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Published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2015) 18:995-1010 Moral Responsibility for Distant Collective Harms David J. Zoller California Polytechnic State University dzoller@calpoly.edu Abstract: While it is well recognized that many everyday consumer behaviors, such as purchases of sweatshop goods, come at a cost to the global poor, it has proven difficult to argue that even knowing, repeat contributors are somehow morally complicit in those outcomes. Some recent approaches contend that marginal contributions to distant harms are consequences that consumers straightforwardly should have born in mind, which would make consumers seem reckless or negligent. Critics reasonably reply that the bad luck that my innocent purchase contributes distantly to harm provides insufficient grounds for moral blame; moreover, such distant and seemingly inevitable collective effects are not by themselves obvious reasons for agents to refrain from acting. Granting these criticisms, I argue that the harm that agents do through knowing contributions to distant collective harm actually builds on the morally sparse agential phenomenology of everyday purchases and decisions: contributors who knowingly disregard distant harms, rather than being reckless or negligent about consequences they should have foreseen, very directly perpetuate the moral invisibility and the lack of recognition from which the global poor generally suffer. This provides agents with clearer moral reasons to refrain from knowing participation in unstructured collective harms, and clearer reason to bear them in mind in acting. Keywords: collective, responsibility, complicity, individual, guilt, phenomenology 1 Closing a Loophole in Global Justice

Envision this odd, but likely familiar, figure: S regularly advocates against sweatshop labor in her

teaching and among her family, and is reasonably well informed about which retailers source most

unscrupulously from sweatshops. But today she needs a new pair of pants, and she purchases them from

a cheerful clerk at one of the very retailers whom she knows to be particularly unscrupulous. I presume

this scenario is hardly uncommon, and that many of us are what we can call “complicit social reformers”:

principled people who believe in collective justice and even dabble in donation or advocacy, but who turn

round and participate in the wrongful collective practices we are protesting. Whether practices of this

sort—what Kutz (2000) terms “unstructured collective harms” (henceforth UCH)—are wrongful in any

sense is a matter of significant current debate.1 One of the more intuitive views to emerge in this debate

suggests that the complicit social reformer is doing no more, but no less, than what is required of anyone

whose actions contribute to UCH. I will call this the “Moderate view”: that we do nothing wrong and do

not earn any backward-looking guilt by contributing to UCH, but we have special forward-looking duties

                                                                                                               1 Kutz provides an excellent introduction to this phenomenon in Kutz (2000), 166-203. For more recent discussion of the debate, see Isaacs (2011), 130ff.

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to aid those affected by any UCH to which we contribute. Those special forward-looking duties are

typically the “political responsibility,” as Young calls it, to advocate for structural or political change.2

After noting that the collective effect of global warming will have morally significant effects on the

global poor, Sinnott-Armstrong concludes that, “It is better to enjoy your Sunday driving [in a gas

guzzling car] while working to change the law so as to make it illegal for you to enjoy your Sunday

driving” (2005, 304). The Moderate view has been developed in clear theoretical terms independently by

Young (2011) and Hayward (2008), both of whom note that there is, as Hayward puts it, “nobody to

shoot” for the damage done to the global poor by the supply chain or other unstructured collective action.3

Private consumer activities lack the commonly accepted features required to establish complicity in a

group outcome, e.g., that co-conspirators jointly intend their action as part of an effort to bring about that

outcome.4 Still it seems intuitive to say, as Barry (2005) has argued, that having contributed to an

injustice imparts to me some duties to address that injustice.5 The Moderate view satisfies all these

intuitions, so that our complicit reformer is as principled as she needs to be: (a) an action like knowingly

buying sweatshop goods is not a moral wrong of which I am guilty, but (b) it makes me more obligated to

help victims than a non-contributing bystander.6 An alternative “Weak” view would simply deny (b) and

treat contributors to UCH identically as non-contributing bystanders.

My goal in this essay is to establish a limited version of the “Strong” view, that is, the view that

contributions to UCH, at least under certain epistemic conditions, do incur proper backward-looking

moral guilt. I argue that a Weak or Moderate view, despite being so intuitive, passes over a morally

culpable failure of imagination. Unlike several other recent authors who take a Strong view of

contributions to UCH, such as Hiller (2011), Lawson (2013) and Banks (2013), I am not claiming that the

relevant failure of imagination is a reckless, negligent, or otherwise culpable failure to weigh distant

consequences of one’s action. In fact, I concede to critics that distant concrete welfare losses of UCH are

not connected to individual contributory actions in the proper way to view them as foreseeable effects of

                                                                                                               2 This point is common to the versions of this position put forward by Young (2010), Hayward (2008), and Sinnott-Armstrong (2005). 3 The Moderate view notably forms the backbone of Iris Marion Young’s (2011) final work, Responsibility for Justice. 4 Kutz (2000) provides the clearest statement of this criterion, but it is a staple in much of the literature on distributive collective responsibility. For recent discussion and development of this view, Miller (2006). In speaking of “joint intention” throughout the paper, I have in mind cooperation paradigms with mutual knowledge conditions like those proposed by Bratman (1999), Gilbert (2006), or Tuomela (2007). 5 Barry views this as an application of Samuel Sheffler’s “common-sense” notion that “individuals are thought to be more responsible for what they do than for what they fail to prevent” (2005, 109). 6 The appeal of this position is reflected in a recently popular Salon article on sweatshop labor. In line with Sinnott-Armstrong and Young, both of whom tout the pragmatic plausibility of the Moderate view, the Salon author concludes, “Individual shopping choices are good for soothing the soul, but only supporting or joining collective efforts can hope to have a practical effect.” Jake Blumgart, “Sweatshops Still Make Your Clothes,” Salon (March 21, 2013), http://www.salon.com/2013/03/21/sweatshops_still_make_your_clothes/ Accessed 7/1/2014.

