by failing in a deliberative obligation that they have to help that other agent deliberate correctly about what to do.  The possibility of deliberative complicity raises a problem: should the deliberative agent focus her attention on fulfilling her deliberative duty and risk causal moral responsibility for others' wrongful actions?  In this paper, I articulate this pressing difficulty and defend a default entitlement to engage with other agents in what I call the deliberative mode.  Assuming that the default entitlement is in place (or than an agent is justified in thinking it is in place), an agent who causally contributes to the wrongful action of another will not be morally responsible for another's wrongful action if she fulfills her deliberative duty.

In previous work, I have focused on grounds of moral and political responsibility that inhere in specifically intentional forms of cooperation and collaboration; this approach has meant that I explained other central forms of complicity, such as facilitation or acquiescence, as paler versions of the intentional case.  Here I articulate and try to defend an account of complicity that rests on a broader conception of non-intentional cooperative behavior, which I call “orientation.”  My hope is that this new account can provide a more robust ground for ascribing moral responsibility in large-scale, formal and informal political settings.  My new account is meant to complement, not replace, an intention-based theory.  I will deploy this account in two familiar contexts: shared ex post responsibility for anthropogenic climate change, and shared ex ante responsibility for public health.

People commonly claim that ‘silence is complicity’. We argue that this is typically incorrect. First, while it can certainly be wrong to not speak up in the face of the wrongful conduct of others, this does not make silence complicity. Second, failure to be publicly vocal is often not wrongful at all in the absence of a specific duty for each person who is aware of the situation to speak up. Ending large-scale wrongs requires a division of moral labour some of which are inconsistent with being publicly vocal. Finally, those who condemn silence are often operating with an inaccurate, overly inflated conception of the efficacy of individual acts of public speech. In fact our obligations in such contexts tend to be imperfect duties with varied options for satisfaction. Thus not only is silence, but also various failures of prevention neither a form of complicity nor necessarily wrongful action.

In public discourse about past injustices committed by the nation-state, people commonly speak of the members of the national community being collectively complicit or responsible for those injustices. Yet, it is challenging to explain how this is so. Instead of being associated with democratic decision making or benefiting from injustices, I propose that responsibility is connected to national membership. National responsibility is mediated by our identity as inheritors of the national community. If the nation is a moral community that retains its identity over time, even as generations die and others take their place, then its collective responsibility for its actions exists alongside individual responsibility for one’s own acts. The nation is responsible, and insofar as we identify with and take up the mantle of that nation, we must accept both what is of value in it and responsibility for its past misdeeds.

In thinking through the philosophical implications of willful submission and complicity with one’s own submission, my aim in this paper is twofold. First, present an account of complicity that includes moral responsibility for participating in unjust structures without taking up the language of blameworthiness, a) when the oppressed subject is not responsible for initiating the injustice and b) faces a restrained array of choices for action. Second, explore ambivalent attachments and subject formation from the point of view of continental and psychoanalytic feminisms. My general goal is to provide resources to flesh out the ambivalence in oppressed subjects’ exercise of agency (for example through dualities such as complicity/resistance, coercion/choice, and fragmentation/coalition).

There is substantial disagreement about the basis of complicity. Some argue that an agent becomes complicit by causally contributing to wrongdoing (Gardner, 2007; Petersson, 2013; Lepora and Goodin, 2013; Zakaras, 2018; Jensen, 2020). Others contend that complicity arises when agents intentionally or knowingly participate in wrongdoing (Kutz, 2000, 2007; Lawson, 2011; Bazargan, 2013). Still others propose that complicity can occur without causal contribution or participation, provided some other condition is met (Driver, 2015a, 2015b; Bennett, 2021; Donohue, 2021; Bazargan, 2022). Disagreement also extends to the normative implications of complicity: some assert that it necessarily entails blameworthiness (Mellema, 2016), while others maintain that agents can be blamelessly complicit (Lepora and Goodin, 2013).I present a unified account of complicity that explains why some theories inadvertently address phenomena unrelated to complicity and why others appear correct at specific levels of analysis. 

I propose a theory of accountability covering both non-complicitous and complicitous actions. First I distinguish accountability reactions (e.g., moral indignation and guilt) – which I elsewhere argue involve a call for correcting imbalances in the agent’s distribution of their agency in the service of persons, or their interests and points of view  -- from criticism, requests for explanations, or mere frustration with someone’s failures to live up to expectations. Second I argue that objects of moral accountability are those that provide the agent with moral lessons, or opportunities for moral feedback learning. In cases of complicity and shared responsibility, much as in cases of individual responsibility, the object of accountability provides a relevant lesson.

A pair of pilots are working together to bomb a munitions factory, which will kill villagers living nearby. However, for one pilot, those deaths are intended as an act of terror, whereas for the other pilot, those deaths are a foreseeable but unintended side-effect. How do we describe the purpose of the shared act as a whole? Generalizing the act’s description fails to reach an apt univocal moral judgment of the shared act. I call this the “problem of incongruent intentions” in shared action. I address this problem by analyzing shared action in terms of a division of agential labor which provides a basis for attributing to each participant a purpose derived from the intentions of his or her cohorts. The result will be that participants whose intentions are themselves unproblematic can be complicit in the problematic intentions of others.