Who Is To Blame?

I think about responsibility a lot. Though the relevant muscles have atrophied quite a bit I did start out as a philosophy student after all. In a time when it feels to me like whatever threadbare moral fiber our nation used to have has eroded to nothing I wonder how much any one of us is to blame.

The thing about moral responsibility is that it necessarily requires agency. If it's not possible for us to have acted differently than we did, we can't really be blamed for our actions. If someone else threw me off a cliff and I landed on a third person, any injury to them isn't my fault.

Agency becomes more complicated when we talk about assigning collective blame, though. It is undeniably the case that collectively, as a nation, we could and should be doing more than we are to prevent things like the loss of our civil rights or the wholesale extermination of a people in Gaza. But how should the blame for our failure be apportioned?

In On The Question of German Guilt, Karl Jaspers wrote that there "exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each as responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can do to prevent them, I too am guilty." He was writing about whether the German people are to blame for the Holocaust, but the principle obtains in any scenario of collective guilt. I don't think he's wrong about this. But the question then becomes what can we actually do? What should we consider to be the possibility space of action for an individual or a collective?

Statistics is something of a scourge for those of us who want to believe in agency and moral judgment. The classic statistical example is voting in a presidential election. Statistically, your vote doesn't matter (apologies for citing Nate Silver). If you take a utilitarian point of view spending the time you'd spend voting donating to charity or cleaning up your local park has significantly more impact than you vote for president. But of course if everyone took the statistically optimal approach your vote would become incredibly important.

Having been part of a number of social and political movements that ultimately led nowhere has unfortunately pushed my knee-jerk reflexes closer to a statistician's mindset. I've voted, protested, called, written letters, and so on to little or no tangible results for so long that I find it harder to convince myself that what I do will matter. I don't want to feel this way but I can't really help it. I find myself questioning the entire chain of action and motive present. Does tilting at a windmill - performing actions for the sake of doing whatever I can to prevent evil, even if I'm certain it will have no actual effect - absolve me of guilt? And if I'm cynically acting to absolve myself of guilt despite being certain it'll have no effect, aren't I just ultimately acting selfishly? Is this just another form of Pascal's wager?

I don't have a clear answer, and it seems obvious to me that thinking myself into a corner instead of doing anything certainly puts me in a position deserving of blame. So I try my best to show up when and how I can even if sometimes I feel like I'm doing out more for my own sake than anything else. I am certainly not doing whatever I can to prevent evil but I'm also not doing nothing. There's also so much goddamn evil going on that if I focus on any one thing by Jaspers' model I can still be blamed for a dozen others that I knew about but didn't have time to act on.

This is a lot of words spent to reckon with the fact that I feel like I should be doing more, but I also feel like there's nothing I can do that will actually matter. I think we're all to blame for how bad things are but I don't really have a model for how that blame should be assigned yet. I'm hoping that by revisiting ethics that I'll come to some internal accord about what I can and should be doing, but if today's quick dive into the literature has reminded me of anything it's that philosophy never really helped me find easy answers. When I set out to write this I was planning to write about Heidegger's Dasein and how much individual agency people have but I'm already 800 words in and I didn't even get there. Looks like this will take more than a single day's writing.