Agency, global responsibility, and the speculations of ordinary life

ABSTRACT

There is an abiding scepticism in normative theory that individual responsibility for global injustice lies outside commonsense moral thought because it is not grounded in an intuitive conception of human agency. Despite the grim realities of injustice in an interconnected world, this scepticism holds that human beings cannot properly internalise a nonrestrictive view of responsibility because it cuts against their experience of agency in the world. Against this view, this article argues that individual responsibility for the realisation of global justice is supported by a pervasive, and socio-politically influenced, feature of the phenomenology of agency: moral imagination. Moral imagination connects actions which are within the domain of an ordinary life to larger projects of social and political change. Since there is no compelling reason for the scope of those projects to be restricted, there is an accessible understanding and experience of the phenomenology of agency which grounds individual global responsibility in the real world. I call this a dynamic phenomenology of agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• responsibility
• injustice
• imagination
• moral progress

Acknowledgments

For engagement on various ideas discussed here, my thanks to Cécile Laborde, Jakob Moggia, Collis Tahzib, Jonathan Wolff, Brian Wong, two anonymous reviewers, and participants in a session of the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop at Oxford University.

Disclosure statement

Support for doctoral research drawn on in this article was provided by the General Sir John Monash Foundation.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Roberto Mangabeira Unger for inspiring me to think deeply about the role of imagination in human progress.

2. Geuss (2010, p. x) makes a parallel, but different, point that imagination is important to all forms of politics.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vafa Ghazavi

Vafa Ghazavi is a DPhil student and John Monash Scholar at Balliol College, University of Oxford.