Chapter Five: Moral Responsibility and Complicity in Philosophical Scholarship (pp.

119-153)

From Being White, Being Good by Barbara Applebaum

Chapter Overview:

What is Applebaums goal in this chapter? Looking for a conception of moral responsibility that can ground
the claim that all white people are complicit in sustaining systemic injustice not because they have a direct
causal link to the harms of racial injustice, not because they have particular bad intentions or bad attitudes
against those who are not white, but by virtue of being a member of a social group that benefits from such
systemic injustices. (120, emphasis added)

Why bother? Unique feature of white complicity claim, i.e., that well-intentioned white people are
responsible for the perpetuation of systemic racism, (119) means that tracking white complicity is more
complicated than standard complicity cases where good intentions (or ignorance) are exculpatory, i.e.,
render an agent non-culpable.

Conclusion? Philosophical scholarship on complicity (and responsibility and culpable ignorance) provides a
conception which conceals white complicity. What we need instead is one which reveals it.

1. Complicity, Causality, Participation and Collective Harms

Surveys the literature on complicity and responsibility, especially collective responsibility, plus objections
(control/voluntariness, individualism, failure to grasp white people qua white people i.e. as members of a
social group), to ground the claim that traditional conceptions of responsibility are conceptually inadequate
to grasp white responsibility for racial injustice. (See Daras handout for more information.)

2. Ignorant Complicity
Surveys no less than eight (8!) contributions to the scholarship on relationship between ignorance and
responsibility, focused on questions: How can one be responsible for perpetrating a wrong that one does
not know is wrong? (113) What does it mean to say that an agent ought, morally, to have known better
and that, as such, their ignorance is no excuse from moral responsibility?

(i) When does being ignorant let someone off the hook? (Aristotle) Moral responsibility requires
voluntariness of action, i.e., the agent is the origin of the action, AND the agent must know that they are
doing wrong. If an agents is ignorant that their action involves wrongdoing, and their ignorance does not
result from the agents choices (i.e. is itself non-voluntary) then ignorance is exculpatory. Not knowing
absolves moral responsibility.

(ii) Being ignorant is not grounds for being let off the hook, i.e. some ignorances are culpable (Holly Smith):
Ignorance does not absolve agents of moral responsibility when (a) there is some benighting act (an initial,
chosen act which results in ignorance) and (b) when the unwittingly wrongful act is a consequence of (a)s
benighting act (and (c) that the connection between (a) and (b) is such that the agent had reason to believe
that choosing (a) would result in (b)). Example: doctor whose use of oxygen permanently damages a
premature infants sight, which they would have known had they chosen to read medical journals (rather
than choosing to do something else).

(iii) Neither Aristotle nor Smiths conception of culpable ignorance captures White Ignorance: (a) the
benighting act is absent*; (b) culpable ignorance ought to apply to even good whites who choose to
inform themselves; (c) involves group-based systemically-induced ignorance (not individualistic ignorance)
so needs conception of culpable ignorance able to capture this; (d) focus on blatant wrongfulness fails to
track moral wrongdoing involved in practices not only not seen as bad but valorised as morally good.

(iv) But thats just what we do round here, or how cultures can render agents unable to track moral
wrongdoing (Susan Wolf): the inability thesis, where ignorance is exculpatory inasmuch as it is the product
of socially sanctioned practices (including ones involving ignorance) such that agents couldnt have known
better. Classic examples: the slaveholders son, the ordinary Nazi.

(v) The possibility of dissent versus choosing not to know: affected ignorance (Michelle Moody Adams):
Adams thinks that the presence of individuals dissenting against culturally or socially sanctioned practices
shows that the inability thesis is false. Capitulation to such practices involves affected ignorance, where
agents (a) choose not to know about some morally significant issue, where (b) it would be easy to know but
for ones choice not to know. Such ignorances are culpable because knowing is available despite cultural
context, and because knowing preserves benefits, including preserving benefit of ignorance.

(vi) But isnt it actually pretty hard to choose to know in situations of institutional but not individual
wrongdoing? (Nigel Pleasants): Distinguishes between individual wrongdoing (where wrongdoing involves
breaking rules/practices/norms) and institutional wrongdoing (where wrongdoing involves following the
rules/practices/norms). Because institutional wrongdoing involves compliance with institutionally (culturally,
socially) encouraged, approved, mandated practices, it is not easy to obtain moral knowledge to critique or
reject wrongdoing. Why? Because it requires shifting understanding of what is morally relevant.

