Excerpt of "Democratic Responsibility"

N O R A H A N AG A N

Democratic Responsibility the politics of many hands in america

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data x

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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contents

Preface

ix

Introduction 1 One

Resisting the Machine: Thoreau on Responsibility and Individual Autonomy

31

Two

Sharing Responsibility: Jane Addams’s Social Ethics

57

t h r e e Choosing Justice over Order: Martin Luther King Jr. 89

on Responsibility, Extremism, and Democratic Politics four

Transforming Silence: Audre Lorde on Responsibility, 119 Self-Expression, and Bearing Witness to One Another

five

Democratic Responsibility in the Twenty-First Century

151

Notes 181 Bibliography 213 Index 225

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introduct ion The Problem of Many Hands in American Life

In 2008 the editorial board of the Economist described the series of events leading to government bailouts of major American financial ­institutions as “genuinely democratic” in nature.1 By using the term democratic, the editorial board sought to convey that the financial meltdown that almost brought the American economy to its knees was not caused entirely by the actions of a few “villainous” elites. Rather, the crisis resulted from a series of poor decisions made by numerous individuals, including “hundreds of thousands of homeowners who bit off a little more mortgage than they could chew.”2 In concluding that the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression was caused by the combined interactions of multiple individuals and institutions, the Economist’s editorial board was surely correct.3 At the same time, this conclusion does not offer a great deal of moral clarity. Efforts to hold agents accountable for events like the Great Recession are subject to what Dennis Thompson has called “the problem of many hands.”4 When everybody is responsible for an outcome, it often seems as though nobody is truly accountable. If all Americans are responsible for the Great Recession, then there is no reason for anybody to feel particularly ashamed of their behavior or to put an end to predatory lending practices, which continue to bury people who take out loans to buy cars or attend school in mountains of debt.

There is also no reason why anybody should feel especially compelled to address the long-term consequences of imprudent lending practices.

Some of the workers who lost their jobs during the economic crisis 1

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2 Democratic Responsibility

have been out of a job for so long that they no longer seem attractive to potential employers, and many people who lost their homes are now struggling to pay soaring rents. Who exactly is responsible for addressing these problems?

Holding all participants accountable for harms caused by processes in which they participate also risks obscuring different degrees of culpability. Numerous actors participated in the chain of events that triggered the financial crisis, including borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages, bankers who made risky loans that they subsequently sold to unsuspecting investors, financial agents who lied about borrower qualifications on loan applications, and regulators who failed to supervise dicey financial transactions. Both the political leaders who deregulated the banking industry and the voters who put them into office also helped create a climate that encouraged excessive risk. Describing the subprime mortgage crisis as a shared responsibility ignores the reality that some of these actions were more blameworthy than others, as well as the fact that some people suffered more than others. Though the Economist is correct that both homeowners and bankers share responsibility for the subprime mortgage crises, this fact frequently functions to obscure the extent to which the former have suffered far more in the long run than the latter. It likewise obscures the reality that African Americans and people with less education have suffered dis­ proportionately from long-term unemployment in the wake of the financial crises.5 Moreover, not all of the behaviors that contributed to the crisis were blameworthy. People who lied on mortgage applications or who knowingly rated residential mortgage-backed securities as safe investments even though they were filled with risky loans are surely deserving of blame. At the same time, expecting homeowners to understand the risks of adjustable rate mortgages is unrealistic given that many of the people selling the mortgages failed to understand the risks. In a nation that exalts homeownership and directly incentivizes it, it is difficult to be too hard on individuals for striving to achieve one of the most important components of the “American dream” and for assuming that the banks’ approval of their mortgage applications meant that they would be able to meet their financial commitments.

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Introduction 3

When discussing problems such as the financial crisis that are the result of many hands, it may be tempting to abandon the concept of responsibility altogether. This temptation should be resisted. To be sure, there is little point in trying to identify and either punish or shame all of the people whose poor decisions contributed to the financial crisis. While criminal or particularly reckless behavior is certainly deserving of punishment, assessing the extent to which millions of mortgage brokers, homeowners, developers, lenders, and investment bankers behaved in a blameworthy manner and determining an appropriate punishment would be a massive and futile undertaking. Going forward, however, a much greater sense of responsibility on the part of citizens is needed to address the lingering effects of the Great Recession and to ensure that dodgy behaviors do not once again bring the economy to the brink of collapse.