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contributions. Proponents of the Strong view need to find a positive harm that depends causally on the

behavior of agents like the complicit reformer, without finessing or denying the non-intentionally

collective nature of the causal chain and the vagueness of a contributor’s knowledge. I locate the

connection by a detour, by shifting the object of blame and the grounds for blame. The complicit

reformer does not fail to imagine that there are moral stakes, consequences, and victims in unstructured

collective action; however, her contributory actions suggest she fails to imagine that these stakes are real

and that victims are real persons whose autonomy can exercise claims on her freedom. This sort of

failure, I argue, is a class of moral harm in itself. I conclude that any contribution to an UCH is a moral

wrong when the social connections between that harm and the contribution are acknowledged by the

agent. Thus the complicit social reformer is not a moral model citizen, as Weak or Moderate would hold,

but is—perhaps surprisingly—a wrongdoer exploiting an apparent moral loophole left open by the unique

phenomenological features of distant UCH.

2 The Problem of the Casuality Condition

In this and the following section I concede that the Strong view fails as long as (a) our object of

blame is that quantity of deprivation that the realities of the global supply chain (or other unstructured

collective action) impose on distant, anonymous persons, and (b) our grounds for blame involve seeing

the agent as having negligently or recklessly failed to pay adequate heed to that distant consequence. In

this section I concede that such consequences lack the proper sort of causal connection to a consumer’s

acts and intentions, because the ongoing dynamics of collective action preclude us from drawing a clear

causal chain to any particular event of UCH. In the following section I assess whether contributions to

UCH satisfy conditions of foreseeability and culpable agency.

Despite that the Moderate view is intuitive and practical, Nussbaum finds it conceptually odd that

on Young’s Moderate view, no fault “ever goes into the debit or guilt side of [participants’] ledger, and

the new task always lies ahead of them” (2011, xxi). Thus we get our complicit reformer, who can

purchase unethically or pollute every day while incurring only more and more obligations to roll up her

sleeves tomorrow. Nussbaum offers the analogy of a child who has hit S: it would seem odd to explain to

the child that she just needs to cultivate good relationships with her friends from now on, without any

reference to blame for the harm she did to S (2011, xxii). To neglect that blame seems to make nonsense

of events. The murkiness of our causal connection to UCH doesn’t give us license to tell a similarly

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conceptually nonsensical story about our contributions.7 Nevertheless, the defender of the Moderate view

can reply that Nussbaum’s conceptual argument hinges on a disanalogy: consumers and investors don’t

cause UCH in the same sense that the child caused pain to S. Assuming that talk of guilt only makes

sense for agents who caused the relevant event, and further, caused it a way that incurs moral guilt

(intentionally, negligently, etc.), it is unclear that contributors to UCH are guilty of anything.

While it might be appealing for defenders of the Strong view to detour around these hurdles and

specify some sui generis criteria for moral responsibility for UCH, Petersson (2013) argues that we

should remain conservative. Petersson primarily aims to retain the criterion that one must have been

clearly causally involved in producing the event to be eligible for blame at all; among causally involved

agents, we examine intentions, knowledge, etc., to assess blameworthiness (2013, 859). To fairly delimit

eligibility for blame, even in unstructured collectives, we must abide by the condition that “[the agent’s]

actions and intentions are part of the explanation of why that event occurred.”8 Petersson offers the

example of the destruction of cod stocks by overfishing: to specify the set of actors whom we might

consider blaming, we draw the line at those agents whose actions and intentions were causally involved

(2013, 857). While Young is not perfectly consistent on this point, her formula for the Moderate view

typically delimits the set of actors eligible for political responsibility in the same way: it is the fact that I

“contribute by [my] actions” to a harm that makes me eligible for special political duties to address that

harm (2011, 109-110).9 The sticking point is whether or not causal connections between our contributory

actions and distant human deprivations satisfy the causality condition in ways that let us talk about moral

guilt.

Provided again that the object of blame to which we are trying to connect our agents is the

concrete consequence of deprivation—e.g. of someone being driven from tribal land by a farming

corporation, of a worker dying in the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh, or of a child

forcibly pressed into a mining job—our agent was certainly causally connected, but it is difficult to make

her look like the sort of causal agent who bears backward-looking responsibility. One obvious reason is

our lack of knowledge about the causal chain. On Petersson’s criteria, this would provisionally disallow

talk of moral guilt: “the reasonable reaction to [a] lack of information [about causal connections] is not to

relax the causation requirements for co-responsibility, but to refrain from assigning moral responsibility

or at least seek more evidence before doing so” (2013, 861). This hardly rules out blaming consumers or

                                                                                                               7 The Weak view notably dodges this conceptual criticism, since it is premised on the idea that past contributory actions are morally irrelevant in the first place. The proponent of a Weak view has to contend primarily with Barry’s intuition that contributions necessarily generate stronger moral ties (see n. 5 above). 8 This requirement is discussed at several points by Petersson (2013, 848, 850, 862). 9 Notably, Barry reads Young as denying the Contribution Principle (2005, 112-116). I suggest a more charitable reading of Young, as above; the only version of the Moderate view that is meaningfully distinct from a Weak view would be one that retains the Contribution Principle.

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investors, but it puts a potentially insurmountable burden of proof on proponents of the Strong view.10

Young goes even further to suggest that the indistinctness of the “termini” of a consumer’s or investor’s

actions—who exactly is harmed, and how so—make it not just uncertain but in principle impossible to

draw a firm causal chain (2011, 100, 108-9). This is more of a problem than it may initially seem. One

could try to get around Young’s problem of indistinct termini in consumer UCH by using a strategy like

that John Nolt (2011) uses for climate change: in effect, calculate the total human harm resulting from the

unstructured collective phenomenon, see how large a contribution the individual made over her lifetime,

and divide to find what quantity of the harm her actions have done. Nolt’s strategy shows that there is at

least in principle some harm to be laid to an individual’s account in UCH. Yet Nolt’s approach has the

disadvantage of abstracting from the causal chain in ways that might be problematic for actions other than

greenhouse gas emissions, since given many actors in many roles my contribution isn’t a clear

percentage. Alternatively, we could try to secure the causal link between contribution and UCH using a

strategy of fine-grained event individuation, suggested by Petersson, to broaden what counts as a cause

