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

Introduction

There is a widespread belief in the background of political and public discourse that individual responsibility for addressing global injustice lies outside commonsense moral thought because it is not grounded in an intuitive conception of human agency. This scepticism suggests that, despite the grim realities of injustice in an interconnected world, commonsense moral thought cannot internalise a nonrestrictive view of responsibility because it cuts against the experience of agency in the world. This scepticism, premised on a set of assumptions about the phenomenology of agency, has also constricted normative accounts of moral responsibility. 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 the action that agents value in the course of their lives to larger projects of social and political change. Since there is no compelling reason for the scope of such projects to be restricted, there is an accessible understanding and experience of the phenomenology of agency which grounds individual global responsibility.

Moral imagination encompasses how we perceive our own agency in bringing about moral progress, or how our lives and actions are situated within social structures and processes. In this light, the human phenomenology of agency is itself contested, malleable, and subject to change. A dynamic view of the phenomenology of agency would connect ordinary, everyday aspects of life – domains where commonsense moral thought presumably prevails – with global structural change. I do not take a position here on the precise content of such structural change. My argument is preliminary to that task. Consistent with the underlying aims of recent calls for political theory with an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ (Herzog & Zacka, 2019) and in an ‘ethnographic key’ (Longo & Zacka, 2019), my claim is that we can anchor normative reflection on global justice in a rich account of the phenomenology of moral life.

Since agents can also use their imaginative capacities to reinforce the status quo or deepen injustice, moral imagination is vulnerable to a regressive or deflationary normative account. By centring moral imagination, however, I hope to show why it is also a worthy terrain for contesting global injustice. By addressing the risks of agential paralysis in particular, my account seeks to overcome a key impediment to moral learning and collective reasoning about global justice. In reality, the lack of real-world progress on global justice has less to do with the absence of a ‘correct’ theory of duties or obligations, and more to do with the paucity of normative, conceptual, and psychological resources to connect agents in their own circumstances with distant victims of relatively opaque global structures. My argument is premised on the notion that global injustice is ultimately in human hands – not uncontrollable forces – and agents can recode those injustices to bring them under their own agency. Moral imagination is a form of rational thought, then, which situates agents in social contexts based on what those contexts can become, rather than merely what they are today.

In the rest of the paper, I undertake two main tasks. First, I elaborate the problem of agency in relation to global injustice. In particular, I reconstruct an account offered by Samuel Scheffler as this is perhaps the best articulation of the sceptical perspective I am responding to. I suggest Scheffler’s concerns remain central to theorising about global justice. Second, I propose a dynamic phenomenology of agency which builds on Iris Marion Young’s ‘social connection model’ of responsibility. My own constructive proposal emerges via two interconnected moves. The first is to overcome the claim of negligibility for individual action with regard to structural socio-political problems. The second is to relate this non-negligibility thesis to the way in which moral imagination forms an indispensable – and inherently open – feature of our self-conception of agency. I argue the dynamic phenomenology of agency makes individual global responsibility viable.

Responsibility in disarray

My argument responds to a particular line of scepticism about the viability of moral responsibility for global justice most clearly articulated by Scheffler (1995). Scheffler develops the idea of a commonsense view of responsibility and points out that this has been put under stress as a result of global interconnectedness. The tension between ‘universalistic and particularistic pressures’ has, in this account, destabilised prevailing conceptions of an individual’s normative responsibility, or what agents have responsibility ‘to do and to avoid doing’ (Scheffler, 1995, pp. 222–23). Scheffler (1995, p. 223) identifies two doctrines of normative responsibility that are central to commonsense moral thought. First, individuals have a special responsibility for what they themselves do (negative duties) as opposed to what they merely fail to prevent (positive duties). Second, individuals have distinctive, or special, responsibilities towards members of their own family and others to whom they stand in certain significant sorts of relationships. The two doctrines mean that the commonsense conception of responsibility is restrictive, that is, they serve to circumscribe – at the level of principle – the scope of the individual’s normative responsibilities. This can be contrasted with consequentialist theories, such as the one found in Peter Singer’s utilitarian global ethics (Singer, 1972), which present a radical challenge to the commonsense view because they endorse a nonrestrictive conception of responsibility.

Why does the restrictive view have such force? Why does it seem natural and intuitive? To answer this, Scheffler turns to the human experience of agency:

[T]his sense of naturalness does not exist in a vacuum. It is supported by a widespread though largely implicit conception of human social relations as consisting primarily in small-scale interactions, with clearly demarcated lines of causation, among individual agents. It is also supported by a complex phenomenology of agency: that is, by a characteristic way of experiencing ourselves as agents with causal powers. Within this phenomenology, acts have primacy over omissions, near effects have primacy over remote effects, and individual effects have primacy over group effects. (Scheffler, 1995, p. 227).

Much, therefore, hinges on this phenomenology of agency. The problem for individual responsibility is that even as an interconnected world morally demands we take up responsibility for transnational harms involving complex causal chains involving many others, this seems incoherent with our actual experience of agency. In this view, the intensification of humanity’s overlapping fate has not changed basic facts about psychology or practical identity, creating a serious impediment for addressing injustice. ‘[T]he phenomenology of agency,’ Scheffler notes, ‘seems like an increasingly poor guide to the dimensions of human action that are socially significant’ (Scheffler, 1995, p. 229).

In a globalised context, doubts over the moral aptness of the commonsense conception of responsibility are, therefore, not limited to consequentialists but in fact run much deeper. The communications revolution, which gives people access to information about remote events, throws this into relief. In many areas of global activity, there is at least some recognition in mainstream public discourse that our lives, and the domestic political and economic arrangements in which they are embedded, are substantively connected to phenomena that cross borders whether that be ecological crises, supply chains, the arms trade, public health, financial flows, food markets, the trade in natural resources, and so on.

Despite interconnectedness across borders, Scheffler doubts that a nonrestrictive conception of individual responsibility can emerge to rival the commonsense conception, since ‘a non-restrictive conception of responsibility would need, at a minimum, to be capable of being internalized and of coming to function as a guide to everyday thought and action’ (Scheffler, 1995, pp. 230–31). In his view, it is not clear ‘that any thoroughly non-restrictive conception of responsibility could meet these conditions’ (Scheffler, 1995, p. 231). This is not because the commonsense view is immutable. Rather, it is because Scheffler doubts individual responsibility can be conceived without drawing categories of special obligations or the distinction between negative and positive duties, and while individual agents only have ‘the sketchiest and most speculative notions about the specific global implications’ (Scheffler, 1995, p. 231) of their actions.

While Scheffler does not deny the importance of global interconnectedness, he wants to show that people can experience structural phenomena – ‘institutional arrangements of enormous complexity’ – as ‘entirely natural’ (and by implication morally legitimate). Intentionality falls away when these structural arrangements channel human action, recruiting individuals ‘as contributors to larger processes that typically have little to do with people’s reasons for performing those actions, but which often have the most profound and far-reaching effects’ (Scheffler, 1995, p. 232). Moreover, individuals are often barely aware of their participation in these processes since their choices seem natural and the reasons for their action stand independently from the larger social processes to which they contribute (Scheffler, 1995, p. 233).

The challenge of global moral responsibility, presented this way, seems overwhelming. The individual agent is no longer the author of their own participation in global injustice. Scheffler calls this ‘the phenomenon of subsumption’ (Scheffler, 1995, p. 233). From the agent’s perspective, this complicates their relationship to a social process in several ways: (i) limited contributions to the overall process; (ii) a lack of control over it; (iii) a sense of pervasiveness such that exit seems unviable; (iv) the difficulty of obtaining reliable information on the process or its effects; and (v) a difficulty in ascertaining how different possible actions would affect the process at a given moment.

This leaves Scheffler at an impasse since the social processes produce effects of great moral significance, yet the structure of the relationship between individual action and those processes makes it hard to construct a viable agential basis for normative responsibility. According to Scheffler, we lack

a set of clear, action-guiding, and psychologically feasible principles which would enable individuals to orient themselves in relation to the larger processes, and general conformity to which would serve to regulate those processes and their effects in a morally satisfactory way. (Scheffler, 1995, pp. 233–234).

The same dynamics that undermine the aptness of the commonsense conception of responsibility turn out to undermine suitable alternatives because of the incoherence between those dynamics and the purported phenomenology of human agency. We can call this Scheffler’s Dilemma, the upshot of which is ‘to leave our thinking about responsibility in some disarray’ (Scheffler, 1995, p. 234).

In taking the individual agent’s experience of everyday life seriously, Scheffler’s Dilemma brings powerful insights to bear on the discussion of global justice. Many philosophers of global justice either neglect this entirely or gloss over the difficult questions it raises. Global justice is readily made the preserve of statesmen, corporations, intellectuals, activists, or philanthropic altruists, while the role played by ordinary citizens in constituting collective beliefs that shape the parameters of possibility, or in reproducing unjust structures through their actions, is rarely made explicit. In contrast, Scheffler’s naturalised phenomenology of agency is largely intuitive and compelling from the standpoint of an ordinary person.

Something resembling Scheffler’s conception of individual responsibility is implicitly accepted by political elites and popular opinion with regard to the possibilities for global reform. It is therefore surprising how little global justice theorists have grappled with the underlying assumptions behind Scheffler’s Dilemma. The global justice literature tends to focus on the reforms necessary to address injustices stemming from transnational relations, such as labour exploitation and modern slavery in supply chains; unfair trade rules, including those pertaining to intellectual property; ‘blood oil’ and the repressive fallout of the trade in natural resources (Wenar, 2016); arms exports from democracies that fuel rights violations by repressive regimes; illicit financial flows and tax evasion; and climate change. In all these areas, we face some version of Scheffler’s Dilemma, namely the phenomenon whereby global connections draw ordinary human agents into the production of injustice while simultaneously leading them to feel they have little agency to actually address the injustice.

Even Thomas Pogge’s attempt to sought to carve out a minimalist approach to global justice based on negative duties (rather than positive duties) and institutional reform (rather than individual action) struggles to provide a compelling response (Pogge, 2008). In Pogge’s view, international institutional arrangements should guard against potential harms and compensate for them if they occur. But who should establish this minimally just regime? Pogge ultimately falls back on something like culpability for individual wrongdoing but in relation to the institutional scheme itself. He argues that the existing international system violates the negative duties of those who impose it, especially political elites in rich countries along with affluent citizens, since ‘[t]hese governments are elected by us, responsive to our interests and preferences, acting in our name and in ways that benefit us. The buck stops with us’ (Pogge, 2008, p. 28). In this view, contemporary institutional arrangements represent the violation of these citizens’ negative duties. So even an argument that seeks to emphasise negative duties in relation to institutions eventually leads back to the individual responsibility of ordinary citizens, albeit relatively affluent ones in rich democracies, to take some constructive action.

Yet, tellingly, the sources of motivation for individual agents are weak or unspecified in Pogge’s account, except perhaps a general awareness of negative duties. It evades Scheffler’s Dilemma. We are left to wonder how the demands of global justice can be correlated in practice with citizens as they are, namely as complex moral beings with diverse life projects, community ties, talents, aspirations, social roles, and so on. Moreover, Pogge relegates an ethos of justice – what G.A. Cohen describes as ‘a structure of response lodged in the motivations that inform everyday life’ (Cohen, 2008, p. 123) – made up of individual practices and social conventions, which shape unjust outcomes. Pogge’s account leaves out responsibilities associated with the reproduction of injustice through business culture and practices, media discourses, the personal habits of ordinary people, and so on (Young, 2011, p. 142). But a sufficiently broad view of social structure – encompassing, but not limited to, institutional arrangements – would recognise the way in which these attitudes and practices reproduce and reinforce unjust social structures.

