Are We All to Blame?

Josh Landy
Who’s to blame for big problems like climate change?

Ray Briggs
Isn’t time we held governments and corporations accountable?

Josh Landy
Or would that just let individuals off the hook?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco…

Josh Landy
…continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy. And I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re asking: Are we all to blame?

Josh Landy
Well, I think sometimes we’re all to blame for climate change, for example. I mean, pretty much everyone uses cars and airplanes and electricity.

Ray Briggs
Look, I would go entirely solar if I could, but I can’t. I have no control over the energy system. How can you blame me for something I didn’t do?

Josh Landy
But systems are made of individuals. As long as you’re still on the grid, you’re helping keep the system alive.

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on. It’s the government’s fault that the roads are in terrible shape, and it’s Amazon’s fault that their workers are underpaid. It doesn’t make sense to blame some poor schlub in the Amazon warehouse.

Josh Landy
Well, I look I I’m not disagreeing that there was a serious problem. And I’m certainly not blaming the poor schlub. I’m blaming CEOs, Congresspeople, maybe anyone who’s ever word use the word ‘synergize’ at a board meeting. But those are individuals, not groups, and groups can’t be morally responsible.

Ray Briggs
Well why not, Josh? I mean, groups make decisions. Congress passes laws, corporations make policies, courts issue verdicts. And sometimes when something goes wrong, the group really should have known better. Isn’t that enough to hold it responsible?

Josh Landy
Well, okay, you know, maybe that works for organized groups with, like an official decision-making process. But what about factory farming? I mean, every time time you eat a hamburger, like it or not, you’re a part of a group that’s causing a huge problem. But it’s not like there’s an official Hamburger Eaters Caucus handing down policy decisions. And there’s nobody to blame except a bunch of burger eating individuals.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but which individuals? I mean, sure, sure, condemn the CEO of McDonald’s. But what about workers at their meat plant who’re just trying to make a living?

Josh Landy
Well, there are other jobs out there.

Ray Briggs
And if you’re going to point the finger at individual meat eaters, why not blame vegetarians who give a pass to their meat eating friends? I mean, where does it end?

Josh Landy
Maybe it doesn’t end. Maybe we’re all complicit in the crimes our society commands.

Ray Briggs
Oh, no, that’s going too far. What about Germans in the 1930s who risked their lives to rescue Jews from Nazis? Or what about American abolitionists in the 1800s who spoke out against slavery? They did everything they could to stop their societies from committing atrocities. How can you blame them?

Josh Landy
But what if they also benefited from those atrocities? Like what if some of the abolitionists wore cotton—cotton that they could only afford because of slave labor?

Ray Briggs
Look, even if that were true, what are you going to do punish everybody?

Josh Landy
Oh, I’m not asking people to be punished. I’m just saying we should strive to make things better. We should take responsibility by helping those who have been harmed by a society.

Ray Briggs
Well in just a bit, we’ll be talking to Marian Smiley from Brandeis University, the author of “Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community.” We’ll see what she thinks we should do in cases like climate change where we all contribute.

Josh Landy
But we don’t all contribute the same. Rich industrialized countries play the biggest role in global warming, but countries with a smaller carbon footprint suffer disproportionately. In the past decade, environmental lawyers in the states have filed lawsuits against corporations and the government for their role in the problem.

Ray Briggs
So we sent our roving philosophical reporter, Holly J. McDede, find out why these cases are really hard to win. She filed this report

Holly McDede
When Sumona Majumdar walks along the San Francisco shore line with her daughter, she sees a world that’s becoming increasingly uninhabitable. Every year roughly 7 trillion tiny pieces of plastic flow into the San Francisco Bay. Plastic is a form of fossil fuel and it takes a lot of energy to make.

Sumona Majumdar
From its entire lifecycle, from the extraction to the production of plastic to plastic degrading, you have emissions of greenhouse gases.

Holly McDede
Most plastic we put in recycling bins ends up in landfills because it’s too expensive for cities to actually recycle it. From there. It often blows into the ocean or gets dumped there. This year Majumdar filed a lawsuit with the environmental group Earth Island Institute against big plastic. The suit alleges that companies like Coca Cola and Clorox are lying to consumers by telling them their products are recyclable.

Sumona Majumdar
It’s the same playbook that big oil used, that big tobacco used very sophisticated narratives that really convince people that you know this is a problem because of individuals not because of the product,

Holly McDede
It’s easy to blame individuals for issues as big as plastic waste and climate change.