(2013, 852-3).11 Perhaps a supply-chain disaster like Rana Plaza depends on my action because, without

my small contribution, the event would have had slightly different temporal features, a slightly different

pattern of destruction, etc.12 Thus a “fine-grained” description of that harm is counterfactually dependent

on my consumer actions. Yet following Young’s criticism, it seems artificial to say that I am

retrospectively morally responsible for precisely the Rana Plaza event, or for any other precise terminus,

in virtue of my contributory action. The example Petersson himself uses to discuss the “fine-grained”

strategy is the stock example of the bombing of Dresden: the exact event “the destruction of Dresden”

wouldn’t have happened without an individual pilot’s contribution, even though some “destruction of

Dresden” would have happened; this terminus is uncontroversially stipulated by the joint intention of the

bombers to destroy Dresden. Granting that termini of contributory actions in UCH are by contrast

indefinite (and who knows in what horrors unstructured collective action might cause my action to

terminate, and when?), it is unclear which event we are concerned with one’s having caused in acts of

unethical consumption or investment. Even if we take a very liberal view of what counts as a cause, we

cannot arrive at the straightforward causal description of any given consumer act. Since it is

                                                                                                               10 David Miller in a related way uses the uncertainty of causal connection between individuals and UCH as a reason to detour by saying, first, that “we” are collectively “outcome responsible,” and next, that we as individuals are outcome responsible in virtue of being members of the responsible collective (2012, 631). For a similar view, see also Shei (2005). Unlike Petersson and myself, Miller does not regard causal involvement as necessary condition for having a share of outcome responsibility for phenomena like sweatshop labor (636ff.). 11 Petersson draws this strategy from Moore (2009, 410-425). 12 The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which housed garment factories for numerous Western retailers, killed more than 1,100 garment workers and injured 2,500; reports indicate that some employees were coerced to work despite the building’s publicized structural safety issues.

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comparatively easier to establish that a contributing agent’s actions are generally “socially connected” to

deprivations, so she is causally connected to them without being a cause on whom any deprivation clearly

depends, we could take a weaker view of her contribution and arrive at the Moderate position.

3 The Problems of Foresight and Culpable Agency

For the moment, however, let us allow that the Strong view has solved this problem of causal

connection, by some combination of (a) accepting Nolt’s idea that there is in principle some quantity of

harm caused by a contributor, (b) accepting that the contributor is the cause of at least some finely-

grained description of distant deprivations, or (c) relaxing the requirement of causality until a social

connection to a harm fully counts as a way of being the cause of that harm. While I have already argued

that there is good reason not to make any of these moves, I think that the Strong view has difficulties even

if we make them. Supposing we have settled that a contributor’s actions make her at least eligible for

blame for some deprivations to distant persons, we need to prove that there was something culpable about

her having participated in the causation of that event. As noted, the dominant models for culpability in

UCH are negligence, recklessness, or wrongful acceptance of a harmful consequence of one’s action. Yet

many of the epistemic problems that made it unclear how to establish causality also make it unclear why

the agent should have seen her act as the potential cause of some deprivation, and hence could and should

have seen that deprivation as a foreseeable harmful effect of her action.

It should be uncontroversial that consumers, polluters, and investors do not intend their actions as

contributions to any group outcome.13 Kutz suggests we detour around this by letting contributions to

UCH count as complicit in a damaging group project because they involve “quasi-intentional”

participation in culturally harmful ways of life (2000, 186-189). Yet recent cognitive science and

phenomenology suggest that individuals may not be naturally connected to their “way of life” in a way

that we could even call “quasi-intentional.” On the contrary, Clark (2008) suggests that I cognitively rely

on my social way of life—built of tacit expectations, approval, social incentives, and so on—more in the

manner of an external environment that structures my attention and gives shape to my experience, like the

sidewalk paths on my walk home or the favorite coffee shop that organizes my attention as I write.14

Each of these environments provides an external “scaffold” for my conscious activities: they provide

unity and stability around my experience and facilitate intentional action, but they do that best when I

                                                                                                               13 For examples and discussion, see Kutz (2000), 166-167, 175. For an insightful discussion of lack of intent in unstructured collective cases, see Sadler (2008, 288ff.). 14 See Clark (2008), Lafont (2005).

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don’t consciously attend to them.15 Nevertheless, it would be absurd to blame me if my favorite coffee

shop collapsed on some patrons through no fault of mine, merely on the grounds that I regularly

cognitively rely on it to perform some of my activities. If I am cognitively connected to my way of life in

some analogous way, then I equally may not be blamed for harms that “it” causes.

If we cannot find anything to suggest our agent participated intentionally in a harmful collective

project, this leaves the probably more popular alternative of suggesting that the agent should have known

or should have borne in mind the deprivations that would come as side effects of her action. I can

naturally be culpable for consequences I fail to bear in mind or too lightly accept; in that case, I am

negligent, reckless, or otherwise fail to give due weight to unintended effects.16 While this path to the

Strong view has had some currency in recent literature, as used by Hiller (2011), Lawson (2013), and

Banks (2013), the difficulty of specifying the causal chain creates problems here as well. Lawson, for

instance, maintains that, as a proxy for contributory intentions, the fact that an agent “could reasonably be

expected to recognize that she is contributing to a harm gives us reason to describe her behaviour as a

contribution to that harm in a way that secures responsibility” (2013, 234).17 Lawson’s general criterion

for establishing responsibility is supposed to be “teleological,” that is, dependent on intent of a goal or on

some proxy for intent. A teleological view allegedly “eliminates the need for the sort of link between

causation and responsibility that we find in individual actions” and justifies relaxing causal requirements

in ways that permit us to find guilt in UCH (2013, 232). There is something plausible in this for

structured collective cases, as where actors jointly intending a murder occupy roles that aren’t singly

sufficient for the outcome (e.g. a lookout who failed to do her job).18 Lawson aims to bypass the causal

story of contributions in unstructured cases as well.