From structural racism to climate change to declining opportunities for social mobility, many of the most pressing challenges facing twenty-first-century societies are caused by the combined interactions of many individuals. It is hard to imagine how these problems will be addressed without a much greater sense of responsibility on the part of citizens. Furthermore, in the absence of a sense of shared responsibility, it is all too easy to hold victims of unjust processes accountable for their own misfortunes. Those who view food stamp recipients as idle free riders often fail to recognize that their own actions sustain an economic system that does not provide employment, let alone a living wage, to everybody who is willing to work. When it comes to outcomes that result from many hands, responsibility is a concept that is difficult to apply but impossible to live without.

The existence of problems that are caused by the combined interactions of multiple individuals and institutions is not, however, exclusive to an age of globalization and hyperconnectivity. Indeed, American reformers and activists like Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King Jr., and Audre Lorde have long held their fellow citizens accountable for harms caused by many hands, including chattel slavery, sweatshop labor, and white supremacy.6 Like the Economist’s editorial board, these reformers regarded many hands problems as democratic in the sense that they are not perpetuated entirely by elites.

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4 Democratic Responsibility

They also, however, encourage us to consider other connections between democracy and many hands problems. First, they demonstrate that we cannot live up to our democratic ideals unless we take some responsibility for harms in which we are embedded. Second, they suggest that democratic ideals require us to resolve many hands problems in a particular manner; democrats cannot sanction solutions devised entirely by elites.

Finally, these reformers call attention to the ways in which democracy intensifies many hands problems. Democratic institutions dramatically increase the number of people who are implicated in political decisions. Meanwhile, faith in majority opinion and affection for majoritarian institutions can make it difficult for democratic citizens to recognize the extent to which they are implicated in harm. The fact that democrats cannot sanction paternalistic endeavors in which elites solve problems on others’ behalf also complicates efforts to address many hands problems. It is unfair to expect innocent victims of unjust ­processes—such as the construction worker who lost her job during the financial crisis or the residents of impoverished island nations whose survival is threatened by global warming—to take responsibility for problems that they did not cause. And yet adult victims of injustice must take responsibility for reforming the processes that harmed them in order to avoid paternalistic outcomes that are inconsistent with democratic ideals.

Drawing on lessons learned from close readings of Thoreau, ­Addams, King, and Lorde, I articulate a distinctly democratic approach to responsibility. The advantages of my approach are partly rhetorical. Given widespread support for democratic values, a theory of shared responsibility that emphasizes democratic ideals is particularly capable of persuading citizens to accept responsibility for problems that are caused by the combined interactions of multiple individuals and institutions. A democratic approach to shared responsibility is also needed to confront aspects of the many hands problem that are unique to democratic societies. Last, even though the democratic requirement that shared problems must be addressed in an inclusive manner often complicates efforts to address harms caused by many hands, in the long run, inclusive solutions to many hands problems are more likely to be effective.

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Introduction 5

In addition to informing contemporary debates about responsibility, this book seeks to intervene in ongoing conversations about the meaning of democracy. Commitment to democratic principles, I argue, entails more than voting, obeying the law, and expressing a general concern for the common good. It also entails coming to see ourselves as having a responsibility to address harms, such as climate change, that we neither intended nor created. This in turn means that we must agitate for structural change and listen to people whose life experiences are different from our own.

This introductory chapter begins with an overview of the philosophic literature on the problem of many hands in which I both highlight important contributions made by philosophers like Larry May, Iris Marion Young, and Jade Schiff and lament the lack of scholarly attention paid to the ways in which democratic ideals might inform our response to problems caused by many hands. After offering an overview of the relationship between democracy and responsibility, I explain why historical American thinkers offer particular insight into this relationship. In the final two sections, I provide an overview of the theory of democratic responsibility that I defend in the final chapter of this study and briefly discuss how this theory might apply to the financial crisis.

