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ABSTRACT
This paper assesses one type of justification for collective liability – the democratic authorization account – according to which citizens can be held liable for what their state does, because they collectively authorize the state’s actions. I argue that the democratic authorization view, properly understood, has an implausibly narrow scope, which risks leaving many victims of injustice without compensation. Hence, I propose a subsidiary account that is wider in scope, and which applies to most cases of state-inflicted harm. This view picks out liable agents on the basis of (a) their ability to bear the compensatory burdens, (b) the incentives that the prospect of liability give citizens to hold their states in check, and (c) distributive concerns. Lastly, I address the relationship between citizens who are (merely) collectively liable for some harm, and citizens who are to some extent morally responsible (for instance in virtue of having endorsed the state-inflicted harm).
Acknowledgments
For very useful comments on earlier versions of this paper, I am grateful to Kim Angell, Lars Christie, Jakob Elster, Eva Erman, Göran Duus-Otterström, Max Fonseca, Clare Heyward, Cathrine Holst, Fredrik Dybfest Hjorthen, Mats Lundström, Jouni Rainikainen, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Of course, states are rarely held responsible in a morally adequate way, but that does not say anything about whether they should. Further, other forms of reparation can also be warranted, but here I focus only on compensation.
2 I will, however, discuss morally responsible citizens in the penultimate section.
3 Some authors use other terms, such as consequential responsibility (Pasternak Citation2011), task-responsibility (Stilz Citation2011), and assignment responsibility (Parrish Citation2009). These terms all refer to a duty to fix some bad state of affairs that does not rely on blame or moral or causal responsibility. While I prefer the term liability, nothing substantial hangs on the terminology here.
4 The account can also be extended to non-democracies (Parrish Citation2009; Nagel Citation2005). Here, I will only discuss it in relation to democracies.
5 There are, of course, alternative ways of grounding liability. For instance, we might think that if someone for some reason benefit from (wrongful) harm to others, they should, for that reason, foot the bill (Butt Citation2009; Collins Citation2016; Huseby Citation2015). Another ground for liability are so-called associative duties arising from some special relationship between the victim and the potential compensator (Miller Citation2001). I will not assess these possibilities here.
6 Pettit (Citation2007, 194–197) raises similar concerns, as does Collins (Citation2016, 345–346).
7 I remain agnostic, however, as to whether the democratic authorization view is, in the end, justifiable. My subsidiary account can if necessary serve as a stand-alone version of liability.
8 I do not consider Nagel here, since he only hints at the implications his theory might have for collective liability.
9 Stilz here draws explicitly on Kant.
10 It is unclear here whether this is a specifically moral reason rather than a prudential one.
11 A principal–agent relationship is a relationship in which the principal authorizes an agent to act on her behalf. Such relationships are commonplace. Citizens in democracies are principals with regards to elected politicians, who are agents. The government is principal with regards to bureaucrats, who are agents, and so on.
12 By ‘responsibility’ Parrish means ‘assignment responsibility,’ which is similar to liability.
13 Stilz argues that the war was aggressive and probably illegal, but she does not use the term unjust.
14 The mandate should also encompass some reasonableness considerations. If a state commits unjust or illegal acts in spotless good faith, the citizens might still be held liable.
15 There could be gray areas here. Some states may be nearly legitimate, and so on. Further, there can be reasons to obey the law that does not stem from the legitimacy of the regime (for instance reasons of stability).
16 In my view, the democratic authorization account will most likely accept alternative (b). While this alternative may indeed be morally problematic, it seems at least consistent with the theory as such. Accepting alternative (a) on the other hand, will imply that the account rests on different, and incompatible, accounts of legitimacy.
17 See also Miller (Citation2001, 460–461).
18 This might point to another, and different, limitation of the scope of the democratic authorization account. If the liable citizens are unable to compensate, the cost of the harm will remain with the victims.
19 One might worry that this reasoning may generalize in such a way that one ends up being liable for all sorts of things that one is (minimally) able to influence. I do not think this concern is warranted. In the cases under discussion, some victims experience severe harm, and there is a lack of agents with clear duties to compensate. In cases like this, we should consider liability of the kind I propose, but even then, we should accept it only after close evaluation of the overall implications and consequences.
20 While I restrict my attention to democracies, it seems plausible that the account also covers cases of non-democracies in which citizens still have some influence over state policy.
21 Or subgroup. See below.
22 Another question concerns the extent to which the duties that follow from my proposed account of collective liability are such that they can legitimately be coercively enforced. I am not completely sure, but it seems to me at least that this account can form the basis of an international compensation scheme that can in turn inform and be codified by law. At this stage, if not sooner, the duties will be coercively enforceable.
23 Notice that it is far from straightforward to establish that an individual is (to some extent) morally responsible for state harm in virtue of having endorsed or voted in favor of the harm. For one thing, the causal influence voters have on electoral outcomes is microscopic. My view is that it is morally wrong to support and vote in favor of, say, racist policies or aggressive and illegal wars, and that doing so may render individual citizens to some extent morally responsible. However, it is not my aim here to examine this question in detail. It is sufficient for my purposes that individual citizens may sometimes be morally responsible for some state-inflicted harm, and that this may render them (among other things) liable.
24 Being morally responsible may also render agents liable to blame. In the present context, however, liability to pay compensation to victims is my main concern.
25 Stilz does not, as far as I can see, address this question. There is no reason, however, to doubt that the democratic authorization account is able to distinguish between morally responsible and non-morally responsible citizens.