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Holly Lawford-Smith
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Not In Their Name

NEW TOPICS IN APPLIED PHILOSOPHY

Series Editor: Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
This series presents works of original research on practical issues that are not
yet well covered by philosophy. The aim is not only to present work that meets
high philosophical standards while being informed by a good understanding of
relevant empirical matters, but also to open up new areas for philosophical
exploration. The series will demonstrate the value and interest of practical issues
for philosophy and vice versa.
The Inheritance of Wealth

Justice, Equality, and the Right to Bequeath
Daniel Halliday
Not In Their Name

Are Citizens Culpable For Their States’ Actions?
Holly Lawford-Smith
Not In Their Name

Are Citizens Culpable For Their
States’ Actions?
Holly Lawford-Smith
1
3
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© Holly Lawford-Smith 2019
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First Edition published in 2019
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1. Introduction 1
2. What is The State? 7
I. The Options 8
II. Citizen-Inclusive States 16
III. Membership: Location, Legal Status, Relations, Causal
Contribution 19
IV. Membership: Normative Interaction, Duty Transferral 24
V. States as the Formal Apparatus of Governance 29
3. Is the Citizen-Inclusive State an Agent? 31
I. