In the face of the bloodshed in Baghdad just now, some people claim that all the responsibility and therefore all the blame for these deaths lies on the shoulders of the Coalition, since, so they say, those who initiate a war are responsible for all the consequences of it. (Or perhaps for all the foreseeable consequences - though there are serious problems about what counts as foreseeable.) This view raises some interesting questions about responsibility. When some sectarian group sends a bomber to blow up Iraqi men waiting in line to try to get a job, or Iraqi children hoping to be given a sweet, or Iraqi mourners at the funeral of someone they loved, whom should we blame for this? Whom should we hold responsible?
There seem to be three main answers to this question. Firstly, we might think that those who are responsible, and hence those who are to blame, are the people who actually carry out these terrible actions - the terrorists themselves. Or secondly, we might think, as do the people I referred to at the beginning of this post, that those responsible are those who initiated the war which continues in Iraq. Or thirdly, we might take the view that responsibility isn't an exclusive matter - it can be shared between various contributors to the actions in question, and the fact that one person or group has responsibility doesn't rule out another individual or group from sharing that responsibility. On this view, responsibility, and hence blame, isn't a zero-sum game: if I have more of it, it doesn't follow that you must have less of it; my being to blame doesn't preclude your being to blame as well.
The main thing I want to say about these three proposed answers is that each of them seems to raise desperately difficult problems. In fact, none of them is at all satisfactory, and it isn't clear which line we should adopt. And this matters, since responsibility and blame are absolutely central to the way we do our ethics and our politics - an enormous amount of political debate rests on judgements about who is to blame for key events.
The first view, which says that the terrorists who carry out these murderous acts are the ones who are responsible and to blame, has its attractions, since it does at least treat terrorists as autonomous agents, rather than as mere puppets at the mercy of the various forces that act on them. The trouble with this view is that it leaves no room for contextual influences, or for the idea of provocation. And we don't have to buy into all the anodyne exculpations of some root-causes talk in order to accept that sometimes circumstances make a difference to the degree of responsibility a person carries for her misdeeds. We think that the person who has been hideously abused or oppressed, or appallingly impoverished or indoctrinated, doesn't carry the same weight of responsibility for at least some kinds of wrongdoing as does the person whose life has been safe and comfortable from the start.
Just how much these considerations count is a matter for debate, and there are some kinds of actions where we may well feel that no amount of provocation or indoctrination can erase the burden of responsibility and blame - torturing the innocent, and even the guilty, is one such example. But in general, the picture of the totally autonomous agent, fully responsible and solely to blame for all his misdeeds, is too simplified and schematic to capture the complexity of the moral world we live in.
What about the second view, that the person or group which initiates conflict is responsible for all the consequences, especially the bad ones, which flow from that action? Again, this view has some advantages. It's very simple, for a start, and solves many of our complicated moral problems about attributing responsibility for horrific acts in war at a stroke. And furthermore, for some people it's a very satisfying view. Those whose hostility to the intervention in Iraq stems from a broader hostility to what they regard as Western imperialism are sometimes made uncomfortable by the evident brutality and barbarity of the terrorists who share that hostility, and in the name of it are so ready to murder their fellow-countrymen, women and children. With this principle in hand - that those who initiate a war are responsible for all its bad consequences - that discomfort can be allayed in a rather gratifying way. Irrespective of these dubious attractions, however, there are serious problems with endorsing this principle.
Let's consider what things will be like, in moral terms, if the principle is correct. For a start, Hitler and the rest of the Nazis will be entirely responsible for the Allied saturation bombing of Dresden and other German cities. Neither Churchill nor Bomber Harris will carry any responsibility for that, and in fact, any atrocities committed by the Allies can be laid at the door of the Nazis, since they alone will bear the blame. Hitler et al will also be responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; or if we think that that was part of a rather different war, then it will turn out that the Japanese High Command was responsible. Either way, no American (or Briton or Russian) will bear any blame for anything that happened in World War II.