However, when we want to use the counterfactual, “S could have recognized her act as a

contribution to X” to establish a teleological connection to X, the distant and non-intentionally collective

causal story of UCH introduces problems. The first problem, noted above with Petersson, is that causal

connection rather than teleology generally delimits eligibility for blame; here we have neither robust

                                                                                                               15 This paradigm of “mindless” cognitive reliance originates in Heidegger (1962, 102ff.). Heidegger’s thesis has recently been confirmed by Dotov, Nie and Chemero (2010); for a survey of recent research, see Clark (2008). 16 I am agnostic on whether the correct term would be negligence, recklessness, or some other term, since my only concern is whether contributors are culpably thoughtless in any sense about the (distant) harm they do. For a discussion of the terminological distinctions between negligence, recklessness, and other varieties of culpable thoughtlessness, see Husak (2011). 17 I am referring to this as a “proxy” for contributory intentions in Lawson’s argument because Lawson presents his view as an extension of Kutz’s view: (1) intent to contribute overrides problematic causal connections to harm, and (2) the fact that the agent should have been foreseen her act as a contribution counts as a contributory intention. 18 Note that the examples Lawson uses to establish the teleological criterion for shared responsibility are “structured” cases (following Kutz), such as the Dresden bombing or cooperation in a murder (2013, 228-232).

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causal connection nor robust teleology.19 Secondly, while it may be said that contributors to UCH should

be more mindful, what I “ought to have recognized” for purposes of moral responsibility must be

sensitive to the information I have at the time I act. If the agent could not reasonably have seen her action

as a cause of a given harm—granting that she already does not jointly intend the outcome—then she

could not have been reasonably expected to see that harm as hinging on her action.20 George Sher’s

recent work, which Banks (2013) has invoked to support the Strong view, suggests that responsibility

judgments do and must go beyond what an agent happens to have had in mind at the time of action;

responsibility judgments extend further to what agents should have known (Sher 2009, 24-8). Sher’s own

examples, however, are ones in which the agent was in a position to see her action as the clear cause of a

clearly individuated harm: a woman leaves a dog in a hot car without thinking how the dog could die; a

terrorist is too blinded by his political goals to appropriately weigh the harm to victims.21 The agent could

have been expected to see her act as, e.g., the cause of harm to the dog, and the dog’s welfare hinged on

her decision in ways she should have foreseen. Naturally a member of a jointly intended action has

reason to see her role in the plot as a cause of the collective effect. Yet it is far from clear that I must see

my bit in any conceivable non-intentionally collective “act” (which is only a unified act in the eye of the

beholder) as a cause of whatever that “act” might effect. This, I take it, is the force of Sinnott-

Armstrong’s analogy that “My act of pouring the quart into the river is not a cause of the flood [after a

torrential rain]” (2005, 291). The mechanisms that aggregate our contributions to UCH are no more in

the control of contributors than are the natural causes of the flood, and the contributions of many parallel

actors must be aggregated to create the collective effects that draw our moral attention to UCH in the first

place. This makes Sinnott-Armstrong’s flood analogy appropriate and makes it strange to say I should

think of those collective effects as side effects of my own contribution. Jubb has expressed concern that a

Strong view like Lawson’s requires agents to become so wary of so many everyday actions as to have a

“chilling effect” on their agency, since one can never know what distant, unintended collective effects

hinge on one’s action (2012, 740-1). Proof that an agent could have reasonably foreseen an effect, ideally

by proving clear causal dependency, would lessen Jubb’s concern.

Yet this proof has been wanting in other approaches to the Strong view as well. Banks (2013)

supplements a Sher-style approach like Lawson’s with the argument, drawn from Hordequin (2011), that

individuals gain broader responsibility from the expressive quality of their actions. Banks argues that

                                                                                                               19 If this is not intuitive, consider an example offered by Janna Thompson: if a group of neo-fascists commits a crime in Europe, an unaffiliated group of young Neo-Nazis in the U.S. does not earn complicity just because they endorse and identify with the group’s goal (2006, 157). 20 I presume this requirement is obvious to avoid holding people responsible for “butterfly-effect”-style consequences. 21 Sher takes for granted that the acts in question are “wrong acts,” and in most cases are ones for which the agents in question intuitively “would definitely be blamed” (2011, 24).

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even a driver of a zero-emissions SUV may gain some culpability from that act for the collective effects

of climate change because “[o]thers driving on the road driving regular SUVs may see my car and think

to themselves that what they are doing is not that bad” (2013, 61). But again, to satisfy Young’s and

Sinnott-Armstrong’s objections and Petersson’s reasonable criteria for responsibility, the burden of proof

is on proponents of the Strong view to prove that the agent ought to have seen her action as a cause of a

harmful but unintended effect. It would seem unreasonable to say that I should have foreseen whatever

non-intentional collective effects might result from courses of action that my behavior accidentally—even

contrary to my wishes—suggests to other people.

Hiller offers a potential way to solve the issue of foresight for distant UCH by distinguishing

clearly foreseeable distant harmful effects from effects with a “‘butterfly effect’ type of causal structure”

(2011, 352). The causal structure in “butterfly effect” cases precludes foresight. Hiller argues helpfully

that causal distance does not automatically entail such a butterfly-effect-like causal structure, particularly

when social structures make it foreseeable that some acts will cause some nonzero amount of harm (2011,

351). Using a formula like Nolt’s, Hiller argues that we can calculate the net harm from a contributory

action, at least as regards climate change: “going on a Sunday drive is the moral equivalent of ruining

someone's afternoon” (2011, 357). This is perhaps all that is needed for a very strict consequentialist

(notably the reasoning Hiller primarily engages) to forbear acting. Yet this doesn’t provide a clear reason

why contributors should have borne in mind the necessarily collective UCH itself—notably, the deep

long-term deprivations and ruined lives—nor does it tell us why contributors would bear any guilt in

reference to that aggregate outcome. We can concede to Hiller that it would be, as he says, one of Parfit’s

“mistakes in moral mathematics” to deny the relevance of a harm just because it is miniscule, especially

when many such harms aggregate into something very bad (2011, 356). Yet Parfit’s signature examples

on the relevance of miniscule effects, such as Harmless Torturers, clearly causally trace the harm to

agents who occupy very symmetrical roles: a group of torturers each do an injury to S so small that S

cannot perceive it, but the cumulative effect of all those injuries causes S severe pain (1987, 80-81).