Injustice and the agent of change

Iris Marion Young’s ‘social connection model’ of responsibility adopts this wider view of social structure, revealing the deep way in which individual action and social structure are inter-related. Young’s theoretical project was not limited to the global domain but global justice was a recurring theme, including in her discussions of labour exploitation in global supply chains. Young framed this phenomenon as an example of structural injustice – injustice perpetuated through ordinary, largely normalised, social processes that put some groups under the systematic threat of domination or deprivation by others (Young, 2011, p. 52).

Young’s conception of responsibility was partly motivated as a response to Scheffler’s scepticism about individual global responsibility, which she also saw as ‘a key problem in contemporary moral theory and practice’ (Young, 2004, p. 374). Young agreed with Scheffler that ‘[p]eople have difficulty reasoning about individual responsibility with relation to outcomes produced by large-scale social structures in which millions participate, but of which none are the sole or primary cause’ (Young, 2004, p. 374). This is especially the case, she notes, in the absence of suitable regulatory institutions to channel collective action at the transnational level.

For Young, these difficulties help explain why responses to harms like transnational labour exploitation tend to be limited to picking out the most culpable actors. Scheffler’s commonsense conception of responsibility largely corresponds with Young’s ‘liability model’ of moral responsibility (Young, 2004, p. 374). Under this legalistic model, we focus on identifying individuated acts of wrongdoing, rather than conceptualising responsibility for the structural background for the injustice. In response, Young developed a model of political responsibility – the social connection model – that provides normative and conceptual resources to situate individuals as constructive agents in collective efforts to address structural injustices. Under her model, ‘all those who contribute by their actions to structural processes with some unjust outcomes share responsibility for the injustice’ (Young, 2011, p. 96). By putting the emphasis on the way in which people are connected to each other through social processes that cut across sovereign boundaries, Young could move to the global level without conceptual difficulty. For instance, her model makes salient the way in which consumers in the rich world are connected to factory workers in low-income countries via global markets.

Young’s conception of responsibility was geared towards transformation, not enforcement of an existing moral code. However, it is not sufficiently sensitive to human agency to address Scheffler’s Dilemma. Whether the moral psychology of the activist in Young’s account can be generalised across the citizenry may be partly a question for social science or psychology. But it is also within the scope of moral inquiry. We should ask how Young’s normative model relates to ordinary people in their own lives. The central claim I want to make is that ordinary people can, in their own lives, for non-instrumental reasons and in a ‘natural’ way, internalise everyday commitments in their social roles, relationships, and ways of life that orient them towards the progressive realisation of global justice. In this sense, the ordinary agent has two potential powers: they can see their actions as impactful in some meaningful sense, and their moral imagination is not constricted by status quo unjust norms.

Transformations in social norms, or the overcoming of institutional failures, have been shown historically to be brought about by agents willing to engage in the demanding task of restructuring the discourse and consciousness on a given issue. Social movements often influence change through cascading effects: A small number of activists start working on an issue, bringing it into social and political contention. As support spreads, more agents may join them either because it is now less costly to publicly convey a prior belief they held anyway, or because they feel more compelled to sign on. Since different agents will have different thresholds for such transitions, the process of change draws more support as it proceeds (Kuran, 1997).

Yet it is important to register here that even progressive agents are a sub-set of the wider citizenry, the members of which retain a latent capacity to contribute to the realisation of justice. Indeed, widespread support for an emergent, more just social structure is vital to that structure’s stability and vitality. Moreover, historically many of the contributions made by agents to moral progress are not easily recognisable or even take place in the public sphere. Consider, for instance, the way in which addressing structural racism involves difficult conversations among friends or family, or how some provide care for others able to participate in more public roles in a social struggle. These contributions may also include the longer-term project of building up, in a prefigurative fashion, patterns of community or organisational life which embody ideals that counteract an unjust status quo. These are illustrations of less visible but still vital forms of moral agency. Often these forms of agency are intimately connected to everyday life. In short, our normative model of individual responsibility should account for the vast array of possible steps moral agents could take to contribute to social transformation, including through the social roles they occupy (Zheng, 2018) or the force of their ethical example.

Similarly, many struggles for global justice can be understood as transformations both in the practice of responsibility and shifts in the phenomenology of agency in a given domain. Take Young’s example of anti-sweatshop activists. They illustrate how some consumers in the rich world came to see themselves as agents with causal powers in a domain – labour exploitation in supply chains – in which they were previously considered passive cogs in an uncontrollable machine of efficient global markets. In this transition in self-perception from helpless contributors to outcomes beyond their control to active protagonists in social change, very little had been altered in the institutional reality of the injustice itself. To understand the implications of this kind of transition in agential self-perception for Scheffler’s Dilemma, we should critically examine and combine two ideas: negligibility and moral imagination.

The radical potential of small acts

Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that human activity falls into two classes. The first includes moves ‘within a framework of organization and belief that we take for granted.’ The framework may even go unchallenged or be invisible such that we ‘naturalize or sanctify’ what is in fact ‘the collective product of our own hands.’ The second includes moves ‘about the framework.’ He suggests these activities ‘change the framework the only way it ordinarily can be changed: piece by piece and step by step’ (Unger, 2007, p. 56). My claim here is that moves of the latter kind can be internalised as part of the everyday life and roles of individual agents such as citizens, family members, intellectuals, professionals, or government officials, and is thereby constitutive of the sense of ourselves as moral beings in a complex world. Our agency-based connection to structural change is therefore not reducible to the limitations of time, space, or direct causal connection. And once we shift focus from precise moral obligations to the role of human agency in social change, normative responsibility can take different forms, including those much more closely aligned to individual capacities and biographical details of the situated self. This requires, however, that we abandon a deterministic view of social structures and instead integrate the notion that they are ‘the collective product of our own hands’ into our psychological and self-constituting notions of agency.