Dave Owen
The level of worry increased significantly as the research became more and more dire.

Holly McDede
Dave Owen, an environmental law professor at the University of California Hastings, says in the 2000s, lawyers increasingly began to turn to the court to force institutions to take responsibility for this crisis. Global warming was also deeply political, even as new research made it clear humans were to blame. This footage is from a Republican presidential debate in 2007.

GOP debate
Yes or no for you. Do you believe that global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity? Do you want to give me a minute to answer that? No, I don’t. Well, then I’m not gonna answer it.

Holly McDede
If this issue wasn’t going to be tackled by lawmakers on their own, lawyers needed to force them to respond. But then and now these cases are hard to win. Owen says when it comes to lawsuits filed against fossil fuel companies, the rulings from judges have gone something like this.

Dave Owen
This is too big, too political, too standardless for us as judges to touch. Really what you are doing here is seeking a political fix, and that should be sought through the elected branches of government rather than through the courts.

Holly McDede
One example of that is Juliana v. United States. That’s the case where 21 young people sued the federal government. They argue the White House has encouraged the production of fossil fuels, thus infringing on their right to sustainable planet.

Juliana
We are here on very basic grounds that every single citizen has fundamental inalienable rights to natural resources necessary for life.

Holly McDede
In early 2020, a federal appeals court issued a ruling in response to Juliana and the judges were sympathetic to the argument the plaintiffs were making. One judge wrote…

Judge
In the mid 1960s, a popular song warned that we were on the eve of destruction. The plaintiffs in this case have presented compelling evidence that climate change has brought that even nearer.

Holly McDede
The judge continues…

Judge
Failure to change existing policy may hasten an environmental apocalypse.

Holly McDede
But then the judge concludes

Judge
Such relief is beyond our constitutional power. Rather, plaintiffs impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government.

Holly McDede
Philip Gregory, an attorney in the Juliana case disagrees. He says the courts have taken on big issues before like Brown versus Board of Education, where the Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate

Philip Gregory
It wasn’t like the President said, oh we need to deal with segregation. It was the courts who were out front. And it was the kids in Brown and similar cases that really forced the court to address these issues.

Holly McDede
So environmental lawyers like him keep fighting. Justice move slowly, but politics seems to move even slower. And when it comes to the climate crisis, we’re running out of time and people to blame. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for the inspiring and depressing report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re asking, Are we all to blame?

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Marion Smiley, who’s a professor of philosophy at Brandeis University, and the author of “Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community: Accountability and Power from a Pragmatic Point of View.” Marion, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Marion Smiley
Thanks very much for having me. This is a great idea.

Josh Landy
So Marion, you’ve written a lot about collective responsibility, including your most recent book. So what first got you thinking about these issues?

Marion Smiley
Actually, to date myself, I was very much involved in the anti-apartheid movements and in divestiture movements in particular. And what I discovered there was that no matter how much we tried to hold personal investors, individuals who invested in companies responsible for apartheid, we had always on every occasion to jump back into collective responsibility. And so I began to try to think about what it meant to deal with investors as part of corporations, and also what it meant to deal with corporations as collective actors.

Ray Briggs
Wow. So this sounds like it’s really sort of linked to your personal experience. So I want to ask at the beginning of the show, Josh and I were arguing about whether we can ever be responsible for anything beyond our own actions. I said yes, Josh said no. Who’s right?

Marion Smiley
Actually, I would myself be a libertarian, if what the common meaning of collective moral responsibility were the one that we had to accept. In other words, if collective moral responsibility required this metaphysical collective to an agent that was super individual, I’d probably be a libertarian too.

Josh Landy
So what you’re saying is, there’s no such thing as like a giant human being. That’s it. That’s a collective. And so we can’t, we can’t say that, Oh, there, there’s this super person that is, you know, the government or something. And yeah, you’re saying, nonetheless, there is such a thing as collective agency. So how does that work?

Marion Smiley
So, the argument goes, one doesn’t need to posit such a super individual collective. Agent, one doesn’t need to talk about collective says, having freewill. One can talk about collective responsibility in a much looser manner, or at least that’s how I choose to think about collective responsibility. So if, for instance, we moved from this metaphysical jump, to what I call shared responsibility, the responsibility of individuals quake group members, then we can have it both ways, then we can talk about personal responsibility, but personal responsibility within groups, and the kind of personal responsibility that’s actually required by groups. So in this context, we don’t need to replace individual responsibility, we need to add collective responsibility and think about them together.