When instead the roles are different in quality and degree of steering power, lack mutual knowledge, and

mediate one another’s connection to the effect—e.g. the roles of a consumer, a clothing company CEO,

and a local official who oversees garment factories—then things are disanalogous to Parfit’s cases.22

Isaacs has argued that when we consider non-intentional collectives that lack the cooperation conditions

of the torturers, it is reasonable not to view the aggregate result as a moral wrong at all: it is too bad that

                                                                                                               22 My sense is that this may be true in reference to the human costs of climate change, despite the greater symmetry in the roles of polluters: in actual cases, the human costs are bound to include the contributions of local officials, governments, and others whose contributions are necessary to translate the proximate effects of an individual’s action into distant harms.

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things added up this way and translated our harmless contributions into harm, but nobody can be blamed

with reference to that harm (2011, 99-100). Consumers and investors, unlike harmless torturers, can

reasonably take shelter behind Sinnott-Armstrong’s analogy that the morally salient consequence of a

flood, which we don’t jointly intend, doesn’t hang on one agent’s non-morally-salient act of pouring out a

cup.23 When the truly important moral event hinges on non-intentionally collective action, it is difficult to

maintain that agents must view that event as a foreseeable effect of their personal action.

I have maintained that in cases of UCH it is best to maintain, and not relax, two fairly basic

conditions for moral responsibility: a causality condition, that the agent’s act and intentions explain the

harm, and the condition that the harm is a foreseeable effect of those acts and intentions; foreseeable

effects include things the agent didn’t consider, provided that she reasonably should have. I have shown

that, if our object of potential blame is the consequence of welfare deprivations to someone at the end of a

distant causal chain, it is difficult to connect agents like consumers, investors, or polluters to that object in

a culpable way. I have also argued that strategies that change or loosen the criteria for moral

responsibility until we can substantiate the Strong view, e.g. by relaxing the requirement of causal

dependence or by significantly expanding what we expect agents to have foreseen as effects of their

actions, are undesirable and unsuccessful. Instead, I have proposed we retain more typical ideas of what

counts as causal dependence, foreseeability and (thus) culpable agency; however, this means we can only

substantiate the Strong view if we focus on different grounds for blame than the acceptance of a bad side-

effect, and on a different object of blame than the consequence of distant welfare losses.

4 Grounds for Consumer Guilt in Moral Perception

We can find a harm more directly linked to, and hinging on, our agent’s control and actions if we

examine the agent’s perceptions. Unlike some Strong approaches above, which find fault with agents

whether or not they know of the harms (since the burden is on effects they should have foreseen), I am

confining myself to agents in the epistemic position of our “complicit social reformer.” Both Sinnott-

Armstrong’s and Young’s complicit reformers acknowledge clearly that they are “socially connected” to

the harms to which they continue to contribute, that is, they acknowledge that their actions require for

their success a non-intentionally collective endeavor that will produce harm to others.24 The right

                                                                                                               23 Sinnott-Armstrong explicitly insists that overdetermination or imperceptibility of harm are not his reasons for denying responsibility for UCH; he instead cites lack of causal dependency and lack of culpable intent: “My exhaust is not sufficient for the harms of global warming, and I do not intend those harms” (2005, 291). 24 Sinnott-Armstrong admits entirely that Sunday drives in a heavy emitting car certainly do contribute to global warming, and that this will cause real suffering in the long run to the poor in developing nations (2005, 293-294). Young unfortunately often elides the moral positions of those who know and acknowledge their “social connection” to harms, and those who contribute unwittingly to UCH (2010, 99-100). I am considering only agents who grasp

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question, then, is whether an agent can act with that knowledge and still avoid guilt. Thus far it has

seemed that an agent’s having a “social connection” to UCH is insufficient, causally and epistemically, to

permit judges to say that she should have seen the UCH as a potential side-effect hinging on her action.

Nevertheless, agents with at least a certain level of knowledge about their social connection to harm

would have to deliberately disregard morally salient information they perceive and consciously choose to

act on maxims that exclude it. Here I examine the agential phenomenology and show that the process of

selecting a morally “thinner” act-description under these conditions provides grounds for guilt.

Of course, if there is no moral wrong at issue, then there is no reason to require agents to attend to

a thicker act-description. The harms of the supply chain are bad, but so is an economic collapse caused

by a series of unconnected real estate deals; it is presumably difficult to fault agents for not having had

the economy in mind when they bought property prior to a collapse. Thus in some cases it seems clear

that our moral judgments should track with Isaacs’ claim that joint intention is a necessary condition for

backwardly positing a moral wrong in a collective context (2011, 99-100).25 Consider which of the

following cases a moral observer would be justified in calling a “mass killing”:

(1) Planned Massacre. 26 killers, A, B, … Z, each kill one victim as a concerted effort

in a single location

(2) Parallel Killings. 26 killers, A, B, … Z, each kill one victim in a single location but

for unconnected personal reasons.

If a newspaper used the term “mass killing” in case (2), we might say rightly that they are

sensationalizing the event. Yet a joint intention toward the moral outcome is already less obviously

necessary from an agential perspective. Consider:

(3) Sentimental Killer. 25 killers, A, B, … Z, each kill one victim for unconnected

personal reasons in a single location. But Z, having learned of the intentions of the

other 25, cannot stand the thought of contributing to so many deaths at once and

foregoes killing his victim.

                                                                                                               their “social connection” at a level at least sufficient to start discharging the forward-looking responsibilities the Moderate view entails—like our complicit reformer. 25 Isaacs’ argument, again, is that the term “moral wrong” is simply misapplied without agency, and this is lacking in collective circumstances unless there is a joint intention.

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Is Z merely confused here? We could say he is just an overly sentimental soul (for a killer, at least) and

maintain that the thought of the 25 deaths doesn’t really supply him with a good reason for not acting.

We obviously would not say that when we add the conspiracy back in:

(4) Conspiracy Embezzlement. 26 evildoers, A, B, … Z, conspire to ruin Bob by each

stealing 1/26th of his money. Z, feeling guilty about the possibility of rendering Bob

homeless or unable to feed his family, pulls out of the conspiracy.

