Role Responsibility and Global Injustice
What responsibility that individuals have for global injustices like poverty is a difficult question to answer. The causes of global injustices are often so complicated and entangled that whose duty it is to respond to these injustices, and on what bases, is largely unclear. This paper focuses on the role that individuals have toward addressing global injustices like poverty, given that such injustices are political problems with structural causes and requiring collective action in response. Although those who are most obviously responsible are collective agents like governments and corporations and structural institutions like international economies, individuals are responsible for global injustices by virtue of their collective and institutional roles. This paper examines what this role responsibility means, and how individuals can act as agents within their collective and institutional roles in order to effect change and carry out their global responsibilities.
A social role describes the relationship an individual has toward a collective of which she is a member or an institution that conditions her action, and it carries with it specific liberties and obligations defined by the collective or institution. The responsibility that attaches to roles may be assessed in a variety of ways, including how well duties are carried out, the morality of accepting and enacting a role, and the morality of constructing the role itself (Downie, 1998: 122-4). An individual can act both as a private individual and as fulfilling a social role, and her actions can be assessed on either account, depending on whether she acts qua her individual self or qua her role. With respect to her role, an individual performs actions, but the capacities of the role are defined or authorized by the collective or institution that creates the role. Individuals represent the collectives through which they act by carrying out the actions expected by their roles, and they contribute to the activities of the institutions under which they act by following the rules and practices designated by these institutions.
The kind of role responsibility with which I am concerned here is not the pre-moral, descriptive responsibility attached to roles that is sometimes discussed. In other words, I am not concerned merely with carrying out the expectations attached to roles as they are given. This would not make role responsibility with respect to global poverty a moral or justice issue at all. Rather, I am interested in how normative moral responsibility enters the ways that individuals carry out the expectations attached to their roles. The degree to which individuals can act morally (based upon considered judgments about what morality and justice require) within their roles is based on what power they have within their roles to act, and to create consequences over which they have some control. These questions concern the relationship between individual agency and role responsibility. Thus, to be clear, it is not the role itself that is the space in which moral and just action, and the carrying out of moral and political responsibilities, can occur, but rather the power an individual has within and as a consequence of the role.
Within these roles, morality enters role responsibility in the space between individuals acting qua their roles (carrying out the expectations attached to their roles, which may or may not themselves be moral or just) and individuals acting qua their unique individuality (acting according to their moral values and carrying out their individual moral and political duties). When there is some potential conflict between the demands of the role and the demands of morality and justice, being morally responsible in carrying out a role involves a “difficult balancing act” (May, 1996b: 122). The agency that this normative role responsibility involves is necessarily limited but also enabled in various ways by the nature of the particular role in question.
I also want to stress that the responsibility that individuals have, including by virtue of the specific roles they occupy, is differentiated depending on various factors.[1] The specific role that one occupies, and in particular the degree of power one has within the role to achieve particular ends or to create specific outcomes, is probably the most critical factor that determines the kind and degree of responsibility that any given individual has qua her role. Thus my project here is not to come up with a list of moral duties that constitute role responsibility applicable to all individuals within roles, but rather to give some theoretical framework for understanding how individuals do have some agency and power within roles to carry out the moral and political responsibilities of their collectives and institutions.
Problems with the Agency Involved in Role Responsibility
There are at least five problems involved with the agency an individual has qua her role within a collective or institution. All of these problems either do or seem to diminish the responsibility an individual has given her constraints.
Diffusion of Responsibility: Because collectives like corporations and governments have multiple levels of decision and action, responsibility is greatly diffused. This presents several problems. Diffused responsibility means that the responsibility that attaches to any one role, even those at the top levels, is low. Having multiple levels of decision and action make it too easy to evade responsibility by blaming someone else for a faulty action, whether that someone else is at a lower level (the person who “did” the action) or a higher level (the person who “decided” on the action). The greater number of people involved who could carry some of the responsibility, the less that any one of them has any, or at least seems to have any. (See Brennan, 1998: 323)
Replaceability of Role Holders: One way to think about roles within collectives and institutions is asplaceholders in which the specific identity of the person occupying the role is replaceable with another. In some cases, this replaceability does not accurately describe the nature of roles; people do sometimes turn their roles into something of their own creation, leaving their own unique mark on them, acting within their roles largely in the same way that they would act as individuals. This occurs most easily and most often when roles are voluntarily chosen. To the extent that the particular individual in a role does not matter, however, responsibility that attaches to the role is less meaningful because the individual has no reason to think that the responsibility applies to her. After all, she can simply be replaced with someone else who will be expected to act in the same way. When individuals are replaceable in roles, the role—and one’s action within it—starts looking like a cog in a machine rather than a position of agency capable of responsibility.
