Collective Responsibility for Unjust Wars
| Date | 01 June 2012 |
| Author | Endre Begby |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.2012.01432.x |
| Published date | 01 June 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Special Section – Politics and War: Ethics, Opinion and Logics |
Special Section – Politics and War: Ethics,
Opinion and Logicsponl_1432100..108
Collective Responsibility for Unjust Wars
Endre Begby
Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN), University of Oslo
This article argues against Anna Stilz’s recent attempt to solve the problem of citizens’ collective
responsibility in democratic states. I show that her solution could only apply to state actions that are
(in legal terminology) unjustified but excusable. Stilz’s marquee case – the 2003 invasion of Iraq –
does not, I will argue, fit this bill; nor, in all likelihood, does any other case in recorded history.
Thus, this article concludes, we may allow that Stilz’s argument offers a theoretically cogent case for
citizens’ task-responsibility in democratic states (given the right conditions); it just so happens that
few if any cases satisfy these conditions.
1. Collective responsibility in democratic legal states
Impositions of collective responsibility remain a prevalent feature of international
law and politics. For instance, Iraq was met with compensation demands totalling
US$52 billion following its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The ensuing sanctions
regime, which has been blamed for excess deaths running into the hundreds of
thousands, provides a poignant illustration of the normative problem underlying
impositions of collective responsibility. On the one hand, states nominally remain
the subjects of these sanctions. But on the other hand, the burdens of the sanctions
are routinely transferred to the state’s citizens, who will rarely have had any
significant say in forming the state’s specific policies. This appears to clash with the
moral conviction that ordinary citizens are, for the most part, innocent of their
states’ actions, and that persons can be held liable only for actions for which they
are also responsible. For this reason, philosopher Michael Walzer (1992, p. 297)
argues that international legal practice treats citizenship as ‘a common destiny’. In
a similarly dramatic turn of phrase, jurist and legal scholar Antonio Cassese (2005,
pp. 6, 8) argued that collective responsibility displays the extent to which interna-
tional law remains ‘a primitive legal system’, and indeed, the extent to which the
international community remains a ‘primitive society’.
One can certainly attempt to offer broadly prudential or consequentialist rationales
for this practice: after all, someone must suffer the economic burdens of unjust
wars, and it ought not be the citizens of the victim state. Only in rare instances
could we hope to extract the requisite funds from the pockets of the politicians and
generals directly responsible for the war. Therefore, the burden naturally passes on
to the offending state’s treasury. But this, for all practical purposes, is to pass the
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POLITICS: 2012 VOL 32(2), 100–108
© 2012 The Author.Politics © 2012 Political Studies Association
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