(vii) We cannot locate individual responsibility for oppression resulting from social practices, because they
represent abnormal moral contexts (Cheshire Calhoun): When wrongdoing results from social practices, it
is harder to perceive, even by those whose capacity for moral reasoning is otherwise functional. If agents are
unable to perceive something as morally significant, or as moral wrongdoing, because of widespread
ignorance and normalization, then they cannot be held individually responsible, even though there are good
(practical?) reasons for reproaching them. Results in a form of diminished responsibility, in virtue of
resulting from an abnormal moral context where interference is being run on their moral sensibilities.

(viii) When knowledge of inter-group wrongdoing is part of public or disciplinary discourses, then claiming
ignorance is not exculpatory (Tracy Isaacs): If men dont know some practice is morally significant, then
they cannot be held accountable (responsible?), but if theyve been told, and the telling is widespread within
their discipline or relevant domains of discourse, and they refuse the new information or feign ignorance,
then this is affected ignorance and they are responsible. There is no way they cannot have known that
sexist language has moral consequences.

Upshot, for Applebaum?

Some useful material here, but too wedded to notions of fault and blame that reduce
determinations of responsibility to wilfulness or choice.
White ignorance will sometimes involve affected ignorance, but given her analysis of WI in chapter
2, sometimes will not (because of lack of volition or control). Therefore affected ignorance as
account of culpable ignorance is not adequate to capture white complicity.
Need alternate conception of responsibility that captures way in which white ignorance is
inculpatory and non-absolving. Why? Because white ignorance is a characteristic of systemic
privilege that benefits white people whether or not they are conscious of it.

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 Moreover, even if they are conscious of and denounce those benefits, because white people are still
beneficiaries of white supremacy, they are still complicit with it. All whites qua whites are complicit
in racial injustice if all whites benefit from it.
Translation: Applebaum wants a conception of responsibility which allows us to say that:

If agent A benefits from state of affairs S in which wrongdoing W occurs, then A is morally
responsible for W, whether or not A knows that W has occurred and/or whether or not A
knows that they have benefited from S in which W occurred.

3. The All Are Complicit Problem

Discussion of claim that all are complicit/all are responsible/all are guilty via Jaspers, Arendt (are all
Germans complicit with/responsible for Nazi atrocities?) then Blum (are all white people complicit
with/responsible for racism/white supremacy?) plus critical challenges (Applebaum rejects Blums rejection
of the white complicity thesis). (See Daras handout for more information.)

4. Complicity in Philosophy and the Complicity of Philosophy

Philosophical scholarship on complicity is unhelpful in revealing or tracking white complicity: undue focus on
other peoples wrongdoing, focusing on causal participation, intended participation, or some volitional
tidbit or moment; erasure or under-appreciation of role of systemic ignorance and its role in the
production of systemic benefit or privilege and systemic or structural injustice (as opposed to terminal
wrongdoings); excessive focus on control/causality as a means of determining blame/fault (NB: I found this
summary quite confusing!).

Upshot? Existing philosophical theories of individual, group-based complicity and culpable ignorance would
not bring white ignorance to our attention and may even obscure the relationship between white complicity
and responsibility. (148)

Significantly, such approaches cannot expose for interrogation how denials of complicity can be supported
by white moral sensibilities or how whiteness can be reinscribed even when good intentions to challenge
racism are present. (148)

Mills, again: concepts orient us to the world, so conceptions of responsibility, complicity, and culpable
ignorance which fail to track white complicity end up actively obscuring or erasing it. For its contribution to
this, Philosophy (as a discipline) is also culpably complicit in the hiding of white complicity.

Therefore: we need to build a new conception of moral responsibility that can expose rather than conceal
white complicity. (149)

CRITICAL ISSUES & QUESTIONS

1. *Does Applebaum oversimplify the role of volition within Mills account of white ignorance (and by proxy,
white supremacy)? Mills is clear within The Racial Contract what Whitenessas a political system involving a
particular political standpointis, to some extent volitional, even if Applebaum is right that (a) contract is a
conceptual device (rhetorical trope) and (b) there is no single act of agreement, but many small acts over
time. Its more complex than she makes out.

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2. Does Applebaum elide failures of the traditional account of responsibility? Specifically, repeated
connection between control/causation models of responsibility and fault/blame arent these things
separable?

3. How does Applebaums claim to need a new conception of responsibility compare or connect with other
similar claims given within different literatures and for different but related reasons?

4. Does Applebaum need a finer grained account of ignorance and its objects than the one she provides?
Consider translation at end of section (2) above, wherein we might ask what precisely it is that the agent is
ignorant of, and what impact this has to our tracking the overall picture of white complicity?