Ray Briggs
Right, so what what makes a group responsible for something if not that, it’s like a person who can be responsible for something?

Marion Smiley
Well, I don’t think all groups are responsible. The groups that I do think are responsible, namely, some states and some corporations are responsible by virtue of the fact that they have a set of goals, a set of missions, both of which could have been expected to lead to harm. So even if they didn’t freely will the harm, as an entity, they should have been able to see what was going to happen. So we hold them responsible here as corporate agencies, because they are as a collective causally responsible.

Ray Briggs
So some people want to say that groups are responsible for things where the groups don’t have clear goals. So the example of like all meat eaters being responsible for factory farming to some degree, or like, if you think that like all white people are responsible for racism to some degree, it’s not like there is either of those groups has any kind of like collective consciousness or goal. Do you think those groups can be responsible?

Marion Smiley
No, no, I don’t like the names of those groups. In some cases, I prefer here to begin with individuals as group members in loose collectives, and then talk about how they share responsibility. So in your examples, which are all terrific, I would say we could hold individuals quake group members responsible, they share responsibility by virtue of having acted collectively. But they don’t act with one overarching will. What’s happens is that their actions have collectively organized themselves, such that there’s collective Harmon faults. They’re individually responsible, not just as individuals, but as group members. But we’re not talking about that overarching group with an intention or purpose. I think you’re right to be skeptical there about those kinds of groups.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about collective responsibility with Marian Smiley from Brandeis University, author of “Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community.”

Ray Briggs
Are you responsible for your government’s foreign policy? Is it wrong to buy gadgets that were made in sweatshops? Is it ever okay for a teacher to punish the whole class?

Josh Landy
Group crime and collective punishment—when Philosophy Talk continues?

Nina Simone
If I die and my soul be lost, nobody’s fault but mine.

Josh Landy
Don’t we all share some responsibility for the lost souls among us? I’m Josh Landy, this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re asking whether we’re all to blame. Our guest is Marian Smiley from Brandeis University, author of Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community.”

Josh Landy
It’s everyone’s responsibility to help control a pandemic. So we’re still pre recording episodes from the safety of our homes and unfortunately, can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Marion, what exactly am I responsible for the actions of a group?

Marion Smiley
So it depends on what you’re doing. talking about in terms of kinds of harm produced. If you’re talking about the responsibility of your nation state for doing harm that flows from official policy, then I think you’re responsible when you consent to that government in the first place. Which means if you voted for the person, if you support the regime, if you don’t rebel, in all of those contexts, for example, I think that all of us are responsible for torture that takes place in Iraq, for the dismantling of the economies of third world countries. So I’m fairly starched about collective responsibility when we’ve consented to what the state has done.

Josh Landy
So yeah, that’s a really interesting example. Because what about the case of somebody who voted against the government that that, you know, invaded Iraq, and, you know, has always voted against or voted for candidates who oppose torture? So if you’re someone who’s marched in the street against the Iraq War, who voted for the other candidate, who has always opposed torture, are you still responsible for the actions of your of your of your country?

Marion Smiley
Yes, but I, I do think that we should probably talk about a scale diminished responsibility versus a great deal of responsibility. I think the only time where you can really contend that you’re not responsible at all, is if you’ve actively worked against the government, or at least against the policies, say, associated with torture or whatnot. Otherwise, yes. And the reason I say that is because I think there’s responsibility that comes with being benefited by the state. So as long as we get benefits from the state, we’re actually part of it. And as long as we’re part of the state, I think we’re at least partly, collectively responsible.

Ray Briggs
So this also makes me wonder, sort of how much do I have to do in order to not consent to what my government is doing? And the benefits? I’m getting? Like, is it enough to like make a bunch of social media posts? Go to protests? What, what do I do? What point? Do I not consent?

Marion Smiley
Yeah, probably it depends on who you are. So one point, I think that’s worth hammering home is that not everybody has the same responsibility within the collective. So while those who have leisure time, and I think of academics as part of that group, might have a much greater responsibility to do something, especially if they have tenure, and don’t lose out, there are those who can’t leave their job, there are those who have to work 18 hours a day, there are those who don’t have the means of protesting. And I don’t hold those groups responsible here. So it is a sliding scale. I think, to the point of sacrifice to answer your question directly, I think to the point where you sacrifice something of equal importance, say taking care of your kids, perhaps, or I’m not sure involving yourself in another movements may be to the point where you sacrifice something like that, or don’t sacrifice something like that. That’s the point, I think that we need to focus on.

