The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [94]
The Stench of War
Perhaps we can best understand the incentive to wash our hands from collective wrongs by thinking about war. Within the last few years, the US and the UK have been enmeshed together in two massive wars in the Middle East that many believe are unjust. I have played no role in either war—or so I’d like to think to assuage my pacifist commitments. I never “rode the tank” or “held a general’s rank,” as the narrator of “Sympathy” did.
I personally didn’t even vote for the guy who began the current ongoing wars—in fact, I protested against him, trying to be as much of a street fighting man as I could be. But even then I might remain complicit. While we as citizens do not directly get to choose whether the country goes to war, we may still be complicit in an unjust war if we support it either through words (or bumper stickers), deeds (such as voting), or money (via taxes). Complicity may even result from inactivity—from not sufficiently protesting or speaking out against the injustice.
Again we see exactly how controversial, and somewhat mysterious, complicity can be. We are not only assessing people for wrongs they barely control, but also for wrongs they merely allow to happen. As we can see with war, often this “allowance” is incredibly weak. Even if I did start protesting right now, it surely would not stop either war. I am not allowing the wars to happen—not by myself anyway. Stopping these wars requires just as much collective action as supporting them does. To give me any moral culpability (complicity must imply some culpability, even if much less than responsibility) seems rather harsh in this instance.
The Puzzling Nature of the Complicity Game
If assessing people negatively for complicity seems to be a stretch—especially as we get farther away from the actual wrongdoing—then why would any philosopher want to keep the concept? Though some would scrap it, there are two main reasons why we should keep it. First, it accurately describes something real within our moral discussions. Second, the concept may be necessary for urging people to stop their tiny roles in grave wrongdoings.
“Complicity” describes something real that lies between innocence and responsibility. There are situations where a person is involved in wrongdoing, but is neither directing it nor making it happen. We need a category for that type of moral activity. This need is obvious in aiding and abetting cases: when someone enables a crime, we must give them our moral disapproval.
A complicity skeptic could say that anyone who enables a crime is morally responsible for the enabling, which should not be confused with being complicit with the crime. That is a tricky philosophical question: were any of Keef ’s drug runners responsible simply for picking up the stuff? Or were they complicit with Keef ’s habit? Or both? Maybe the difference is so negligible that it is impossible to decide. Perhaps we’ll have better luck with collective complicity.
There does seem to be something real about complicity in these collective wrong cases as well. Returning to war, we all know who’s directly responsible because Lucifer tells us:
I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the Gods they made.
National leaders are responsible for war, not the people. If we want moral accountability, blame the kings, queens, presidents, or prime ministers. While it would be wrong to blame the people, who can hardly be responsible for what their leaders do, at the same time, no war effort could succeed without popular support.
The people surely need convincing, and the stanza points out that religion is often employed in a war-rousing deception (the song suggests that our leaders wage war in the names of “Gods they made”). The fact that they need to trick the citizens shows the necessity of gaining the citizens’ support. While the war effort does not depend on any one