Citizen responsibility and group agency

Singling out the blameworthy

Pasternak argues that remedial costs need not be distributed proportionally to citizens’ blameworthiness for the wrong committed: it's acceptable for all intentional citizens to share these costs, even if they aren’t all blameworthy. Interestingly, though Pasternak argues there's nothing morally objectionable about distributing remedial costs in this way, she still presents it as a morally second-best option, to be carried out only when distributing remedial costs proportional to blameworthiness is infeasible, too expensive, or wouldn’t generate enough resources to cover the costs in full—which, admittedly, she expects will be the case in most real-world contexts (Pasternak, 2021: 34–40, 45–6, 92).

This raises the question: if (as Pasternak claims) all intentional citizens are responsible for remedying their states’ wrongs, and requiring them to pay remedial costs involves no wrongdoing, why should we prefer to distribute remedial costs according to blameworthiness when feasible? Pasternak briefly addresses this question. She says requiring only the blameworthy to pay remedial costs would reflect “the individualist intuition that citizens should not be held liable for wrongs committed by others and beyond their control” (Pasternak, 2021: 34). She notes we would object to a system that required a dictator's oppressed subjects to pay reparations to their state's (other) victims or required citizens who weren’t born when their state committed a wrong to pay the remedial costs (Pasternak 2021: 3–4).

But why not adopt a structural injustice framework for theorizing citizen responsibility, which would deny that only the blameworthy should share in remedial costs (even ideally)? Pasternak's appeal to individualist intuition doesn’t establish that we should reject such a framework. Contra Pasternak, we could follow Young's (2006) thinking on structural injustice and see liability (which typically makes one blameworthy) and participation in or perpetuation of an unjust system (which need not make one blameworthy) as distinct but equally fundamental sources of remedial obligations. Consider someone who, in a non-blameworthy way, helped perpetuate a social system that encouraged their state to commit injustice. On Young's (2006) “social connection” model of responsibility, they’re responsible for the injustices created by the social system they upheld, and there's no obvious reason to exempt them from paying remedial costs even when doing so is feasible. This view of citizen responsibility is (like Pasternak's) individualist in an important sense. It's not the mere fact of one's nationality that makes one responsible for injustice on the social connection model—but rather one's own contributions to the creation of injustice. Though (on Young’s (2006) view), responsibility for remedying structural injustice is shared among many and must be discharged via collective action, individuals acquire this responsibility by participating themselves, individually, in processes that produce injustice.

Pasternak (2021: 34) suggests another reason for preferring to distribute remedial costs only among the blameworthy: this would cleanly distinguish between “innocent” and “guilty” parties, “exonerat[ing]” the former. But Young’s (2006) view challenges Pasternak's assumption that a theory of reparative obligations should center guilt and innocence in this way. If we aim to understand how injustice is produced, how it could be remedied, and who is responsible for doing what to engender justice, it's perhaps less important to single out “guilty” parties for condemnation while exonerating the innocent masses. It's arguably more important to understand each person's role in producing injustice and what corresponding role they should accept in efforts to remedy it.

Especially since Pasternak understands remedial costs to include the costs of safeguarding against future injustice, they are arguably everyone's to bear in the first instance (not only when the blameworthy cannot be productively singled out). Say John mugs someone, is blameworthy, and is responsible for compensating his victim. Who is responsible for establishing social conditions discouraging mugging, thereby safeguarding against future muggings? Is it only John—perhaps along with whomever else has committed a blameworthy mugging? No; many others share in the responsibility to create social conditions discouraging mugging—say, by ensuring subsistence resources, education, and jobs are available to all on fair terms. John and anyone else who has mugged someone are the only ones to blame for past muggings. Nonetheless, it would not be ideal if only they bore the costs of safeguarding against future muggings.