Ray Briggs
So we have a question from Alexandria, who asks, I would love to hear discussion around Karl Popper’s discourse about not tolerating intolerance, and relating it to our banality of evil.

Marion Smiley
It’s actually the Hannah Arendt it’s really interesting in this context, I’m not sure how it relates to Popper On the other hands, I actually think that Arendt is mistaken with regards to the banality of evil. I think she’s letting too many people off the hook, and also actually not providing a robust enough notion of collective responsibility. The reason I think she’s letting people off the hook is that she’s allowing for too much socialization of individuals. And she’s not holding individuals personally responsible for taking a critical perspective on the regime. So she’s flattened out responsibility here. And in doing so, has come up with a very sort of nebulous notion of collective responsibility that doesn’t lead us into action.

Josh Landy
I love that point. I’ve always been a little suspicious. You know, there’s something interesting about the endpoint, but the notion that, you know, the vast majority of people who go along with evil are just sort of mindless bureaucrats that’s always seemed kind of off the mark. It’s certainly not true vitamin like moves. And it was it was a genuine zealot. And unfortunately, there are lots of Zealots, and we need to hold them responsible. But Can I switch to a slightly different question? You made an excellent point a moment ago about kind of sliding scale of responsibility that it’s not just the kind of on off switch, you’re either responsible, you aren’t but but you’re more or less responsible, right? If you actually did something wrong, you’re very responsible if you if you went along with the wrong if you voted for the person, for example, you’re pretty responsible. If you benefited, you’re somewhat responsible if you if you didn’t try to stop it, you’re at least minimally responsible. And how far does this go? Like? I’m someone who grew up in England. But my family are basically Ukrainian Jews who have left Ukraine and Poland that area, you know, around 1900? Am I responsible for British imperialism? How far does it go? Right? To what extent to the sins of the fathers so to speak, carry down to future generations who weren’t even necessarily related to those for those originators?

Marion Smiley
Yeah, that’s that’s a really terrific question. Of course, it also gets to the heart of the reparations question in the US. Since I do insist on a causal contribution, if we’re going to be holding persons and collectives responsible, I reject notions of generational responsibility backwards, I actually see them moving forwards, which is why I’m very interested now in talking about forward looking collective responsibility. But when it comes to backward looking responsibility, namely blame, I can’t really tell a story for why you should be responsible for Imperialism. But I can tell the story about why you might be responsible for getting rid of it in the future. And that guy’s a fantastic answer to what what you’re benefiting from now.

Josh Landy
Yeah that makes me feel better, but also inspired to do good. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about collective responsibility with Marian Smiley from Brandeis University. And we’ve got an email from Alfredo who sent the email to philosophy top two, or G. Here’s what Alfredo says, I play more to Deleuze said Madame de Pompadour to her lover, Louie the 15th after he lost the battle of Rossbach, a certain political elite in the United States has made it their motto, making statements that benefit them and harm the more vulnerable among us take the senators who were informed of the health crisis to come earlier this year. They stated the COVID wouldn’t be disruptive, all the while rebalancing their investment portfolios, wider these senators believe they are stripped from any responsibility towards their constituents. So what do you think, Mary? Are these senators responsible?

Marion Smiley
Again, a great question. I think it’s ludicrous for them to deny responsibility. The question is, on what grounds? are they responsible? And are they responsible point individuals or as part of a larger organization. It’s such a perfect example. Because I think it involves almost all components of responsibility. There’s causal contribution, there’s benefits. There’s membership in a group that’s privileged clearly, and so forth, and so on. But it also raises this really interesting matter of excuses, which is a practice to mitigate responsibility and often abused. So senators, in my mind, now, some of them at least abuse the practice of excuses by saying, Well, I’m only doing what my constituents wanted me to do. Or worse, I was ignorant of the consequences of what I put forward, I’m still putting forward etc. Those excuses really don’t work in the case of the senators in question, and why they don’t work is actually interesting in and of itself. They’re there, they’re really two kinds of excuses going on here. One, I was just doing my job, I couldn’t do anything else. The other is, I didn’t know what the consequences of my actions were, or would come. First of all, there’s the claim here of truth, that’s not valid. So there’s lying going on, and that should probably stop the whole conversation. But it doesn’t when you then proceed to say, well, you know, I was ignorant. My sense here is that the excuse of ignorance is one that we should be spending a lot of attention on asking questions, not only about whether people know something, but about whether they should know in this context, that’s the responsibility of a senator to know. And it’s also the responsibility of a senator to pass on to constituents, truthful information. So across the board, the excuses don’t work.