Now what is essential for my purposes is that we would also not call Z merely confused if we add in other

knowledge and cooperation conditions short of jointly intended conspiracy. Consider these cases:

(5) Mafia Fraud Embezzlement. 26 people, A, B, C, … Z, learn that their investment

incomes are actually part of a bizarre mafia hit and that each of them is gradually

sucking out 1/26th of Bob’s investments. The mafia does not know that the 26 have

found out, and furthermore, it appears that the authorities will not discover the scheme.

Z, feeling guilty about the possibility of rendering Bob homeless and unable to feed his

family, pulls his investments out.

(6) Computer Glitch. Same as (5), except it is a computer glitch instead of a mafia

scheme. Z pulls out again, again feeling guilty about what he might be doing to Bob.

If we simply stipulate that the bar for what counts as a “wrong” is the presence of a collective intention,

following Isaacs, then there is no wrong in (6) at all. But obviously we shouldn’t stipulate that if it

doesn’t fit the intuitive facts. Even if we maintain that the Sentimental Killer is an overly imaginative

soul, it would seem odd to say that Z is thinking too sentimentally or irrationally about his actions in

Computer Glitch just because he is not participating in a cooperative joint intention. Rather, it would

seem intuitive to say that Z has good reasons to pull out of her investment in either (5) or (6), and that the

aggregate outcome does indeed provide information that Z ought to consider in moral deliberation. Joint

intention to produce an outcome is obviously not a necessary condition for an agent to have reasons to

refrain from an action that leads in aggregate to that outcome.

It might be objected that agents making purchases that are socially connected to global labor

exploitation lack the level of knowledge about the causal story of their actions that we have in (5) or (6).

This is true. But lack of clarity about the causal story does not necessarily alter an agent’s moral reasons

in a substantial way. Consider:

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(7) Shady Investment. Person Z enjoys a flow of money into his account from a new

investment, until he finds out that, by some process he does not understand (and which

he is told is extremely complex), the money is flowing into his account by means that in

the end ruin the life chances of some particular person or persons whose name(s) he is

not told. Feeling guilty, Z pulls out of the investment.

Suppose instead that Z would like to claim that he “isn’t really clear what’s going on with that

investment,” since the details are all very mysterious (not at all like the mafia investment), and so he

prefers to consider his act under act descriptions that are clear to him, such as that he and his wife want to

retire in health and financial security. Kutz offers the related case of a shareholder who, Kutz claims,

“might plausibly claim no interest in whether the company makes land mines or baby food, but only in

the dividend on the stock or the likelihood of a rise in its price” (2000, 161). I doubt this, since I presume

that the agents in Mafia Fraud or Computer Glitch cannot simply “claim no interest” in the morally salient

facts that Bob and his family are being ruined, and if not, then there is no reason why the agent in Shady

Investment can “claim no interest.” The only way an agent might legitimately prefer his narrower act

description in Shady Investment is if the lack of clarity makes him doubt the truth of the connection

between his investments and the harm. Of course, at a certain point, there is a vice in doubting such

connections, and there must be a point at which those doubts cease to excuse blame (e.g. Z believes his

stock broker is lying anytime Z is told that the money is flowing in from Bob’s account). But none of

these doubts exist for our complicit social reformer, whose advocacy work is premised on her having

acknowledged a “social connection” to the harm to which she contributes.

The important epistemological difference here is that between doubt and vagueness. Vagueness

of a certain sort does not alter an agent’s moral reasons. Schutz (1967) has noted significant

phenomenological differences between face-to-face experience and the experience of a person who is

absent or distant. Much of my perceptual social world is populated by the latter sort of persons, who are

mere “ideal types” to me: the relatively clear “personal ideal types” of old friends I haven’t seen in

decades, and more distantly, “garment workers in Dhaka,” “mail carriers,” etc. My phenomenal sense of

these persons is a mere 2-dimensional stand-in composed of my own sense of their thoughts and motives.

I may transition for a time to face-to-face experience with a member of one of these classes; nevertheless,

time, distance, and the reorientation of my activities to local affairs will ensure that persons at a distance

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from my life will transition back to being mere ideal types to me.26 Yet the vagueness of my perception

of a distant old friend, though it may make it easier to steal from her, cheat her, etc., does not give me less

reason to refrain from these acts. Perhaps if I came to doubt her existence—to think this ideal type really

is a mere idea and in principle can’t be filled in with a face-to-face encounter—then my moral reasons

would change. Betraying something that is actually a figment of my imagination isn’t a moral wrong.

But I take for granted that it is wrong for me to behave as though an old friend is a figment of my

imagination merely on the grounds that she is at the moment a mere ideal type to me. And the same must

be true of ideal types, however vague, at the indistinct termini of the supply chain, unless we actually

believe that they are mere figments of our imagination. But they are not.

The upshot of my argument in this section is that the only level of clarity I can justly demand

about any of my actions is the amount of clarity needed to see the moral outlines of what I am doing. Z

has no right or need to demand any further clarity about his Shady Investment other than that it is ruining

the life of some anonymous person(s). He cannot disclaim responsibility, say, until he knows the names

of the parties involved or until he has an economics degree that will let him grasp the workings of his

investment—else I have no reason not to shoot you until I have a clear engineering knowledge of guns. If

I have enough clarity to know the moral outlines of my actions, I am obliged to take my bearings from the

act-description that incorporates them. Acting against those reasons because of unclarity would not

merely earn me some especially strong version of bystander responsibilities to aid, as the Moderate

position suggests. On the contrary, continuing in something like a Shady Investment would make an

agent properly guilty, since he would be consenting to employ machinery that brings about someone’s

ruin for a small gain to himself (e.g. 1% more than he could otherwise earn). Provided he knows this, he

knows enough to refrain from acting.

5 The Object of Consumer Guilt

This leaves us with a puzzle: our intuitive reasons for refraining from an action that contributes to

some UCH—call it X—hinge on a social connection to X; however, I have ruled out that social

connections force a contributor to think herself the cause of X, or to see X as the foreseeable but

unintended side-effect of her action. As noted, an agent thinking of X as the side-effect of her own action

is disregarding causal unclarity, foreseeability issues, and some collective action problems that are rightly

thought important by critics of the Strong position. Moreover, the relevant deprivations will no doubt

                                                                                                               26 Schutz’s (1967) work is largely devoted to explicating the phenomenological difference between these and its consequences for individual and group action; for a concise explanation of the transition between face-to-face experience and ideal types, and back again, see esp. pp. 186 ff.

