“Complicity”

Committee: Miranda Fricker (chair), Linda Martín Alcoff, and Serene Khader

My dissertation begins by identifying that dominant theories of complicity in moral philosophy – which generally understand complicity to consist in some degree of inherited culpability, arising from knowing or intentional contributions to wrongs perpetrated primarily by others – are too restrictive to explain the variety of collective wrongs and structural injustices in which we identify and hold individuals responsible for complicity, including in ways that do not assume blameworthiness. I defend a novel reconceptualization of complicity as participation in collectively-perpetrated wrongs, including structural injustice. Maintaining that neither participatory intention nor knowledge (nor culpable ignorance) are necessary for complicity, I show that a broad notion of participation can account for a variety of behaviors from the most obviously causal contributions to subtler ways of reenacting harmful systems and insulating them from criticism. I further argue that complicity does not entail blameworthiness, and draw on feminist ideas of responsibility and literature on moral luck to propose a more nuanced approach to identifying the moral responsibilities generated by even non-culpable complicity.