Philosophy and the Problem of Many Hands

The liability model of responsibility—in which individuals are held ­accountable only for outcomes that are caused by blameworthy individual behavior—is the dominant approach to responsibility in Western philosophy and culture.7 Marion Smiley finds some version of this ­approach to responsibility at work in thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, ­Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant. Aristotle and Augustine, for example, assumed the existence of external standards established by either a political community or an omnipotent God that can be used to determine blameworthiness. Kant, on the other hand, believed that individuals should be capable of independently differentiating between moral and immoral actions by applying universal moral laws that are recognizable to all rational creatures.8 All of these t­ hinkers,

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6 Democratic Responsibility

and indeed most thinkers in the Western political tradition, adhered to some form of the liability model.9 When confronted with the horrors wrought by the Nazi regime, however, a number of mid-twentieth-century philosophers concluded that an alternative to the liability model was needed. To be sure, there were many people—such as those who were convicted at the Nuremberg trials—who deliberately committed acts of genocide and who therefore could be held responsible for Nazi atrocities according to the liability model. At the same time, the liability model let the millions of people who remained silent while government officials rounded up and killed their fellow citizens off the hook because they did not physically harm anyone. It likewise absolved soldiers and government officials not directly involved in the Final Solution of any responsibility for the crimes committed by the regime they helped sustain. The idea that citizens who remained silent as their government committed genocide bore no responsibility for Nazi war crimes was troubling to philosophers who sought to encourage individuals to actively resist regimes that failed to respect basic human rights. It also troubled those who believed that the post-1945 German government should make reparations to Holocaust survivors.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness—written in the early forties in Nazi occupied France while Sartre was participating in the Resistance—points toward an alternative to the liability model. According to Sartre, we are responsible for the social processes and in­ stitutions in which we participate. “If I am mobilized in a war,” he explained, “this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it.”10 It is worth noting that Sartre departed from the liability model by separating responsibility and causality. Sartre held citizens who were drafted into the army responsible not because their actions were a direct cause of violence but rather because they had chosen to support the war effort. Assuming responsibility for our choices, Sartre explained, is essential for human dignity and freedom. Given the context in which he was writing, it is likely that Sartre also hoped that individuals who held themselves responsible for the institutions and processes in which they participated might refuse to be involved in the Nazi war effort.

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Introduction 7

In response to postwar debates about whether ordinary German citizens bore responsibility for the Holocaust, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt also called for a new kind of responsibility.

Her ­alternative—which she referred to as “political responsibility”—­ focused on communal membership rather than individual choice. Political responsibility, as explained by Arendt, differs from both moral and legal responsibility in that it does not result from blameworthy behavior but rather from membership in a political community. As members of political communities, individuals are responsible for harms that have been committed by individuals acting on the community’s behalf.11 Unlike moral or legal responsibility, political responsibility is not accompanied by guilt, shame, or punishment, as all of these things are associated with blameworthy behavior. Rather, political responsibility is accompanied by an obligation to remedy harms that have been committed in one’s name.

More recent efforts to develop an alternative to the liability model are less concerned with state-sponsored evils and more concerned with injustices perpetuated by civil society, such as global sweatshop labor and hate crimes against minority groups. These efforts are nevertheless significantly indebted to Sartre, Arendt, and other mid-twentieth-­ century thinkers who sought to hold citizens accountable for complicity in Nazi crimes.

Larry May’s influential account of shared responsibility draws on the idea—espoused by Sartre and other existentialists—that the ability to take responsibility for our choices and actions is what makes human freedom and dignity possible.12 May, however, insists that individuals are responsible not only for their own choices but also for the impact that their words and actions have on others in their community. For example, an individual who espouses racist sentiments should not be held blameless if those who hear her words commit violent crimes against members of the race she has depicted as “inferior” and “prone to criminality.”13 In situations where the combined interactions of multiple individuals result in harm, May concludes, responsibility must be shared. Rather than being evenly distributed among all participants, however, responsibility should be distributed based on the degree of control particular agents exerted over the outcome and the extent to

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8 Democratic Responsibility

which they engaged in blameworthy behavior. Lesser degrees of responsibility may be accompanied by shame, regret, or outrage, as opposed to guilt; however, even these lesser degrees of responsibility should be sufficient to motivate individuals to address political and social harms in which they are implicated.14 As Iris Marion Young points out, one of the limitations of May’s approach is that it cannot easily be applied to structural injustices.15 Problems such as inequalities in the public school system, she observes, are shared responsibilities in the sense that they are caused by the combined interactions of multiple individuals. They differ, however, from the outcomes that May describes in that the behaviors that contribute to them are not necessarily blameworthy. When affluent parents shun neighborhoods that have poor or overcrowded public schools, they make it even harder for those neighborhoods to have a sufficient tax base to meet the costs of a decent educational system. They also drive up housing prices in areas with effective public schools. As Young sees it, however, blaming parents for wanting to provide a decent education to their children is unjustified.16 In order to deal with circumstances in which May’s model is inadequate, Young proposes a “social connection model of responsibility,” which says, “individuals bear responsibility for structural in­ justices because they contribute to the processes that produce unjust outcomes.”17 This model is influenced by Arendt’s account of political responsibility. While Young embraces Arendt’s effort to distinguish guilt and responsibility, she has reservations about Arendt’s particular linking of responsibility and political membership. For Arendt, political responsibility is tied to membership in a particular political community; German citizens bore responsibility for the Holocaust because it was committed by people acting on their behalf. Arendt’s understanding of political responsibility thus cannot be applied to harmful processes—like global sweatshop labor—that transcend national borders. Young therefore concludes that responsibility for injustice should not be linked to national membership but rather should stem from “belonging together with others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which we seek benefits and aim to realize projects.”18

