In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy

Introduction

Introduction Search for the moment you came to believe that your state was committing a crime. You suspected this for some time. At some point your suspicion hardened into a belief. Then it dawned on you that you live in and have some modicum of control over a democratic, unjust state. Your state tortured individuals. Or it engaged in an unjustified war. Or it failed to insure individuals against severe deprivation. When you arrived at this belief, there is a sense that you hardly learned anything new. You have long known that the world contained an alarming number of instances of injustice. But now the phenomenology is different. Where you stand seems to make an important difference. There is a special horror that you experience when state-sponsored injustices are committed in your name. The self-directed attitudes seem real: shame and even guilt. So do the other-directed attitudes: indignation and resentment. You do not respond in this way when you learn of similar injustices carried out by other states. It is difficult to make sense of precisely whom or what these participant attitudes that you experience as authentic are targeting. After all, you have never engaged in the conduct we usually associate with accessories to a crime. There was no getaway car—none of the familiar aiding or abetting. You never checked a box on a referendum authorizing a particular unjust action or wrote a supportive op-ed on its behalf. Is our idea of citizenship strong enough to implicate you? All of us were born into a political structure that we did not preselect. Our involuntariness as citizens is the oldest preoccupation of political philosophy. How can you consent to state coercion, even tacitly, if you were baptized as a citizen at the moment of birth? Socrates had the first and, to many peoples’ ear, still the best answer to the problem of forced citizenship. Over time we come to own the office of citizenship. This process happens imperceptibly. Its conclusion can seem inevitable. Our discrete interactions with political institutions voluntarily tie us to its largesse. Socrates’ focus was on the benefits that we accept as inhabitants of the state.1 He argued that the transactional relationship—“deeds not words”—could justify the state’s coercion of the individual citizen. He followed the argument where it led him, and it sealed his fate. If you are a citizen in a democratic regime, you face an even more troubling involuntariness. You may experience a sense of distress for participating in political institutions that could not be justified to other citizens—who themselves are living here by the accident of birth. Or, 2 • Introduction looking outside your state, you may feel personal responsibility for relying upon political institutions that operate by exploiting people far away. Socrates put the problem as one of self-regard. Should you accept the setting back of your own interests out of political obligation? But for many of us, the more disturbing problem is other-regarding. I believe this updated form of the problem of involuntariness is even more resistant to solutions. Not only are you coerced without your consent, but you participate in the coercion of others through a position that you did not seek. You insist that you never set out to wrong other citizens or noncitizens abroad. Still, your self-reactive attitudes of shame and indignation persist. They can bring on the feeling that you are trapped in an institution in which you retain an authority position. No matter how much you dwell on the tininess of your allocated power, your distress seems to speak to your moral liability. It doesn’t help to fall back on the shoulder-shrugging line, “I’m not in charge here.” In this book I argue that there are responsibilities of the democratic citizen that are nondelegable. For a knife-edge case, think of the pivotal voter. In the musical 1776, a heavily fictionalized James Wilson realizes that his ballot will carry the day on the Declaration of Independence. If he votes the document up, he will be “one among dozens.” His name will be washed out in a sea of other votes. If he votes against the Declaration, he will be remembered as “the man who prevented American Independence.” He rejects this option with a summary judgment: “I just don’t want the responsibility.”2 I take complicity to be the professional hazard of democratic citizenship . Public officials claim to govern, act, and speak in...