Participation in and Responsibility for State Injustices

Robert Jubb
2014 Social Theory and Practice  
Introduction As political theorists and philosophers have become increasingly aware of collective acts and agents over the past decade or so, they have become increasingly interested in the question of what responsibility individual members of these collectives have for what the collectives have done. If our involvement in "the imposition... of a coercive global order that perpetuates severe poverty for many who cannot resist this imposition" makes us responsible for that poverty, as Thomas
more » ... e claims, this is because of the character of that involvement. 2 We are responsible for the harmfulness of that order because our support for it is analogous to the support citizens of Nazi Germany provided to that regime, and so we are responsible for its results just as they were. 3 Pogge's claim depends on the state-citizen relation being relevantly similar to the relation between the global order and its members. If citizenship is in some way distinctive, this could break the analogy between citizens of Nazi Germany and members of the current global order he sometimes relies on. For example, citizenship might ground special responsibilities to those with whom we share it. Indeed, cosmopolitan claims like Pogge's have been resisted in precisely that way. Andrea Sangiovanni, for example, has argued that citizens' reciprocal provision of "the basic conditions and guarantees necessary to develop and act on a plan of life" limit the responsibilities we have for those we do not share a state with. 4
doi:10.5840/soctheorpract20144013 fatcat:q5fgplnsljavzaw5gf2dfx6aj4