Moving to another war, we'll find that all the killings since 1948 of Palestinians by Israelis will be the responsibility of the five Arab states which went to war with Israel as soon as it declared independence. As initiators of the war which continues to this day, they are solely to blame for all its consequences. For those who think that the conflict in Iraq is really due to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, then those five Arab states are responsible for that too. And come to think of it, for those who think that radical Islamist atrocities in the West really stem from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then those five Arab states are to blame for those atrocities too - and hence, of course, for any hostility to Islam caused by them.
Really the possibilities are endless, and that's because causal chains are endless. If we view the initiators of a war as the only blameworthy agents in the context of that war, then not only do we deny responsibility to all the other participants (thus reducing them to moral puppets), we also place a limitless burden of responsibility on the initiators. Indeed this principle gives carte blanche to all the other parties to a military conflict to behave as atrociously as they please, since all the blame will be attributable to the initiators. Really, for sheer crass oversimplified moral crudity, the view that all the responsibility for atrocities in war can be attributed to the initiators is way ahead of the field.
The third view, that responsibility and blame aren't a zero-sum game, seems at first sight markedly more promising. Here the thought is that those who offer provocation may be to blame, alongside the actual agents who commit horrific acts. The oppressors, the abusers, the war-makers can be blamed for the terrible consequences of their acts without our having to deny that the terrorists are also to blame. This view certainly allows for moral complexity. The problem it produces, though, is that the participants in responsibility and blame very rapidly multiply, once we abandon any zero-sum thoughts. Certainly the initiators of a war can be seen as bearing responsibility for any terrible outcomes, along with the agents who actually perform the atrocities. But so can those who provoked the initiators, and also those who cheer on the terrorists, and those who fund them, and those who make excuses for them, and those who declare that we should support the terrorists because they're our enemy's enemy, and hence to some extent our friends. A great many people will make some causal contribution or other to the atrocities, since causal chains ramify so fast; and there seems no reason to exclude any of them from sharing in the responsibility, once we allow that it can be shared by more than the direct agents, and especially once we allow that it can be shared by people (such as the initiators of the war) who may have neither wanted nor aimed at the horrific outcomes. We'll rapidly get to the stage where it's easy to say that we're all responsible for the horrors, which is of course tantamount to saying that no-one is really responsible.
Perhaps the right way to think about the question of responsibility is to distinguish between those who are primarily responsible, and those who bear some real, but lesser, secondary, responsibility. Can we say anything in general about who bears the primary responsibility for terrorist acts? As a matter of fact we might not be able to do this: the moral state of play might be too complex for that, so that who is primarily responsible will vary from case to case, depending on the individual features of the circumstances. But if there is a general candidate for bearing the primary responsibility in the case of crimes against humanity, which is what terrorist acts aimed deliberately and directly at civilians are, then it seems likely that that candidate is the person who aims at, who intends, who deliberately arranges, that the atrocity be carried out. That is, the terrorist agent herself, and those who plan and organize her terrorist actions. Whatever secondary responsibility is borne by her sympathizers, or her indoctrinators, or her oppressors, she herself, along with those who organize her murders, is the primary locus of blame - unless, of course, we wish to profoundly patronize her and diminish her humanity by supposing that she is really just the creature of the forces that act on her, and that the deployers of those forces are the only ones who can be held responsible for what they do - the only ones, that is, who are truly human.
In Iraq, as elsewhere, those who restrict the responsibility and blame to the terrorists alone fail to acknowledge the moral relevance of other, though secondary, contributors. On the other hand those who, focusing on the fact that blame isn't a zero-sum calculation, distribute it even-handedly between terrorist forces and the Coalition, evade the issue of primary responsibility. Both of these views in their different ways make too few moral distinctions to adequately deal with the desperate realities of the terrorist carnage in Iraq. (Eve Garrard)