Abstract
This paper considers some aspects of the morality of complicity, understood as participation in the wrongs of another. The central question is whether there is some way of participating in the wrongs of another other than by making a causal contribution to them. I suggest that there is not. In defending this view I encounter, and resist, the claim that it undermines the distinction between principals and accomplices. I argue that this distinction is embedded in the structure of rational agency.
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Notes
Their strategy of persuasion is essentially that of the militia commander in Bernard Williams’ famous ‘Jim in the Jungle’ example: see Williams (1973), pp. 98–99.
For simplicity I am bracketing (and will not discuss here) the special case of vicarious responsibility. Vicarious responsibility is sometimes confused with responsibility as an accomplice. But the two are quite different. Being vicariously responsible means owing a justification or excuse for another’s wrongs irrespective of one’s own participation in them. One reason why the two are often confused is that, once institutionalised in the law, they may offer rival techniques for pursuing some of the same legal policies. On the legal policies (and with some symptoms of the confusion) see Fletcher (1977), pp. 642–644.
Results are outcomes of actions that are also constituents of them; consequences, by contrast, are non-constitutive outcomes. This useful terminology is owed to von Wright (1963, pp. 39–41). Probably, in cases of complicity, the principal’s action should be regarded as a result rather than a consequence of the accomplice’s action. But we need not settle the question here.
On novus actus interveniens, and the classification of causal contributions more generally, the most important contribution was made by Hart and Honoré (1985).
Notice, interestingly, that some wrongs of complicity may themselves involve nonproxyable actions. Inducing a wrong is a possible way of being an accomplice. But one cannot be an inducer of a principal by acting through another inducer, because inducing is a nonproxyable action.
Clarkson (1971) 3 All ER 344.
For excellent discussion see Glover (1975).
For detailed explanation see Gardner (1996).
Of course, associating with wrongdoers could itself be a principal wrong. I don’t mean to raise any question mark over that possibility.
References
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Acknowledgements
This paper is a descendent of my Kadish Lecture, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley on 7 April 2004. My commentators on that occasion were Scott Shapiro and Jonathan Simon. I also profited from the remarks of Michael Bratman, Sam Scheffler, Jay Wallace, and Sandy Kadish. Substantially revised versions of the paper were presented at a workshop on Complicity in Oxford on 4 June 2005 (where I debated the topic with Christopher Kutz) and at a British Academy symposium on 22 October 2005 (where my commentators were Lindsay Farmer and Tatjana Hörnle). Antony Duff, Frances Kamm, and Doug Husak also made helpful remarks on the revised versions. I am grateful to all these people for exposing, between them, numerous failings. None of them is complicit in whatever errors remain.
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Gardner, J. Complicity and causality. Criminal Law, Philosophy 1, 127–141 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-006-9018-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-006-9018-6