Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability
Saba Bazargan‐Forward
Abstract
Abstract This book develops a novel strategy for addressing individual accountability in the context of cooperatively committed harms. For example, how should we decide a single employee’s moral accountability in a corporation that commits egregious wrongs? What about a single soldier fighting in an unjust war? Or a single participant in a lynching? We need a way to make sense of individual moral accountability in instances such as these. This book makes the case for thinking that distinct aspects of human agency, normally wrapped up in a single person, can be “distributed” practically across different people. It is argued that we “distribute” agency routinely, by forming promises, by making requests, by issuing demands, and by undertaking shared action. The resulting division of agential labor makes possible a distinctive way in which one person can be accountable for the actions of another. The first half of this book, develops this form of interpersonal accountability—which it calls “authority-based accountability”—into an approach for handling problems of individual accountability in the context of cooperative activity. The second half applies this account to war ethics, criminal law, business ethics, and institutional racism. The book aims to demonstrate that what matters morally is not just our causal contributions to wrongful cooperative activity. In addition, the purposes we confer upon one another can inculpate us as well. The result is an account that can help us make sense of individual moral accountability in a bureaucratized world.