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Introduction 9

Young’s approach to responsibility is also different from Arendt’s in that it is “forward looking.” By this, Young means that the “point is not to compensate for the past,” as Arendt wants Germans to do for the Holocaust.19 When it comes to thinking about responsibility for structural injustice, Young explains, past behavior matters only so far as it can help us understand how we are connected to ongoing harms, and why we therefore have an obligation to work together to transform the processes that have caused those harms.20 Young’s social structural model speaks to twenty-first century concerns about how political actors should respond to a wide variety of ongoing harms that are caused by complex processes, over which individuals have little control. According to Jade Schiff, however, Young offers little guidance as to how recognition of complicity in the suf­ fering of others might become “a practically meaningful part of our everyday experience.”21 Drawing on Sartre’s discussion of how “bad faith” led to anti-Semitism in Europe and Arendt’s account of the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann who argued that he couldn’t be blamed for his role in the Holocaust because he had been following orders, Schiff observes that individuals all too often fail to acknowledge the ways in which their own behaviors make them complicit in the suffering of others.22 When confronted with the reality that consumer goods are produced in sweatshops overseas, for example, many consumers often respond that their lack of control over working conditions in other countries absolves them of responsibility. Alternately, they might conclude that workers in desperately poor countries are lucky to have any kind of a job. The solution to the problem of many hands, Schiff explains, is not simply to challenge conventional understandings of responsibility. We must instead learn to cultivate “responsiveness,” or the ability to recognize the ways in which our actions implicate us in the suffering of others.23 Taken together, the conversation about responsibility that was inspired by the horrors wrought by the Nazi regime offers important insights into what a compelling solution to the many hands problem must entail. First, it must acknowledge that responsibility—at least in certain situations—can be shared. Second, it must address the reality that harmful outcomes are not always caused entirely by blameworthy

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10 Democratic Responsibility

behavior, and that it is possible to be responsible without having been blameworthy. Third, it must be forward-looking, in that it encourages political actors to take responsibility for ongoing problems. Finally, it must offer some guidance as to how individuals might recognize and respond to shared responsibilities.

Missing from most contemporary efforts to offer an alternative to the liability model, however, are sustained reflections on the relationship between democracy and responsibility.24 In her reconstruction of liberal conceptions of freedom, political philosopher Sharon Krause does suggest that ideals embraced by many democrats require us to take responsibility for harms to which we have unintentionally contributed. Because Krause’s primary concern is freedom, however, she does not offer a fully fleshed out theory of responsibility.25 In general, there has been little discussion about the relationship between democracy and shared responsibility.26 This omission is not particularly surprising given that most contemporary discussions of the problem of many hands were written in response to the ascendance of fascism in twentieth-century Europe. For those of us who live in societies that are governed by democratic institutions, the relationship between these institutions and shared responsibility is worth probing.

Democracy and Responsibility

Perhaps the most obvious reason for examining the relationship between democracy and the problem of many hands is that democratic institutions significantly increase the number of people who are implicated in political decisions. As Eric Beerholm has recently observed, “complicity is the professional hazard of democratic citizenship.”27 To be sure, democratic regimes are not the only regimes in which citizens bear some responsibility for political outcomes. It seems appropriate to hold ordinary Germans at least partly responsible for the Holocaust, given that there were actions that they could have taken—such as ­hiding Jewish neighbors or protesting deportations—that would have made it harder for the Nazi regime to commit genocide. However, it makes less sense to hold ordinary Germans responsible for the failed invasion of the Soviet Union, given that there was little that ordinary

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