Not in Our Name and Not to Our Benefit: Allocating Political Responsibility

• In Event: Poster Session: Normative Political Theory

Abstract

Recent work in political theory has challenged individualistic theories of responsibility in the face of complex systems, unintended consequences, and delegated authority as constitutive of contemporary political life. Critics have proposed conceptions of political responsibility as collective responses to the predicaments of politics. While these theories offer significant advantages over moralistic and legalistic approaches to responsibility, they nevertheless raise two political-theoretical questions. First, how should responsibility be allocated differentially within a collective? That all members of a political community or participants in a social structure share responsibility for the injustices it generates should not mean that they are all equally responsible; intuitively, an agent’s relative responsibility should reflect their relative privilege. Second, how should agents respond politically to injustices? What form of political action should this response take? While responsibility may be constitutive of politics, different relationships to injustice necessitate different responses.

To respond to these questions, we develop a typology of political responsibility through the intersection of two axes. One axis tracks the degree to which an agent benefits from the injustice: the agent benefits, the agent neither benefits nor is harmed, and the agent is harmed by the injustice. The second tracks the degree to which the agent authorizes the injustice, from direct authorization, through indirect authorization, to a lack of authorization. These axes generate a three-by-three typology that describe nine different ways that an agent can be related to an injustice, allowing us to distinguish both differential degrees and differential forms of responsibility. First, as the agent’s relationship is characterized by greater benefit and more direct authorization the degree to which that person must respond to the injustice increases. Second, the typology provides accounts for nine qualitatively distinct forms by which agents are obliged to take political responsibility. To explicate the value of our typology, we map examples from contemporary dilemmas of global justice and governance.

This paper advances the literature on political responsibility by demarcating differential degrees and forms of political responsibility and providing an analytical tool by which scholars and citizens can make sense of their constitutive responsibility to the political world in terms of specific responsibilities for specific injustices.

Authors

• Michael Christopher Sardo, Occidental College

• Erin Lockwood, University of California, Irvine