Equal responsibility in an unequal world?

ABSTRACT

Christine Hobden’s Citizenship in a Globalised World puts forth an innovative account of citizens’ collective responsibility for state injustice. While this account adjusts the burden of rectifying collective responsibility in accordance to capacity, influence, and benefit, it nonetheless holds that everyone, regardless of their differentiated circumstances, is equally part of the collective that is morally responsible for the injustices that their state perpetrates. Furthermore, being responsible puts one on the moral hook for being blamed, included in collective punishment (wherever justified), and being asked to apologize and bear the burden of rectifying the injustice(s). This response paper questions whether a view that takes into account unequal positionality should or can endorse equal collective responsibility, and argues in the negative. Instead, I suggest that marginalized citizens’ responsibility to correct for state injustice may be more plausibly construed as a responsibility to each other as subjects of common oppression.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective responsibility
• marginalization
• state injustice
• global injustice
• equality
• inequality

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christine Hobden, Stephanie Collins, Anna Stilz and Ashwini Vasanthakumar for an engaging symposium on Christine’s book. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shuk Ying Chan

Shuk Ying Chan is a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University. Her current book project draws on Third World anticolonial thought to explore the moral and political implications of decolonization as an unfinished project of global justice. Her work has appeared in Politics, Philosophy & Economics.