Similar logic applies in the context of collective wrongs. Consider Lu's (2011) treatment of Japanese colonialism in Korea and responsibilities to redress the harms of the “military comfort system,” whereby many Korean women were induced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers. Lu (2011) argues this system was perpetuated not only by individually blameworthy actors (e.g. people who abducted women and forced them into sex-work) but also by “structural” conditions (e.g. international norms condoning colonization and allowing colonizers to exempt their colonies from human rights standards, sexist attitudes in Japan and Korea, and socio-economic hierarchies that allowed Korean elites to benefit from exploiting poor, rural Korean women). Thus, Lu (2011) argues, the responsibility for remedying the harms of the comfort system—including reforming the offending social structures so they no longer produce similar injustices—lies not with the blameworthy alone, but with all who helped maintain those structures, including people in Japan, Korea, and the broader international community.

Intentional citizenship

As noted above, Pasternak thinks all “intentional citizens” can permissibly be required to share the costs of remedying their state's wrongs. Pasternak (2021: 8–9, 75–8) defines “intentional citizens” as those who intentionally play their respective roles in the state, see themselves as contributing to the functioning and maintenance of their state understood as a group agent, see themselves as contributing to carrying out the state's plans, and don’t see their participation or participatory intentions as forced upon them. Thus, secessionist minorities and oppressed people often aren’t intentional citizens: though they may participate in the state for pragmatic reasons, if they don’t endorse their participation and would abandon it if they could, they don’t participate as intentional citizens (Pasternak, 2021: 109–12). Setting these groups aside, Pasternak (2021: 102–24) draws on cross-national surveys that ask respondents to report how attached they feel to their nationalities to argue that intentional citizenship is widespread in many countries.

I’m sympathetic with Pasternak's view that someone must willfully play their role in their state and willfully contribute to enacting its plans for the resulting state action to be an act of group agency of which the individual was a part. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that a group's acts are not acts of genuine group agency if its members don’t act as agents when playing their respective roles in making and enacting group decisions (Rafanelli, 2017: 287). For a member to act as an agent when playing their role, they must act on their own will and intend to contribute to whatever group decision procedure or action they participate in—which, in the case of a decision procedure, includes intending to help produce the procedure’s outcomes (Rafanelli, 2017: 287, 294). Though I made this argument about corporations, it applies similarly to other prospective group agents, including states. At this level of abstraction, my view is consonant with Pasternak's: what I call “acting as an agent” when playing one's role in the group roughly corresponds to what Pasternak calls “intentional citizenship.”

However, I propose, Pasternak underestimates the conditions that undermine an individual's intentional citizenship and therefore identifies too many individuals as intentional participants in genuine group agency. Pasternak's treatment of citizens’ responsibilities for state policies they oppose and for secret policies illustrates this well.

In the first case, Pasternak (2021: 81) argues that when citizens intentionally participate in the state, they opt to maintain and facilitate the state's agency, a key component of which is that the state may issue decisions they disagree with. If citizens who understand this continue to participate in the state and don’t “reject” their participation (don’t see it as forced upon them), they remain the “inclusive author[s]” of state policy even when they disagree with it (Pasternak, 2021: 81). Similarly, Pasternak (2021: 81–4) writes, if citizens know their state maintains secret policies and continue to participate in the state (without rejecting their participation), they are inclusive authors of those policies, despite not knowing their content.

According to Pasternak, though being an “intentional citizen” means intentionally helping enact the state's plans, one isn’t removed from the category of “intentional citizen” whenever the state's plans include something one disagrees with or doesn’t know about. After all, part of what it means to help enact the state's plans (because of what a state is) is to help enact the plans of a group agent that may do things one disagrees with or one doesn’t know about. Assuming citizens understand this, we should interpret their continued (non-rejected) participation in the state as intentional participation meant to help enact the state's plans, even if they don’t personally endorse or know about each of these plans.

