In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy

Chapter 9 Democratic Complicity

C H A P T E R 9 Democratic Complicity We often hear blanket liabilities issued for democratic citizens. They are said to rightly have, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, “owned” and “authorized” the actions of their government.1 This view alleges a strict connection between citizens and any injustice downstream from a shared coercive structure. Responsibility for the profile of political acts and underlying ground rules, on this view, attaches to ordinary citizens. Once we find ourselves in any reasonably working democracy—its institutional details will hardly matter—blame flows vicariously. No more information is needed about my relationship with a reticulated political system. There is a grain of truth in this view. But it hardly commits us to assigning complicity such an omnivorous role in democratic life. Representative democracy’s endemic problem invites a custom solution. Citizens direct their blame at agents, and lawmakers pass that back to their principal. Here I want to propose a way of locating individual responsibility in a mediated political setting. If democracy is a distinctive kind of agency relationship, as I have argued, its great liability is secondary injustice. My accounts of citizenship and representation are structured around the two modes of complicitious agency. We can relate to institutional injustice as accessories and coprincipals. Up to this point our discussion has been forward-looking.We have considered the deliberative use of moral principles, which are meant to serve as guides to democratic agents in their decision making. What follows from these materials for our retrospective judgments? There is another, critical way that these principles can be deployed.2 We can consult them in the assessment of actions and agents—in deciding whether a citizen or elected official is morally responsible for an unjust law or an executive order. The chapter begins in a customary manner, eliciting our intuitions about a case shorn of democratic features. We then apply our basic convictions about complicity to the structure of a democratic system. I then sketch two ways of understanding individual complicity for injustices in the basic structure. Participatory accounts condition complicity on citizens acting together with the intention of producing a collective outcome. Associative accounts hold that individual citizens, embedded in political systems, engage in a kind of mediated wrongdoing. I argue that these two accounts overexculpate or overimplicate the democratic citizen. DemocraticComplicity • 227 The third and fourth sections present this difficulty as two implausible poles. On the first, intention theorists face an objectionably high number of false negatives. The second pole confronts associative theorists with a significant set of false positives. Each view, on its own, fails to organize and explain our pretheoretical intuitions about the distinctive forms of wrong-commission and wrong-avoidance made possible in a multilayered democracy. These explanatory difficulties are closely related. I trace them to an impoverished conception of the basic structure and its existence conditions. Neither intention nor associative theorists have the resources to give us a plausible-sounding answer to the question, What’s morally unusual, if not unique, about the basic structure? Section 5 defends a democratic conception of complicity designed to avoid these two poles. It draws upon our ideas about complicitous agency while recognizing that the routinized interactions under a democratic system raise distinctive problems. The nub of this account is that complicity picks out a wrongful relation that we bear to unjust institutions and political agents. I end by considering a difficulty in this way of accounting for complicity for political structures. The democratic account has the onus of either explaining away or accommodating our felt experiences of shame and guilt for injustices committed by our state. The Distributive Problem A democratic conception of complicity is a solution to a problem: How should we distribute moral responsibility and blame across a polity? Its shape resembles the more familiar distributive problem of socioeconomic injustice. We can take two lessons from this debate. What set of background conditions gives rise to the problem? Our answer will make up the circumstances of democratic responsibility. A political system must have the proper democratic credentials. It must manifest an injustice— whether local or global, foreground or background. This has an evidentiary status, namely that democratic actors have acted unjustly. We are less certain how to distribute responsibility for the injustice. There is a second leaf to be taken from the socioeconomic version of the problem. We should not treat the amount of material goods to be distributed as fixed. For how we divide up the pie...