In this regard, we can draw a distinction between whether individuals actually do make a difference and whether they believe they can, and how this might motivate action. Let us call the former difference-making agency and the latter anticipatory agency. Difference-making agency pertains to contemporaneous empirical facts and the agent’s probabilistic judgements about their individuated influence on the world at a given moment, while anticipatory agency focuses on the possibility of change based on beliefs about how the world could work differently. Anticipatory agency integrates into moral psychology a belief that social structures produced through human action and thought can be changed through human action and thought. In the case of anticipatory agency, the agent sees themself as having causal powers to advance change in the world without relying on concrete evidence or a quantifiable assessment of the effects of their actions. My distinction here is not intended as an empirical claim about human psychology. Rather, the two modes of agency register a political claim: An exclusive focus on difference-making agency can obfuscate the ways in which agents engage in constructing a different social and political world, namely one with new possibilities for realising moral progress and specifically global justice. Since anticipatory agency is focused on the larger possibility for social change, rather than the individual’s direct influence, it becomes a powerful resource to motivate difference-making agency in the face of structural constraints and disappointments. Anticipatory agency enables us to develop a belief in our ability to make a difference prior to that difference becoming manifested in the world.

For the purposes of my argument, we can assume that agents can have some effect even through seemingly negligible action. Granting that at least some difference-making capacity exists to shape a new world, the crucial question becomes whether human agents will recognise this capacity in practice, and translate such recognition into everyday action and beliefs that support collective action. Once the agent registers that small acts – those within their reach – can alter an unjust status quo in some way over time, this is a sufficient basis to decouple anticipatory agency from presumptions of non-influence that arise from the status quo social order. This is because agents can internalise a view that the effects of their agency are themselves a variable they are seeking to expand through their action. In this sense, one of the aims of individual agency is to change the social or political world so that future agency will be more effective in advancing justice. This does not require a belief on the part of the agent that they can resolve a problem of global injustice, or an understanding of the details of the new order, but the far lower threshold that their action can help alter the landscape for the future elimination of injustice. This resembles Pablo Gilabert’s conception of ‘dynamic duties’, which in contrast to standard duties, do not target specific desirable outcomes under prevailing circumstances but rather aim to ‘change those circumstances so that certain desirable outcomes become achievable (or more achievable).’ In Gilabert’s scheme, dynamic duties ‘direct a change, often an expansion, of an agent’s power to bring about certain outcomes’ (Gilabert, 2017, p. 119). As with Gilabert’s model, it turns out our phenomenology of agency is not fixed. It is adapted by us as we engage with the world. And it is partly formed by social forces and beliefs, and conceptual categories about social and political life, all of which are themselves contested through human agency. I call this alternative conception a dynamic phenomenology of agency. In this dynamic perspective, anticipatory agency is the midwife to future difference-making agency as it enlivens agents’ sense of their causal powers in the present.

Under a dynamic phenomenology of agency, the agent responds to complex global injustice through their life projects and circumstances, finding creative ways to express their values in different decisions and actions they take. Mara Marin’s response to the ‘the circle of powerlessness and denial’ which agents experience in the face of complex oppressive social structures offers a useful way to think about how this dynamic approach can ground global responsibility. Rational examination of the situation by an agent can breed powerlessness (the inability to effect change) which in turn triggers denial (the sense that since the burden of transformation is too great for individuals, such transformation falls outside individual responsibility). Powerlessness and denial feed off each other.

Marin’s constructive proposal borrows the notion of a ‘commitment’ in friendships as a metaphor to illuminate the moral response of individuals to oppression. In friendships, we voluntarily commit ourselves to obligations without knowing precisely what these will entail, and knowing they will continually change in their practical expression. These ‘commitments take shape, over time, through chains of open-ended actions and responses.’ The concept of commitment highlights at the descriptive level ‘the cumulative character of the actions that constitute oppressive practices’ and normatively captures ‘the nature of the obligations that flow from such actions’ (Marin, 2017, p. 3). The notion of commitment for Marin captures the idea that agents occupy a certain position in a social structure and have social relations to others in that structure. A key upshot of her approach, I suggest, is that social structures need not be perceived as deterministic but can be viewed by agents themselves as being made through human agency, which itself expands the scope of relevant social action.

We can argue, then, that the agent retains control not over a social structure itself but over how they internalise its potential for transformation through human agency. This approach makes social structures legible to reform at the agential level. In this perspective, the complexity of global injustices can even be said to generate a plurality of openings for agents to contribute towards the necessary transformations of practices, norms, ideologies, policies, and institutions which reproduce injustice.

Presented abstractly, a dynamic phenomenology of agency might be accused of being overly idealistic. But the historical reality of moral progress, including on global justice, should temper this criticism. As people have become aware of their part in global injustices like labour exploitation or climate change, including via discussion in the public sphere as well as interpersonal dialogue, they tend to identify practical ways they can help realise justice, including by conveying their own moral concern. There may be significant blockages in such learning processes, but there is nothing intrinsic about agency or the scale of injustice that solidifies those blockages. If we can be worried about exploitation of workers that make the shoes we wear, or the environmental damage caused by the energy consumed in the transport we use – and these worries can be made salient features of everyday conversation and practice in the way they have been in large parts of various societies – there are strong reasons to suspect similar transformations are available in relation to other global injustices. This conceptual move to a dynamic, rather than static, phenomenology of agency assists us to understand the possibilities for promoting such change in a wider number of areas of global life.