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proceed apace whether or not the agent takes any given action.27 So why should our agent refrain?

Perhaps she is just thinking unclearly about the UCH and her relation to it. But perhaps instead she is not

thinking only of the UCH itself. A more defensible moral story might look like this: the agent who pulls

out of something like a Shady Investment is seriously and authentically considering, and acting to honor,

the personhood of someone whose moral standing would have to (because of the social connection) be

disregarded in order for her action to succeed.28 This reasoning would notably be available to the agent in

Shady Investment, but not to my intuitively less reasonable Sentimental Killer. And this attention to

personhood, I suggest, is also where we can locate an alterative object of blame for an agent who

knowingly contributes to UCH.

Thus the answer to the puzzle is that the marginal result itself—e.g. that my purchase

hypothetically decreases one individual’s welfare by the pleasure of a sunny day, or by nothing at all—is

not the only harm to speak of. Considering the global supply chain, Pogge finds consumers more

crucially guilty of violating negative duties toward the global poor through the perfect duties that derive

from the third formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative: “[Kant’s] basic idea is that persons are

entitled to equal freedom and should therefore constrain their freedom so that the freedom of each is

consistent with the freedom of all. Acting beyond this limit, one invades the rightful freedom of others,

thus violating a negative duty: a person unduly harms others when the success of his conduct implies that

like conduct by others is constrained” (2008, 141).29 When the success of some action of mine demands

that another person have her autonomy compromised, and I know this, I am violating a negative duty

toward her. This presumes, I think rightly, the Kantian idea that at least some of the cost to victims of the

global economy comes in the form of lack of recognition and their invisibility as agents. I foster that

invisibility when I act as if a Bangladeshi sweatshop worker, who is admittedly at this moment a person I

know only as an “ideal type” through acts of imagination, actually is a figment of my imagination that can

make no real-world claims on me. Part of my overall moral duty is to act as though persons are persons

with claims on my freedom and not as though they really are figments of my imagination or mere

philosophical curiosities.

                                                                                                               27 Here I set aside debates over whether agents are responsible for contributions that make no difference, since I have already discounted responsibility for concrete outcomes of unstructured collective action on other grounds. For discussion, see Kagan’s (2011) case that overdetermination cases are logically impossible; for a reply to Kagan and defense of overdetermination as an excusing condition in UCH, see Killoren and Williams (2013). 28 I recognize that one could offer an act-consequentialist story instead: the agent knows vaguely that act A has more grave costs than B; without knowing the exact cost of A, she knows enough not to choose A. Nevertheless, I presume this consequentialist story would still need to solve the problems raised in §2-3 in order to explain (e.g. to Sinnott-Armstrong) why it is rational for the agent to see the UCH as a consequence hinging on her own act. 29 For a more concise statement and defense of Pogge’s argument, see Pogge (2005).

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Kantian considerations have typically been thought to exculpate contributors to UCH. The

reasons for this should already be fairly clear, since staples of Kantian responsibility like guilty intention

and the control condition seem impossible to satisfy for UCH.30 As Kutz has noted, contributors probably

all act on maxims with the proviso “only if my contribution makes no perceptible difference,” which

could be thought to make contributions universalizable.31 Sadler (2007) argues in a different vein that

actions are perfectly universalizable so long as they are part of a mere non-intentional “social pattern”

rather than an intentional “social practice,” as is the case in UCH: if the harm is caused only by a

“pattern” found by external judges, there is no reason I, the consumer, cannot will the innocuous maxim

of my contributory action (e.g. “help my family by decreasing the clothing budget”) to be a universal law.

This properly Kantian sense of universalizability is entirely independent, as Sadler correctly notes, of the

consequentialist consideration as to whether or not I’d want a world where a certain number of people do

exactly the same action (2007, 497). Sadler accordingly permits her agents to act on very local maxims

that are, so to speak, morally uninteresting.32 Yet the maxims of contributors, at least under some

epistemic conditions, are not morally uninteresting at all. Provided I am aware that an action has a moral

outline such that the success of the action requires that someone else be deprived of her autonomy, my

taking that action is morally wrong.

The harm involved here bears explanation. Apart from damage I do to her welfare, to regard

someone’s moral status as an idle curiosity is a moral wrong and a moral harm in itself: I may mouth my

philosophical belief in someone’s autonomy, but her autonomy is an empty idea unless I let it limit me. If

S’s autonomy is an empty idea to everyone on earth, then S is de facto not autonomous, in that she is ruled

out by all other agents from having a social status that permits her to place claims and constraints on the

action of other people. I directly contribute to that lack of status myself by treating another’s autonomy

as something beneath moral considerability. In the case of global poverty, the moral invisibility of the

victims—the fact that nobody in the global economy permits them to make claims on their freedom—is a

key part of their plight. As Young and others note, workers at the bottom of the garment industry often

suffer coercion, child labor, sexual exploitation, wages below subsistence levels, withheld pay, and deadly

responses to protest.33 To simply accept all this as an entirely reasonable cost for a $10 discount on a new

garment, or for a bump in my investment income, is to directly (not indirectly) disallow moral recognition

to the victim from one of the few agents in the system who has significant leeway to do otherwise—

                                                                                                               30 On Kant’s overall “juridical” conception of moral responsibility, see Uniacke (2005). 31 For examples of this see Kutz (2000), 176ff. 32 The apparent Kantian universalizability of contributory maxims has also been noted by Sinnott-Armstrong (2005). 33 See Young (2011, 127-8); Blumgart, “Sweatshops Still Make Your Clothes” (op. cit.).

