Complicity
Ethics and Law for a Collective Age

This book examines the relationship between collective responsibility and individual guilt.

Christopher Kutz (Author)

9780521594523, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 October 2000

344 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.63 kg

"Filled with concrete examples, imagined, literary, and historical, Kutz's wide-ranging and probing discussion is written in measured and elegant prose... This thoughtful and stimulating book is a significant addition to the literature." Margaret Gilbert, Social Theory and Practice

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.

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. The deep structure of individual accountability
3. Acting together
4. Moral accountability and collective action
5. Complicitous accountability
6. Problematic accountability: facilitation, unstructured collective harm, and organizational dysfunction
7. Complicity, conspiracy, and shareholder liability
8. Conclusion: accountability and the possibility of community
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & political philosophy [HPS]