By connecting the immediate, close, and personal with global processes of social transformation, we counteract the notion that global concerns are intrinsically problematic for the phenomenology of agency. We can call the constructive thesis the radicalism of small acts. This stresses the way in which small acts shape social practices, discourses, and beliefs and thus have the potential for advancing moral progress. By radicalism, I simply mean what Judith Shklar defined in After Utopia as ‘the belief that people can control and improve themselves and, collectively, their social environment’ (Shklar, 1957, p. 219). I want to suggest that in relation to global justice, small acts can be radical in this way.

Consider the following example at a more localised level. In an acutely patriarchal society, parents in a poor family who raise their daughter to think of herself as an equal to her male peers are engaged in a relatively small act. The considerations we normally associate with demandingness such as cost or restrictions on autonomy are low. The short-term risks are few, for instance, since no one is policing the education of the child at home. Moreover, this educative act seems to have no bearing on the entrenched structural injustice of patriarchy in the wider society; in the short run at least, there is no visible disturbance in the public sphere to the shared social ethos. There may of course be an effect for that individual girl’s sense of self-worth but even then, her egalitarian beliefs may empower her to act in ways which generate a violent backlash against her. Yet the education these parents provide, pursued for non-instrumental reasons, serves as a significant step towards realising greater gender justice. This is in part because the small act, or series of small acts, opens the possibility for downstream effects which flow from the very existence of an empowered woman. It is not the material change which is all that counts – the visible consequences – but the increased likelihood of moral progress in the future. The girl’s conviction, even in the face of grave risks and pushback, becomes a latent force in an evolving contest within society over the norms of justice and the possibility of overcoming injustice. Given the uncertainty that pervades processes of social change, repressive responses against her, under certain conditions, might even provoke a backlash that unintentionally intensifies her own commitment, or that of others, to pursue reform. Whether others acknowledge it or not, this girl becomes a node of an emergent standard of justice. We might characterise the parents’ actions as fulfiling a moral obligation, but it is not necessarily experienced as an obligation by them. Rather, it is experienced as part of a coherent life, or one that aligns values with everyday action. This illustrates the highly uncertain and unpredictable, and potentially unconscious, way that a value-based response to a localised problem joins up with a broader social context and the potential for social transformation.

We can think of many other examples which display similar characteristics. Kitchen table conversations about social or political freedom within a family inside a highly repressive society, for instance, may take a similar shape. The family may be powerless to act on their desire for freedom but the hushed conversation itself generates moral and conceptual resources, which can grow over time.

Scaling up, a citizen may use their time and energy in their local community to contribute to an evolving democratic conversation on problems of wide moral concern, adding to cumulative pressure for reform or inspiring others to do so. One way to understand the possibility for the more expansionary approach to agency I have in mind, then, is to consider the social role of the citizen more deeply. Consider the way in which Lior Erez and Cécile Laborde (2020) connect a political conception of citizenship with global justice through the prism of ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ as a civil ideal. The salient point for my purposes is that the practice of political citizenship, when grounded in values, can extend from a localised polity to the global context since the relevant values do not have a limited scope. As Erez and Laborde show, once the ideal of liberty as non-domination is practised and internalised in the national life of the citizen, the committed citizen would also strive for this value to be instantiated in global affairs, notably in their own state’s international entanglements and commitments. Rather than the global domain being perceived as beyond the agent’s domain of action, the political conception of citizenship has the opposite effect: it generates social and moral resources from within a state for the pursuit of global justice abroad. Achieving global non-domination, including in economic life, becomes the purview of the national patriot. The concept of cosmopolitan patriotism is therefore a powerful demonstration of a broader phenomenon: The concerns of global justice and the aspects of life and relationships where the agent perceives or feels they have a meaningful stake can be experienced by the agent as more or less proximate depending on the moral imagination they cultivate in the context of social and political projects. Global justice thus becomes a matter of coherence for the agent in the context of their own situated social reality.

Yet even if an individual agent manages to recode a large injustice so that addressing it becomes a part of one’s everyday life and identity, an acute problem persists because in seeking to overcome a global injustice – even in concert with others – the agent may be paralysed by the perception that any single contribution within their grasp is negligible. That perception may undermine the potential link between one’s everyday commitments and the larger aims of global justice. We can think of this as the drop-in-the-ocean problem. ‘The idea of negligibility,’ Melissa Lane explains, is ‘that the effects of individual action are negligible with respect to social outcomes, so it simply doesn’t matter how [one] acts’ (Lane, 2012, p. 45). In economics and political science, negligibility is a quasi-technical idea which assumes agents individually have such a miniscule effect that their action will not materially affect a social outcome (Lane, 2012, p. 51). According to Lane, this idea can cut in two directions, producing both indifference to the negative effects of one’s actions and a sense of futility about the capacity to promote progress: ‘Negligibility purchases impunity with powerlessness’ (Lane, 2012, pp. 51–52). Her argument in relation to carbon emissions applies to other global collective action problems:

In seeing ourselves as members of a global mass, we easily see ourselves as powerless and ineffectual. We see ourselves as impotent (nothing we do makes a real difference) and therefore innocent (our emissions, in fact all our actions, are irrelevant to the real problem). In this light, the moral division of labor seems to be clear: those making the big impact (whoever they are) should be responsible, but the rest of us are off the hook, exonerated by anonymous negligibility. (Lane, 2012, pp. 55–56).

Lane argues this view of negligibility is mistaken. She distinguishes four claims which might be inferred from the broad view of negligibility with regard to taking positive action:

• 1. It is irrational on a cost-benefit analysis to act because the social benefits are so small as to be outweighed by the costs of doing so.

• 2. A stronger version of the first claim which asserts it is irrational as an analytical claim to take the specific action because doing so makes no difference to the objective.

• 3. An assertion of imperceptibility which acknowledges the action can make a difference but since it cannot be perceived, you should not do it.