Ray Briggs
Right. So um, During about the people who voted for the senators, as well, as we touched on this a little bit. So I mean, the people who voted for those senators might well not be benefiting from their failure to take COVID Seriously, but it seems like if they don’t resist, they’re still a kind of responsibility, even without the benefit condition you mentioned. Is that right?

Marion Smiley
Right. And I think it’s, again, a question of what their responsibility is to know. And also what the responsibility is to change things. And so with regard to the excuse of ignorance on the part of constituents on can there’s a certain threshold point early on, I don’t think they had a responsibility to know they weren’t given the information. Now they’re given the information they have a responsibility to know, no excuses. Do they have any power or control over what say, Trump does? I’m not sure. To the extent that constituents don’t have control over either what their senator or the President or anybody else does, you can’t really hold them responsible. So there’s a question here about what their power basis?

Josh Landy
Oh, this is a nice email that we received, actually, on this very topic. Jeff in Williamstown, Massachusetts writes, I think we’re responsible on a continuum with our responsibility as citizens of a rich nation, and participants in the global community, for poor exploited people around the world. Unfortunately, our capacity to change anything is extremely, extremely limited. We’re stuck living his moral failures. This should make us humble in all things. It sounds like it’s very much speaking to the point you just made about how much power we have much control you have. Yeah.

Marion Smiley
And humility is always a good thing. So that’s another great point. And I think it gestures to the question, Who should we be holding responsible? Again, I’m a pragmatist, I think who we should hold responsible has a great deal to do with who’s in the best position to remedy the problem. So moving forward, and I do favor talking about forward looking collective responsibility, we need to ask, who’s in the best position, say, to cut down on the kinds of exploitation that your reader brings up, when it comes to environmental disasters, we have to ask who’s in the best position to to prevent global warming. And from my perspective there, that’s where collective responsibility becomes absolutely necessary. And in particular, the state, because from my perspective, only the state has the power and the control to turn things around. You might say corporations, but they’re not going to do it. So you need a state that regulates corporations. So you need a particular kind of state there, I just don’t think individuals can do it on their own. And I’m a little concerned about blaming individuals, when they can’t do it on their own, unless they don’t at least try to establish a state that can do it for them.

Ray Briggs
So I want to ask about some of the framing of of talk about government’s earlier. So sometimes we’re tempted to blame people who voted for like a candidate with a bad policy. But in a two party system, there are a lot of cases where both parties have terrible policies, and there’s nobody viable, who supports the policy you want. So I think that like, not torturing people in offshore prisons is the policy I want. And I don’t trust either the Democrats or the Republicans to do that. How should I think about responsibility in that case? Whose responsibility is that?

Marion Smiley
Right, that’s wonderful. I think that your scenario is a really good one. With respect to the question of dirty hands. So here, I would say, well, switching metaphors from hands to nose, hold your nose and vote for the person who is best. I bring up dirty hands because I think it’s always important to keep in mind that even when you choose the lesser of two evils, you may have still helped bring about harm. And it’s one of the stickiest most difficult questions in moral philosophy to address consequentialist say, just bite the bullet. You chose the best out of two lousy options. deontologists those who care about moral integrity will say, Look, you did something wrong. Keep it in mind. But don’t be rate yourself.

Josh Landy
That’s I like that. That’s a nice sort of balanced answer. And it makes me wonder about other tricky cases, right. So here’s a case where you voted for the better candidate, but it still wasn’t ideal. What about a case where you do something that really doesn’t feel that bad? Here’s an example. You know, some studies have suggested that the greatest impact you can have as an individual on climate change is having one fewer child. But you know, most people feel, I don’t just say I’m just having a family, like, I’d like to have three children or four children or two children or something like that. Where’s the line between something that feels like a person’s individual choice, and not particularly, you know, they’re not trying to harm anybody else. And something that’s contributing to a pretty important to collective problem.