Anonymity of Roles: Closely related to the problem of replaceability is the problem of anonymity. To the extent that individual identity of the role holder does not matter, one’s identity and action within a role are anonymous. It does not matter who occupies the role, or what she does, since she can be replaced. This anonymity treats all individuals who are potential role holders as the same, eliminating any freedom that individuals have to be themselves as unique individuals and to follow their own conscience, to be accountable to action. By allowing people to perform actions in their roles that they would not do as individuals, cloaked in the anonymity that precludes them from accountability, anonymity allows for terrible misdeeds to occur. Anonymity allows people to lose “face-to-face confrontation” with other people, and especially with the consequences of their actions (May, 1996a: 89). As Larry May says, “What is lost in anonymity is the sense of personal responsibility that will counteract the possible willingness to contribute to harm or evil in the world” (1996a: 96). (See also Arendt, 1951; 1964)
Inevitability of Causal Processes: If roles are anonymous and their holders replaceable, then the consequences that result from the action expected from those acting in roles can seem inevitable. The more that roles seem to have an existence of their own, independent of individual human influence, the more that they seem to have a causal process of their own, independent of human agency. Again, they really start seeming like cogs in a machine, just a way for inevitable causal processes to occur like machinery. Event causation independent of agent causation (i.e., causal processes that occur without human agency or intervention involved) can seem like processes over which humans have no control. And the more inevitable causal processes and outcomes seem, the more it seems that humans are unable to have any control over them. Responsibility for these actions and outcomes seems irrelevant. (See Arendt, 1951)
Impotence of Agents: As a result of all these factors, individuals who act within roles can feel impotent, that is they feel as if they have no power or control over the actions that they are expected to perform and the outcomes which are supposed to result. Larry May argues, “Bureaucratic institutions socialize people to see themselves not as actors but as acted upon” (1996a: 88). In other words, it seems that they do not have sufficient agency to be responsible in any meaningful way. To the extent that this is true, it does not make sense to talk about role responsibility, unless by this term we just mean that one is responsible for carrying out the expectations attached to the role. When moral philosophers discuss role responsibility, however, this is not what they mean.
The responsibility ethicists care about is what an individual acting within a role should do, normatively speaking, not whether the role holder fulfills the expectations embodied in the role description. Ideally the expectations of a role will correspond to what an individual ethically should do, but of course this is not always the case. To what extent an individual is able to and should act contrary to role expectations when following her own conscience is highly problematic.[2] Acting qua individual and not qua role in such cases may be morally praiseworthy—e.g., we may applaud whistleblowers—but in many cases it is hard to blame those who do not do so. When individuals have little power to transform their roles, it may be unreasonable to expect them to act outside of their constraints as a matter of duty. In fact, there may be an asymmetry in how we evaluate these kinds of cases, where we praise those who follow their conscience rather than obey orders but do not blame those who do not.[3] Yet, as Hannah Arendt (1951) points out, this still allows for terrible injustices to occur, and for people to act horrendously in their roles in ways they would not do as individuals. So this asymmetry of praise and blame may still be an unsatisfactory way to resolve potential conflicts between responsibility to role expectations and responsibility to ethical considerations.
How the Agency in Role Responsibility Matters
As these problems show, an individual can feel as if she has no ability to act on her conscience when occupying roles, and in fact an individual’s particular action often does not make much of a difference, if any, within bureaucratic and institutional structures. Given these very real constraints, it is difficult to see why an individual should see herself as an agent and not merely a cog in the machine, and how she is able to do so.
There are a few ways to address this. Causation explains why the action of any given individual occupying a role matters, why causal processes are not inevitable, and why a person’s involvement in them is not truly anonymous. For many people, however, this answer is not sufficiently motivating. Social philosophy provides other ways to think about the meaningfulness of individual agency and responsibility within roles. Our individual action seems to matter more when we respond to particular others such as by entering into relationships with them, as communitarians argue, and when we see our action as extensions of our identity, as virtue theorists argue. Moreover, when we examine the ways in which we always have some element of free choice in our action, as in the existentialist view, we find that we are not as impotent as we may feel.
Particularity of Action: Causal Response
Role responsibility is a problematic concept largely because of the nature of roles as seeming to support inevitable outcomes of causal processes and in which the individuals occupying them are replaceable and anonymous. The concept of over-determination in causal theory helps us understand this nature of roles, and points us to ways of seeing our way out of these problems.
Over-determination helps explain the anonymity of roles and social positions, underscoring the reasons why responsibility is difficult to apply to structural injustice and why role responsibility especially is problematic. Both as victims of injustice and as agents of responsibility, our particularity and uniqueness vanish, so that both our suffering and our actions are defined by what position we hold within social structures, by our roles, making irrelevant who we are as individuals. A person in a given role may be expected to act a certain way, knowing that if she does not fulfill her expectations, someone else will replace her in the role. Her particular agency in the situation seems irrelevant because the action will occur regardless of whether she does it.
Yet how an individual occupies a role does matter, and an account of causation as a basis for moral responsibility can explain why. John Mackie argues that when there are multiple sets of sufficient causal conditions, we can identify “the cause” as what is necessary post factum (1965) or necessary in the circumstances (1980). In other words, “the cause” is what is necessary given that it is the only sufficient condition that is present, such as what actually did happen or who actually did act in a certain role. Even if others would have acted instead, the agents that did act are morally responsible for how they did act because their actions were necessary post factum and causally relevant. If moral responsibility is a meaningful concept such that we act as agents and are not mere cogs in a machine, then what actions we carry out in our roles or what experiences we endure through our social positions is morally relevant. Even if others would have been expected to act if we had not, or even if others would have been suffering if we had not, our particular actions and experiences, and the fact that they were ours, matters.