Granted, participating in a state means participating in processes whose outcomes one doesn’t fully control. But Pasternak's analysis overlooks the possibility of a citizen endorsing their participation conditional upon their state meeting certain standards. Imagine a US citizen, Claudia, who opposed President Trump's proposed ban on Muslim immigrants. When the ban is proposed, Claudia provisionally endorses her participation in the US state, but if the ban is enacted, she will reject her participation: the US will no longer qualify as a decent state in her view and she’ll wish to renounce her membership (though she may not actually do so, for pragmatic reasons). Claudia does everything her role in the state enables her to do to stop the ban from taking effect. She writes her Congresspeople and local paper, marches in the streets daily, and so on. Despite this, the ban is enacted.

Presumably, Pasternak would say Claudia is an inclusive author of the ban because she willingly participated in the state in the time leading up to its passage and in the political processes that ultimately brought about the ban (though she hoped her participation would produce a different outcome). On this view, Claudia's vociferous opposition (via protest, letter-writing, etc.) doesn’t diminish her authorship of the ban. In fact, it is precisely Claudia's willing participation in the political processes that were to decide whether the ban was enacted, via the channels her role in the state opened for her, that Pasternak would invoke to show Claudia was an “intentional citizen” and therefore an author of state policy. But we shouldn’t treat Claudia's participation in the state for the purpose of preventing the outcome that would cause her to reject her participation as evidence that she is an author of that very outcome.

Pasternak also seems to assume citizens must either reject their participation in the state altogether or endorse their participation, which means endorsing the role they play in enacting state policies no matter what those policies end up being. But we shouldn’t ignore the possibility of citizens endorsing their participation on the condition that state policies meet some specified standards.

On Pasternak's view, I take it, Claudia was an author of US policy up to (and including) the point when the immigration ban was enacted. She ceased being an author of state policy only once she rejected her participation. On the view I’m suggesting, Claudia was never an author of any policy banning Muslim immigrants. Though she endorsed her participation in the US state so long as it was a state that didn’t ban Muslim immigrants, she never endorsed her participation in a state that would enact such a ban. She rejected her participation in that kind of state—Claudia simply didn’t know the US was such a state (it was not, decisively, such a state) until the ban passed.

Consider now the case of state secrets. Say Thanh, another US citizen, knows the state has secret procedures for dispelling threats to national security. Thanh endorses his participation in the state conditional upon these procedures meeting basic human rights standards (e.g. only targeting people the state has sufficient evidence against). Not knowing the state's secrets, he assumes this condition is met. Once Thanh discovers this condition isn’t met—learning about widespread state surveillance of the general population—he no longer endorses his participation in the US state. We shouldn’t say that Thanh was an author of all state policies (including secret surveillance authorizations) before he learned about these abuses and rejected his participation. Rather, Thanh never endorsed his participation in a state that would spy indiscriminately on its own citizens.

Does this mean citizens like Claudia and Thanh aren’t responsible for remedying their states’ wrongs? Excusable as their participation may have been, they participated in processes that helped enact or maintain the offending policies. (One could argue Claudia didn’t participate in such processes, but Thanh certainly did). So, don’t they bear some remedial responsibility—at least to help repeal the relevant policies and safeguard against their re-emergence?

I agree, Claudia and Thanh likely bear this responsibility. I’ve argued that neither endorsed their participation in the state that produced the offending policies, and that they therefore weren’t “intentional citizens” (their participation didn’t render them participants in their state's agency understood as group agency). But if we adopt a theory of citizen responsibility not derived from a theory of group agency, we can still explain why and how they’re responsible.

The structural injustice framework can provide such a theory. For example, Young (2006) would say, if Claudia and Thanh participated in a social structure (e.g. the state, the state system) that produced structural injustice (e.g. by making Muslims especially vulnerable to state oppression), then they bear responsibility for reforming the structure to eliminate the injustice. The exact nature of their responsibility depends on their degree of power and privilege, their ability to catalyze collective action, and their interest in changing the status quo (Young, 2006: 125–30). Nothing in this position depends upon the claim that Claudia and Thanh's participation took the form of participation in acts of group agency. The structural injustice framework, then, gives us a way to explain widespread citizen responsibility without erroneously identifying too many citizens as intentional participants in their states’ group agency.