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<p>What does it mean to be complicit, particularly in diffuse collective wrongs like environmental damage or structural racism, and what responsibilities are entailed by complicity? Moral philosophers have typically understood complicity to consist in some degree of inherited culpability, arising from knowing contributions to wrongs inflicted by others; some trace complicity to individuals’ intentions to join in wrongful collective activity. But these theories fail to explain many plausible cases of complicity, particularly in diffuse wrongs and structural injustices. If we are going to use this concept fruitfully across a range of moral contexts, then we need to understand complicity differently. This article demonstrates that four unnecessary assumptions render existing theories of complicity unable to explain the range of cases they ought to, focusing particularly on complicity in structural injustice. I motivate a unified reconceptualization that&#xa0;can&#xa0;support efforts to identify and respond to complicity across contexts. The Participation View (PV) asserts that complicity is participation in collectively perpetrated wrongs, and that complicity does not entail culpability, although one is certainly answerable for it.</p>

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Rethinking Complicity: The Participation View

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月3日

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  • Eliana Luxemburg-Peck

摘要

What does it mean to be complicit, particularly in diffuse collective wrongs like environmental damage or structural racism, and what responsibilities are entailed by complicity? Moral philosophers have typically understood complicity to consist in some degree of inherited culpability, arising from knowing contributions to wrongs inflicted by others; some trace complicity to individuals’ intentions to join in wrongful collective activity. But these theories fail to explain many plausible cases of complicity, particularly in diffuse wrongs and structural injustices. If we are going to use this concept fruitfully across a range of moral contexts, then we need to understand complicity differently. This article demonstrates that four unnecessary assumptions render existing theories of complicity unable to explain the range of cases they ought to, focusing particularly on complicity in structural injustice. I motivate a unified reconceptualization that can support efforts to identify and respond to complicity across contexts. The Participation View (PV) asserts that complicity is participation in collectively perpetrated wrongs, and that complicity does not entail culpability, although one is certainly answerable for it.