• 4. ‘[T]he straight claim of negligibility’ which can be formulated as doing the specific action makes ‘only a very small difference to bringing about [the objective], and there is no evident threshold such that it could be known to contribute to bringing about [that objective] on its own, so you should not do [the action] to bring about [the objective]’ (Lane, 2012, p. 56).

Against the claim of negligibility, in particular, Lane puts forward several points on why action should be taken. I reconstruct these as follows:

• 1. Rationally and morally, an agent can focus on a proximate goal rather than the larger social goal they hope to obtain. In other words, our reference points for achieving outcomes are not neutral: we can recode a large social problem into one more readily within our reach. For example, there may be compelling reasons to choose to focus on carbon emissions at the national, city, family, or personal level, instead of global emissions as such. The structure of this response mirrors my earlier argument on cosmopolitan patriotism.

• 2. There may be intrinsic reasons to care about even small contributions to something good, even if there is no salient threshold available. Acting in support of the larger goal can be a way for the agent is to stay true to their own moral compass, regardless of the short-term results.

• 3. Our actions can have indirect effects (such as through the social influence of our example), as well as direct effects, in bringing about an outcome, turning our negligible contributions into non-negligible ones. These indirect effects are often hard to predict so we should err on the side of their possibility emerging.

Lane observes more broadly that ‘[s]ocial change is precisely the project in which one is working from negligibility now to mainstream in the future’ (Lane, 2012, p. 63) by bringing new values to bear on a given social phenomenon. She notes how a social ethos is connected to ‘imaginative modes of perception’ such as background beliefs, images, and narratives. Crucially, individuals can help make and remake the social ethos and norms since their actions represent ‘possible node[s] of change which can rebound upstream or downstream, reshaping the others in its wake’ (Lane, 2012, p. 64).

Lane defends her position against negligibility-based assumptions borrowed tacitly from the economic model of perfect competition. Such models assume reactions of cause and effect to produce equilibrium. Lane insists, rightly in my view, that there is no reason to make such assumptions in political life. In fact, the assumption that an equilibrium will hold as agents act could itself lead to stasis in the real world if agents come to assume (wrongly) they cannot enact change. At a deep level, then, such a view negates the nature of politics itself as a ‘domain of possibility articulated by … key dimensions of uncertainty, interaction and identity’ (Lane, 2018, pp. 159–160).

Lane’s affirmative view of human agency in the face of large social problems matches the scale and structure we confront in Scheffler’s Dilemma. An anti-negligibility understanding of individual action, I suggest, reveals the possibility of grappling at the level of agency with the relationship between global social processes and the experience of constructive action (not just avoiding direct harms), remote effects, and the collective dynamics at play in large-scale social phenomena. The crucial point is that if the agent views themself as non-negligible in large-scale social processes, the force of Scheffler’s Dilemma fades: Action within one’s grasp, in one’s localised and proximate context, can become associated in the mind of the agent with playing their part in a large-scale process of moral progress. The stakes in overcoming tacitly accepted assumptions about negligibility, both within agents and in society’s collective consciousness, are therefore high. Lane claims we can ‘understand ourselves to be non-negligible’ (Lane, 2012, p. 126). I want to suggest we can, within the frame of a dynamic phenomenology of agency, through the course of socio-political change and a suitably open-ended orientation to structural problems, view ourselves as co-producers of a common social reality which promotes (or undermines) global justice through complex social processes.

Within this framework, small acts are noteworthy not in their visible impacts but in being unencumbered by status quo norms of justice. Morally innovative action forms the undercurrent and the expressive dimensions of social transformations that shape norms of justice over time. We can think of these acts as minor rebellions against injustice as part of processes of micro-prefiguration: small experiments in living and collective thought tilting in the direction of a more just world. When it comes to the phenomenology of agency, the actual effects of agency (difference-making agency) are not therefore necessary to shift our experience of potential influence (anticipatory agency). Agents can perceive themselves to have causal powers without relying on concrete proof via the immediate effects of their action. This, in turn, raises their difference-making capacities.

These capacities can be usefully understood as a form of what Lucia Seybert and Peter Katzenstein call ‘protean power’, namely ‘the effect of improvisational and innovative responses to uncertainty that arise from actors’ creativity and agility in response to uncertainty’ (Seybert & Katzenstein, 2018, p. 4). They contrast this with ‘control power’ which focuses on risk (rather than uncertainty) and relies on power over others or systems to achieve one’s aims. With protean power, the emphasis shifts to the improvisation and innovation of agents, including weak ones who retain more agency in global politics than is typically acknowledged. While under control power ‘[c]apabilities deployed by ex ante identifiable agents lead to probabilistic outcomes’, under protean power ‘[p]otential capacities of agile actors improvise to find solutions to local problems with ex ante unknown effects on others and the system at large’ (Seybert & Katzenstein, 2018, p. 10). From the perspective of the agent, protean power concerns how they relate to what is possible in the world, rather than what is probable. While control power is comparable with the game of billiards with its ‘discrete movements’, protean power is more like tennis with its ‘interactive fluidity’ and the influence of uncertainty and dynamic variables on outcomes (Seybert & Katzenstein, 2018, pp. 15–16). A recognition of protean power shifts the ontology of world politics away from a closed system to an ‘open system’ marked by a complexity which cannot be captured by a linear or mechanical model of the world. As Seybert and Katzenstein argue: ‘In a linear world, small things follow from large ones. In a non-linear world, large things can follow from small ones’ (Seybert & Katzenstein, 2018, p. 18). Agents exercising their protean power, I suggest, must also retain a sense of their own agency. Once we properly factor in the latent potential of protean power, and the fluidity of global socio-political processes which such power instantiates, then we must also register the ways in which the phenomenology of agency is dynamic.