Marion Smiley
You know, that’s a really hard case. And where you draw the line is probably going to have a lot to do with the kind of values you place on personal projects versus collective projects. So at one end of the spectrum, if you’re a libertarian, you’re going to say your personal projects simply matter more than collective ones. But if you take collective responsibility seriously, then you’re going to have to strike the balancing act that you talked about. So with regards to having families, it strikes me that we should be very worried about ascriptions of collective responsibility for reasons that we haven’t talked about yet. And that is that you might actually be violating the freedom of individuals to choose. I’m not going to say in the private sphere, but maybe in personal life. Okay. So we haven’t gotten to this question yet of the limitations of collective responsibility. But I think one of its primary limitations is when it bumps up against the needs of violate individual freedom. So in this case, we take say the example of China, I think, collective responsibility that lets claims of a one child policy. were wrong, because it wasn’t the Collective’s business.

Josh Landy
Oh, gosh, let’s definitely follow up on that in the next segment of our show. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re asking, Are we all to blame with Marian Smiley from Brandeis University, author of “Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community.”

Ray Briggs
Can individuals fix big problems like racism or climate change? How do we hold our communities responsible? What would it take for society to stop causing so much harm?

Josh Landy
Individual action, collective solution—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues

The B-52s
Who’s to blame when the party gets out of hand?

Josh Landy
Who is to blame when the party gets out of hand? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. our guest is Marian Smiley from Brandeis University, and we’re asking, Are we all to blame?

Josh Landy
So Marion, we’ve been talking about large scale problems that are mostly caused by governments and corporations. But what would you want to tell our listeners who want to make a difference?

Marion Smiley
So I think there’s some questions that should be asked, and some measures that should be taken. One of the measures that needs to be taken now is the constitution or construction of collective entities. So we’ve been talking about collective entities that already exists, one of the major challenges I find in contemporary society, is how to build those collectives in the first place. And there, I would say the biggest difference that everyday citizens could make, is to actually build those collectors, but you need to convince them why. And here’s where I think all sorts of arguments that philosophers make about collective responsibility become very helpful, as in pointing to the fact that you may be the source of the problem, pointing to the fact that those who are suffering are part of your community, pointing to the fact that you have this power to do something, but only through the creation of communities. So there are some examples in the past where that’s worked. Most of them are movements. So you have collectives, like anti racist movements coalition’s you have feminist movements, the environmental movement itself, is the construction of a collective before the movement. We really didn’t talk about ourselves as a group of polluters, we now do so I would say that the best thing that you could do is actually start to think about yourselves collectively. And then So what your responsibility is within that particular collective.

Ray Briggs
So the collectives, you mentioned, were all formed for the purpose of addressing a political problem. And I’m noticing that the purpose is of governments and corporations or maybe different. So I guess governments are not for the purpose of addressing any particular political problem. But to sort of arrange people so that they can live in relative harmony over a long period of time, maybe that’s overly optimistic, maybe it’s up to have a monopoly on violence and corporations have the purpose of selling things and making money? Is it the purpose that that’s the problem, rather than the organization of the collective or is it both?

Marion Smiley
It’s probably a combination. So I might go further than you have in terms of talking about the purpose of state, if we’re talking about a state that’s democratic, it does have a purpose, and that’s inclusion. So if you start with that very basic purpose of inclusion, and talk about all the people who are now excluded, you have a state that has a responsibility to act collectively, to fight racism, to fight sexism and anti semitism and provide for religious freedom, and overcome poverty and so forth, as something that’s really, I would argue, written into the definition of a democratic states. So another thing that everyday people could do, and I think this is really important, is insist that the state be democratic. You know, there’s some kinds of states that are designed not to be democratic or not to be inclusive. And there, I think it’s much, much more difficult to argue for collective responsibility, or at least not an inclusive kinds of responsibility. I would also agree with you that corporations are a sticky matter, which is why I think that it should be the state’s responsibility to control corporations, rather than the corporation as a collective entity, trying to democratize itself, I just don’t think that’s going to work.

Josh Landy
Yeah, it’s hoped that we’d like to think it was possible, but it does sound like wishful thinking. I wonder if I could come back to something really interesting. You were saying before the break, you were talking about the limits of the notion of collective responsibility, and how, you know, maybe at a certain point, it bumps up against individual choice. And we really want to preserve that, I wanted to raise another sort of possible worry, for the notion of collective responsibility. A tweet popped up on my feed today from Shell Oil. And shell asked the survey question, what can you do to fix climate change? And there were four options. And, and I’m just a little offended by this, frankly, because there you have major oil companies who, for years, maybe decades, were questioning the science of climate change, what they actually happen to know, was was accurate. And now they it seems like they’re offloading the task of solving the problem on us the individual. So is there a point at which the notion of collective responsibility can be used as a kind of, I don’t know, a distraction from from the sort of the thing that’s really going on?

