Contemporary conceptions and practices regarding complicity have led to the surprising emergence of citizens who seek rather than flee complicity. The purpose of this is to gain standing to challenge controversial state practices. As in the recent Hobby Lobby decision, such attempts to demonstrate complicity are not motivated by a desire to take ownership over state actions, but to justify institutional reforms or individual opt-outs that would not be legitimized absent such a finding of complicity. This article highlights the danger (...) posed by the proliferation of claims of this sort and works to unpack and critique the logic of such efforts to demonstrate complicity. Such claims rely upon implied political meanings of complicity, which affirm a strong connection between complicity, standing, and sovereignty. These political meanings of complicity are embedded in familiar conceptions of liberal democratic citizenship, but upon examination prove to be in tension with core liberal principles. By bringing to the surface the connection between complicity, standing, and sovereignty, this logic may be reformulated in such a way as to contribute to healthier modes of democratic participation. (shrink)

In Complicity and the Rwandan Genocide ( 2010b ), Larry May argues that complicity can be the basis for criminal liability if two conditions are met: First, the person’s actions or inactions must contribute to the harm in question, and secondly, the person must know that his actions or inactions risk contributing to this harm. May also states that the threshold for guilt for criminal liability is higher than for moral responsibility. I agree with this latter claim, but I think (...) that it casts doubt on May’s account of criminal liability, particular in so-called performance cases in which low-level participants merely fail to help. This is because it is far from clear that passive non-helpers are morally responsible for their participation in widespread harms. Situationism purports to show that passive bystanders typically are not morally responsible for their role in such harms, because they were behaving reasonably subject to the constraints they faced. In this paper, I assess this claim, and defend it on the basis of O. W. Holmes’ standard of the reasonable person as a guide to judging criminal complicity. Finally, I provide a situationist account of the Rwandan genocide, which focuses on the systemic causes and primary perpetrators of the genocide, rather than low-level participants. (shrink)