It is also important to recognise the way in which agents value aspects of their lives, particularly collective projects, in ways that extend beyond their personal lifespan. In Death and the Afterlife, Scheffler (2013) shows that humans value a ‘collective afterlife’, or the ongoing collective projects that survive our own death. He reflects on how the motivations of a cancer researcher, for example, whose work is only a small part of a long-running effort to potentially cure the disease in an indeterminate future, would be negatively affected by knowledge of a ‘doomsday scenario’ in which the earth will be completely destroyed 30 days after her own death. Since we individually assign value to collective projects even though we will not live to see their full consequences, it is clear humans can value their contribution to social or political projects without requiring commensurate evidence of the results of their individual efforts. This has great relevance to many questions of justice. As Scheffler himself notes, a commitment to the realisation of justice is one that ‘may involve an indefinite number of generations’ (Scheffler, 2013, p. 148).

Our self-perception of the worth of our actions against an injustice is therefore not fixed by evidence of immediate consequences. Moreover, as circumstances evolve, the phenomenology of agency as it bears on a given domain of global injustice is subject to adjustment such that small steps can later become associated with social transformation in ways that were inconceivable or disregarded at an earlier stage of the same social process. To return to the earlier analogy, some scientists might actually discover a cure for cancer, after all, building on many small steps taken by others. To internalise this notion of cumulative progress in everyday life, however, is a matter of imagination – the capacity of the mind to conceive what a social process or structure can become in the future. While insistent about the moral imperative of structural change, a dynamic phenomenology agency would thus support a vision for global reform that is experimentalist and open-ended with regard to institutional details.

Moral imagination

Small acts by their nature tend to overcome the spatial, temporal, and special obligation limitations raised by Scheffler’s Dilemma. They are acts, in other words, that seem natural to us. But it is less clear how the sense of agency they instantiate can be systematically channelled towards a viable conception of responsibility for global justice. To make this connection, we must look beyond instrumental rationality – a kind of rationality that relies on probabilistic judgements, often with in-built assumptions about the mechanical and linear nature of causality – to acknowledge the role of moral imagination in constructing social order. Between small acts and the phenomenology of agency, moral imagination plays a crucial intermediate role in contesting scepticism about global responsibility since this scepticism is supported by internalised assumptions about how the world works and our ability to shape it.

The agent’s capacity for moral imagination can recode their duties so they become more apt for a globalised context. This plasticity of imagination is illustrated by many real-world examples. It has become easier in our time not only to recognise oneself as a small-scale contributor to complex, transnational harms but also as a protagonist in social and political projects to address them. This represents a shift in moral imagination, not simply reasoning about potential consequences, enabling individuals to experience their actions as having traces that extend globally, in both negative and positive directions. To have this conception of their own agency, the agent relies on an understanding – without verifiable evidence – that their agency can create a more just world that does not yet exist. Imagination brings us into contact with a future that is more just than what is attainable within status quo norms. Moral imagination in particular connects our tentative, experimental steps in a progressive direction – steps taken in an immediate and localised context – with goals of global reform.

Imagination is central to various accounts of moral and social order. In his study of Western modernity, for example, Charles Taylor traces the emergence of social imaginaries from natural law theories on which moral order was based. He describes different cultural forms, namely those of the economy, public sphere, and self-governance, to explain how we came to imagine each domain. Taylor defines social imaginaries as ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). Imagination is also frequently invoked in other fields and in political action. C. Wright Mills (1959/2000), for instance, describes how imagination enables sociologists to discern the connection between individuals in their biographical lives to the larger currents of history and social context.

It is beyond the scope of this discussion to make the broader case for the role of imagination in political life. Rather, I want to suggest that moral imagination is an essential feature of how humans see themselves as agents with causal powers. One way to begin to think of imagination at this level is to consider it as a capability. Martha Nussbaum (2010) has described the imagination as ‘an innate gift’ which ‘needs refinement and cultivation’. Nussbaum’s elaboration of the capability theory developed by Amartya Sen and herself famously includes a list of central capabilities, with imagination (alongside senses and thought) included among these (Nussbaum, 2006, p. 76). This capability can be deployed in many pursuits, I suggest, including to advance justice in the world. The connection between the moral imagination of agents and the realisation of justice is invoked to support various theoretical and practical programmes. Take, for instance, Erik Olin Wright’s idea of ‘real utopias’, which he grounds ‘in the belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself shaped by our visions’ (Wright, 2010, p. 6).

But what exactly is meant by moral imagination? The concept risks being filled with whatever content one wishes, making it seem either banal or unreasonably utopian. By imagination, I do not mean fantasising naively about alternative realities. Rather, I mean something manifest in our attempt to simultaneously understand how the world works whilst remaining conscious that was has been made by humans – our concepts and our social and institutional order – can take a different form to what currently exists. Connecting this to the agent’s perspective, consider how Jedediah Purdy describes imagination as

how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it. It is an implicit, everyday metaphysics, the bold speculations buried in our ordinary lives. (Purdy, 2015, p. 22).

Purdy points out that ‘far from being frivolous make-believe, imagination is intensely practical’ since ‘[w]hat we become conscious of, how we see it, and what we believe it means – and everything we leave out – are keys to navigating the world.’ Imagination, he explains, ‘belongs to people in their lives, not to philosophers working out doctrines. Imagination is a way of seeing, a pattern of supposing how things must be’ (Purdy, 2015, p. 22).

We could say that Purdy’s description is implicit in Scheffler’s phenomenology of agency and so imagination is already accounted for but I think this elision would be a mistake. It is the less concrete element of Purdy’s definition – ‘the bold speculations buried in our ordinary lives’ – which makes imagination distinctive, and reveals the ways the phenomenology of agency is itself contested, malleable, and subject to change over time. The commonsense view of responsibility, perhaps appropriately for its descriptive objectives, does not want to give much ground to such speculative activity. After all, if it were to do so, it seems it would no longer be a commonsense view. In a different light, however, the transgressive faculty of humans – the ability to transcend our immediate context, to consider alternative ways of living, and the creation of alternative institutional futures – is constitutive of our sense of causal power in the world. Once we make this concession, we can begin to recognise the ways in which a dynamic phenomenology of agency grounds a more suitable conception of individual responsibility for an interconnected world.