Marion Smiley
No, that’s wonderful. That’s a really terrific example, I’m gonna steal that one from you, um, feel free. They’re not, they’re not easy to come by those kinds of examples. So a distraction. What I think is a distraction here is a matter of MIS distributing responsibility, or dealing with shared responsibility in a way that is not justified. So I would push back, and I’d say, it’s your job. But underlying it all is this notion that even in collective responsibility, we need to distribute tasks, we need to ask who is going to actually do the work within the collective. And from my perspective, pushing things back on everyday citizens is not appropriate in this context. But I do think pushing things back on consumers, for example, of oil, or whatnots, might be a fair distribution of moral labor. But that’s a really, I mean, it’s a really interesting example, because it’s being used to distribute responsibility away from the responsible actor. And it assumes actually, that things really aren’t collective after all. So another pushback would be to say, you’re at the center, company XYZ of the collective of which I’m a part.

Ray Briggs
I have another kind of collective responsibility example that I want to ask you about, which was reparations. So do you think that the US or white people in the US are reparations to the descendants of people who are enslaved here? And if so, how exactly does the collective responsibility shake out?

Marion Smiley
Mm hmm. So Here’s where the distinction between backward and forward looking collective responsibility becomes very important. I am an adamant supporter of reparations. I’m not sure I would ever talk about white people as the group, which is responsible for a lot in reparations, I’m much more comfortable talking about the state as responsible for doing so. And there’s two reasons for that. One, I don’t like to zero in on group identity, as in whites as the basis for responsibility. I’d much rather talk about individuals and groups as contributing to harm. And second of all, I think you have to be practical here. And the only entity that could actually deal with reparations is the state. Now some people say, Well, you’re being too pragmatic or even utilitarian. But all one needs to do is recognize in this context, that the state was causally responsible from day one for racism. And so the state which has continued throughout time, so it’s a continuous actor, should undoubtedly be responsible for providing remedies. Now, that’s backward looking responsibility, which usually goes with reparations. But I would add to that something that might not sound like reparations, but which is a remedy. And that is given slavery and the history of racism through Jim Crow, to the beating up of black men today. I do think the entire community is responsible moving forward, for doing things like transferring funds, creating educational opportunities, job training, etc, for all African Americans, by virtue of the history of slavery, but also by virtue of what I was talking about before democratic inclusiveness. So to the extent we want to remain a collective of the kind we say we are, we need to work as a collective to make sure that kind of inclusion works.

Josh Landy
I really like this forward looking way of thinking about it, I also feel, yeah, it’s a nice example of a case where different strands of responsibility come together, right? There’s a way in which our state caused a harm. And if people can feel national pride, surely they should be able to feel national embarrassment, right. But there’s also the benefit, or there’s also the benefit part, even if you didn’t cause the injustice, you’re probably benefiting from it. And so and and certainly looking forward, things would be better if something were done. And I totally agree with you that the state is the is the is the right actor. So what should reparations look like? In fact,

Marion Smiley
I actually, I actually adhere to both a transfer of funds to all members of the African American community, akin to the Nazis, Germans transfer funds, to Jews around the world’s cancel the transfer of funds to Japanese Americans, who were interns, and so forth. But that’s backward looking. And that’s fine with me. I have no problem with backward looking responsibility. I don’t think it goes all the way. I don’t think it does enough. And that’s why I do think that more robust social policies moving forward, that give opportunities to taken away are of extreme relevance to your question. You know, what was taken away? Well, opportunities were taken away lands was taken away expressively, money was taken away, labor was taken away. So give back those things that were taken away, maybe not in the same form, but in the form that actually gives people opportunities, gives people lands or jobs or whatever, moving forward.

Josh Landy
On that note, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. Marion.

Marion Smiley
Thank you so much for talking. These are great questions. Thank you very much.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Marion Smiley, Professor of philosophy at Brandeis University, and author of “Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community: Accountability and Power from a Pragmatic Point of View.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m very convinced that we have to take collective responsibility for collective problems somehow, but figure figuring out exactly what to do. Like that’s hard. How can one person make a difference ever? But actually, I’ve found that there are old Philosophy Talk episodes that speak to this problem. Excellent. So for instance, in 2014, John and Ken interviewed Margaret Gilbert about collective actions, which are things that aren’t just done by you or me, but but somehow by us together. And I don’t think that having a theory of collective action is exactly enough to solve climate change all by itself. But maybe it’s a start.