  17  

myself, the consumer or investor.34 Thus in disregarding victims I do not just exacerbate their plight by

depriving them of yet another sunny day; I exacerbate it by being yet another agent who treats their

claims and autonomy as idle ideas rather than real limits on my own autonomy. My contribution to the

victim’s moral invisibility is direct and exhibits causal dependence on my actions and intentions in ways

that satisfy the causality and foreseeability conditions outlined above.35

Note that I am arguing for the Strong view under specific epistemic conditions, namely, that the

agent is certain, or at least has extremely strong reason to believe, that a specific possible action of hers is

socially connected to UCH. Short of that epistemic benchmark, I am comfortable with Weak or Moderate

views being the correct story. Let Darla be an inhabitant of a wealthy town, A, who knows that 50% of

the products sold in her town come from source B, which has fair labor practices, and 50% from C, which

coercively employs child labor. Allow that nevertheless for all of her purchases, Darla has no idea

whether the particular product comes from B or C. Now even if we don’t hold her guilty for anything in

this case—which we cannot, on my view—Darla may recognize that she is contributing to the evils in C

in some unspecified way. She knows that as a participant in the town’s economy she has some general

social connection to the UCH (it being extremely unlikely that she chanced never to contribute at all), but

she doesn’t know of any particular social connection that attaches to any specific action of hers. The

Moderate view could be used here to say that this very general knowledge would give her stronger duties

to aid C than a totally unconnected person.36 The Moderate view ceases to be the correct moral story

when our agent antecedently knows of a social connection to UCH in reference to some specific action

she is considering, e.g. when Darla knows that a particular product is sourced from C.

I leave open the question as to whether something less than certainty will do. This is admittedly

an important question, since we are arguably rarely certain about our social connections to harm.

Nevertheless, unless our agent antecedently knew that some specific action of hers was connected to some

UCH, there is no specific event when she consciously participated in denying moral status to anyone.

One might reply that I have proven that it is conceptually possible for an agent to be backwardly guilty in

                                                                                                               34 Young notes importantly that many of the actors nearer to the problem, including local governments and factory managers, arguably suffer from coercion and constraint in their actions as well (2011, 129). A consumer’s relative leeway is admittedly less if her own economic situation forces her to purchase goods from a given retailer; however, a case like that would merely count as a possible excusing condition. 35 Pogge argues that we cease to be guilty for our contributions to UCH just in case we take action to compensate the victim; perhaps the complicit social reformer could be seen as doing just that (2005, 69-70). Yet Pogge and I agree fundamentally on the Strong view that there is a moral wrong done by contributors to UCH that demands rectification. We disagree much more narrowly on whether continual compensatory acts can sufficiently erase a continual stream of wrongs within a Kantian framework. 36 Where I would favor the Moderate view in cases like this, Pogge notably retains the Strong view here as well: on Pogge’s model, Darla’s broader participation in this unjust institutional order already qualifies her for backward-looking responsibility (2005, 60); David Miller’s (2012) or Shei’s (2005) models would say the same (see n. 10 above).

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reference to UCH, but I have offered such strict epistemic criteria that few real-world cases qualify. Yet I

presume that in any non-collective case, if I am 90% certain that an action of mine does wrong, I am

hardly at liberty to act on the 10% chance that it doesn’t: if I am “merely” 90% certain that there is a child

under a window, I presumably do wrong if I drop a broken refrigerator out the window on the 10%

chance that she walked away. Being reasonably certain of a social connection to harm would do in the

present case as well. And note that any residual uncertainty that a contributor to UCH may have about a

specific action is different in kind from a less informed individual’s merely general knowledge of social

connections to UCH, e.g. over her lifetime. Knowledge about a particular action, however vague, inflects

one’s deliberations in ways I discussed in the previous section; by the same token, ignorance about a

specific action makes one ineligible for the kind of blame I have described. Lastly, in case it seems

strange that the degree of harm varies with the knowledge of the agent (not that of the victim), this is

because we are dealing with a social harm: a denial of recognition of equal moral personhood, a removal

of social channels that enable recognition and dignity. As noted, there are effects on the victim: the

repetition of that harm consistently in the victim’s interactions, especially when the external safeguards of

legal rights are lacking, amounts to a socially created lack of autonomy.

I have shown that in at least some epistemic circumstances we can take a Strong view of

contributions to UCH. Knowing of a social connection means knowing that I am one of many non-

cooperating actors in likely asymmetric roles collectively bringing about an event at significant causal

distance; accordingly, I know that the success of my action requires that event. My causal connection to

such “socially connected” events is mediated by non-intentionally collective actions in ways that make it

unreasonable for me to see (or be required to see) those events as direct effects of my personal action, or

even as effects of a group project in which I participate.37 Accordingly, we cannot satisfy standard

criteria for retrospective responsibility if our object of blame is merely the UCH itself. But we can satisfy

those criteria if we shift the object of blame from the agent’s share of distant deprivations to the way a

knowledgeable agent would have to consciously choose maxims that fail to take victims’ moral status

seriously. Provided that moral invisibility is a real harm, as I argued it is, then we have found a wrong in

which a knowingly contributing agent should see herself as causally involved. Our complicit reformer

would be one such agent and so should stop contributing. I am agnostic about what duties of restitution

follow from such contributions, but they should likely be similar duties of advocacy and political action to

those the Moderate view recommends. More immediately, my argument demands not contributing

                                                                                                               37 Consider that, conversely, I would not have cause to pat myself on the back for my purchases if it turned out that global capitalism made the lives of Chinese factory workers go well.

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knowingly to UCH and shifting investments and purchases to transparent and ethical sources.38 Provided

that moral invisibility is a real harm—this being part of what it means to lack autonomy at all—then the

vagueness and phenomenological abstractness of a relationship do not excuse me from honoring that

relationship. It is certainly no use to complain that it is easier to treat people I don’t know as figments of

my imagination.

                                                                                                               38 It is popular to suggest, as Young has, that boycotting businesses that source from sweatshops and switching to ethical sources will make sweatshop workers worse off. There are numerous replies: (a) this is a merely pragmatic argument, and the Strong view may be conceptually correct even if a boycott leaves some people worse off; (b) most importantly, signaling with my purchases that moral businesses can succeed best is, at least in the long term, good for global labor. One could potentially claim that the Kantian wrong vanishes if, e.g., my sole reason for retaining a lucrative investment in a mining company that uses child labor is to do right by those children (and not at all for my own profit). I leave it an open question whether that position is credible to the reader.

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