At a broad level, we can say there are two ways to conceive the role moral imagination plays in the phenomenology of agency.¹ The first thesis that it is merely supplementary to instrumental reasoning about our causal powers; it helps modify our perceptions of agency, for example, by encouraging us to be more ambitious in our moral goals. The second thesis – and the one I want to emphasise – is that moral imagination helps us overcome limitations posed by instrumental reasoning based on our tendency to internalise status quo assumptions about how the world works. The second thesis is highly pertinent for global politics because, as Scheffler’s account captures so well, we are in a period of transition where the standard discourses, sentiments, and institutional frameworks of international life tend to be ill-suited to the normative responses we need. This is partly why Fraser (2008) argues – in a Kuhnian mode – we are in a period of ‘abnormal justice’. The concept of moral imagination helps us understand that the mind is not merely an algorithmic problem-solving machine, but also possesses the creative capacity to transcend a particular context, including by drawing surprising insights from the connection between different social forces and relations (Unger, 2007). By helping make connections between our individuated circumstances and general phenomena, imagination serves as part of our coping mechanism in daily life for the complexity of the world, including its uncertainty and unpredictability. So, while imagination represents a certain part of our thinking, it does not stand apart and inaccessible to the rest of the workings of the mind or reasoning about action. It is a part of rational thought and touches all moral thinking about politics, to varying degrees of intensity, and often tacitly.²

Imagination is of course important to much of moral theory. Kant’s categorial imperative, for example, requires an imaginative move to include the moral worth of others via the image of a kingdom of ends. But Kant also worries that giving ourselves over to imagination will lead us to yield to our senses and become their ‘plaything’ (Kant, 1997, p. 139). This suspicion runs deep in some post-Enlightenment moral theories which have tended to downplay the practical relevance of moral imagination.

A notable exception is the tradition of American pragmatism, especially John Dewey and the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty. Dewey considered the power of imagination to be epitomised by poets, those who can break out from stifled dogmas and produce new descriptions of social reality. As he said, ‘[t]he moral prophets of humanity have always been poets’ (Dewey, 1989, p. 348). But while Dewey considered the power of imagination to be epitomised by the poet, he also considered it a part of ordinary life. In his view, ‘imagination is as much a normal and integral part of human activity as is muscular movement’ (Dewey, 1980, p. 245). Dewey uses the concept of imagination in different ways (Fesmire, 2003, p. 65). One is to convey the idea of empathy as a part of moral judgment. A second more central use refers to the ability to transcend habit and routine to exploit the creative possibilities of circumstance. In this sense, Dewey refers to the poet Percy Shelley’s idea that ‘[i]magination [not established morals] is the chief instrument of the good’ (as cited in Fesmire, 2003, p. 65).

Rorty saw imagination as integral to the idea of philosophical progress itself. In his view, ‘[p]hilosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative’ (Rorty, 1998, p. 8). And less ambitiously, ‘[p]hilosophy’s function is … to clear the road for prophets and poets, to make intellectual life a bit simpler and safer for those who have visions of new communities’ (Rorty, 1991, p. 6). Rorty saw moral progress as also being dependent on imagination since ‘[o]nly the imagination can break through the crust of convention.’ As he explained, ‘Galileo did for Aristotle’s hylomorphic physics what Martin Luther King did for the Southern Way of Life. He dreamed up an alternative. The attractiveness of that alternative gradually undermined an old consensus and built up a new one’ (Rorty, 2007, pp. 923–924). For Rorty, imagination is central to politics as it provides the basis for radical critique of the status quo. This is because critique depends on imagining a world that differs from our own, whether in terms of language or practice. This has major political ramifications since it implies we should ‘praise movements of liberation not for the accuracy of their diagnoses but for the imagination and courage of their proposals’ (Rorty, 1991, p. 6). Moral imagination provides the possibility of change – of possible worlds – its proper place in rational thought. Imagination in this sense is not parasitic on some other moral theory, but is shot through the inner workings of our moral reasons for acting. As Unger puts it: ‘The imagination is the scout of the will’ (Unger, 2007, p. 125).

Moral imagination, then, supports a dynamic phenomenology of agency that can orient the situated self towards global challenges of injustice. It connects the human agent’s tentative, experimental steps in a certain direction – steps taken in an immediate and localised context – with a particular goal of global reform. The imaginative landscape – the social context in which individual agents form their own imagination – is thus a terrain for collectively contesting the parameters of global responsibility. This contestation should not be foreclosed by the presumption of a static phenomenology of agency.

Conclusion

In sum, the global domain can be brought within the realm of individual agency through the work of moral imagination. This is instantiated in what I have called the small acts which link agents to global socio-political projects that advance justice. Such acts are noticeable in social movements such as the one to counteract labour exploitation in supply chains, but they also can take diverse forms, including in the course of ordinary life and the occupation of social roles, as when citizens who value liberty as non-domination in their national body politic come to demand that ideal be reflected in their state’s engagement in global political and economic affairs. In place of the traditional image of agency on which Scheffler built his commonsense view of normative responsibility, I have combined an account of the non-negligibility of small acts and moral imagination to make the case for a dynamic phenomenology of agency. This alternative phenomenology of agency grounds a viable conception of individual global responsibility. Normative responsibilities at the global level can be internalised by ordinary people, so long as those responsibilities are married to their everyday circumstances, roles, and ways of life. Bridging this gap, it turns out, is one of the great tasks of realising global justice in our world.

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.

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Notes on contributors

Vafa Ghazavi

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

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.