Josh Landy
That’s a great thought. If you want to hear that episode or any of the 500 other episodes from the 16 years and counting Philosophy Talk, why not become a subscriber Philosophy Talk?

Ray Briggs
And if you have a conundrum that’s bedeviling you a personal dilemma in your life that might benefit from philosophical insight, send it to us at conundrums@philosophytalk.org, and maybe we can think through it together on the air,

Josh Landy
Now… complicit in everything responsible for nothing, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ghostbusters
Ian Shoales… During Donald Trump’s first Presidency, I came across the term “stochastic terrorism.” If a public figure says, for example, “It would be a shame if something happened to Ian Shoales,” and something happens to Ian Shoales, that is stochastic terrorism. Not provable cause and effect, but enough to cause a riot in Kenosha. And then pundits hit the chat shows to say Ian Shoales was kind of a loud mouth, he was asking for it, leading to White Supremacy truck parades in Texas. And that too is stochastic terrorism, a fancy name for rabble rousing, bear baiting, inciting a riot. Asking for trouble. Provoking. Hateful rhetoric. Hate speech. The wrong message. Dog whistles. Gaslighting. Blaming the victim. Victimizing the blamer. Twitter. Slowly but surely taking blame out of any occasion. Crime has just become another data point, like the consumer price index, and fat shaming. It’s like ownership and capitalism. Remember the housing bubble collapse, when we learned the mortgage debt had been chopped up into bits called tranches, so that every dollar owed was owned by a thousand different entities inside other entities. Who owes what? Who knows? Hell of a way to run a railroad in my opinion, but who’s to blame? Exactly. Everybody. Nobody. Crime has a thousand blames, from history, class, and race, to poor parenting, and our old friend, psychopathic narcissism. We went down moral rabbit holes that have nothing to do with ethics and more with where we bought the rabbit hole map. The Marxist map store? The neo liberal map store? The framer’s intentions map store? George Orwell wrote about the dangers of Nationalism, blind adherence to a group not necessarily a nation – church, family, football team, cult. Crimes became those of not belonging properly. Heresies. The original Church was very top down and Pope driven – making heresies easy to invent and manage. Then Protestants made every man a pope, and heresies abounded. In the 20th Century, heresies gave way to Communist schisms. Before you know it, Trotsky was dead, and various commissars erased from group photos. On the capitalist side, fascism and racism were denied yet thrived. Capitalism itself was blamed for various ills, but not enough to do anything. You can’t fetter a free market. Such things are not done! Would YOU like to be blamed for the collapse of civilization as we know it? I thought not. And so we come to that place where our own confusion about what we’ve become leads us to hate our perceived enemies, for imaginary crimes of which we ourselves are blameless. The right stand for making money, nothing else matters, nothing else makes sense, get out of the way, or you’re the one to blame, the left stand more for – no wonder we do crimes, look at the randomness of life, we’re all victims somewhere, with somebody else to blame, let’s all become counsellors! Or, more recently, Karens, whistleblowers, and judiciary committees. Today, it’s all about the 911 call, the cell phone video, the tainted evidence. Trials are a long way away. Crime and punishment are plot points in movies, seldom encountered in life. Sure, there’s prison, but that’s not really a punishment, more of an imposed life style. We are more a world of Ted Talks, therapy sessions, Power Point. The recent election had law and order as an issue, but the lawlessness seemed vague and old-fashioned: full of outside agitators, toppled monuments, and grafitti. We blame the Woke. We blame the Unwoke. Blame cancel culture. Blame Hillary. Blame Trump. Blame antifa and Black Lives Matter. Blame identity politics even though white supremacy is also an identity nicht wahr my little commissar? The truth is, comrade, you can never go far wrong if you blame yourself. Because, again you’re only partially to blame. Blame is tranched. Blame is now the long term debt of morality, like a student loan owed to a bankrupt bank. It’s a fallen world, we’re all sinners, spread the blame around. It’s only human. It’s only American. It’s like shorting on an investment. You can always make book on a heartfelt apology. And then you can write a book. Remember, before you reap the whirlwind, the whirlwind must reap itself. -That’s pretty good. I should write that down-. Also remember, blame is just the residue of sin. And whatever sins remain are already forgiven. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Ghostbusters
You know, it’s just occurred to me we really haven’t had a completely successful test of this equipment. I blame myself. So do I.