When should we hold a group morally responsible for a
member’s evil? In the wake of the Charlie Hedbo attacks, many will demand
answers about Islam’s role in promoting violence. And as we brace for the
inevitable backlash against ordinary Muslims, in France or elsewhere, questions
will be raised about different nations’ collective responsibility for individual
violent acts of Islamophobia and racism. Both questions (and others like them,
such as wider responsibility for violence against women)
involve judging a group’s moral responsibility for some of its members’
actions.
Such judgments are ethically complex, and it can prove hard
to make them with any consistency. All of us can be tempted to swiftly declare
the collective responsibility of other groups (such as Muslim responsibility for
terrorism), even as we shrug off the same accusation when it is applied to us
(Western responsibility for Islamophobic violence or abuse).
Contributory
responsibility
One immediate challenge for these judgments of collective
responsibility is that ‘responsible’ is a slippery word. When we say someone is
morally responsible for some act, we usually mean that they were directly
responsible for performing that act. But often in cases of large-scale collective
responsibility, we mean something looser. We mean that the accused contributed
in some indirect way to what happened, laying the groundwork for an environment
where the violent action became more likely.
Sometimes, attributing this type of ‘contributory’
responsibility can be straightforward. Most people would agree enthusiastic Nazi
party members bear at least some blame for its atrocities. Even if the
party-member did not personally commit such evils, his or her racist, brutal
beliefs helped contribute to what happened. Certainly, few doubt that inciting
others to violence can be a serious wrong, a theme captured in Aesop’s famous fable
of The Trumpeter Taken Captive, where a
trumpeter who encourages his army to fight is found blameworthy even though he
carries no weapon himself.
Outside of such clear-cut cases, weighing contributory
responsibility proves much more difficult. Despite the violent actors’ appeals
to their religious or patriotic motives, the larger collectives almost always denounce
the violence. Religious leaders demand the religion utterly forbids terrorism.
Political leaders stress that racist violence contravenes national traditions
of tolerance and the rule of law. Each might appeal to other factors leading to
the specific violence, such as political rather than religious commitments, or personal
criminality or insanity. For example, debate rages as to whether the recent
siege in Sydney was a religiously motivated lone-wolf terror attack, or the
final implosion of a troubled misogynist mind. Similarly, those who defend against any possibility of some collective
responsibility for the Paris attacks tend to stress insanity and criminality, rather than commonly held beliefs.
Sometimes, the collective might hedge its condemnation of
the terrorist or racist violence. The collective might accept that some of the culprit’s
reasons for anger and frustration were valid, or that the culprit was genuinely
persecuted, even as they deplore the violence. In such cases, outsiders can feel
the collective is partially excusing the actor’s wrongdoing, even as those in
the group can point to a clear distinction between endorsing ends versus
endorsing means. Both these opposing concerns (of excuse versus distinguishing means and ends) are genuine ethical issues, and need to be weighed carefully in any given case.
Positive
responsibility
We can also use ‘responsibility’ in a different sense, where
we locate a person or group that we think should have worked to actively
prevent the act from happening. While this person didn’t cause the act, even
indirectly, we might believe he or she was nevertheless in charge of doing
everything possible to prevent it happening. In this case, we might agree a
religious or political leader didn’t facilitate an act, but still feel they
‘could have done more’ to positively prevent it. If so, when we demand that the
leader condemn the violence, we might not be saying we suspect them of
contributing to it,
but rather that we think the leader is well-placed to hold a positive moral
responsibility to try to prevent further attacks, and that this is an appropriate
way of their doing so.
Group cohesiveness?
Judging collective responsibility also involves measuring a
group’s cohesiveness, the extent to which it operates as a unified agent, with
its various parts able to work together or at least influence each other. Group
cohesiveness can be hard to measure. Why? Because when someone does something
terrible that we can hardly imagine doing, we naturally ask what could have
motivated them. If we are outside their group (religion, nation), we can
suppose the reason lies in this factor of group-membership that distinguishes
us from them. If we are inside the group, then instead we naturally search for
some other distinguishing feature. Each process can distort our reasoning, but
at least the view from inside the group introduces more sophistication into our
enquiry. From outside, communities often look homogenous. From inside, we can
appreciate the profound differences, divisions, partitions and personalities that
prevent the group from functioning as a single community, much less a unified
agent.
Let’s try for
consistency
As we can see, any attribution of collective responsibility
ultimately hinges on subtle principles regarding individual moral agency, and
complex factual claims about group solidarity. Despite these difficulties, like
most ethical questions we can benefit from trying to be consistent in our
judgments. This article has discussed two applications of collective
responsibility: collective religious responsibility for terrorism, and
collective national (or cultural) responsibility for violent acts of racism and
Islamaphobia.
What’s remarkable about these two issues, in my experience,
is that those who make the collective attribution in one case are quick to deny
it in the other. A person who believes Islam is essentially violent rarely
accepts that (say) Australia is essentially racist. And vice versa: the person
who happily asserts that Australia is a racist country and it behoves all of us
to stand up against such ugliness would never think to demand that Islam is a
violent religion or that all Muslims must take responsibility for quelling the
dangerous minority with their group.
In other words, we can all learn from the ways we ourselves
resist the collective responsibilities others attribute to us, even as we
demand such responsibilities of others. This isn’t to say the two issues (of
violent terrorism and racist violence) are equivalent: a person may have
principled conceptual reasons and empirical evidence to make one attribution
even as they deny another. Instead, the point is that thinking about how we
personally make these different judgments can help us reflect on the
complexities involved.
…and caution
Finally, it bears mention that even in those cases where we do
allocate responsibility, there remains a question of what the best and most
helpful moral response to that finding is. Locating even a genuine case of
blameworthiness does not tell us what action should be taken, much less whether
we should be the one take it. Deciding that another person does bear moral
blame certainly does not authorize us to take retribution. Believing that it
does, after all, is one of the fundamental moral failings of both the terrorist
and the racist thug.
[A shorter version of this blogpost was originally published at The Conversation.]
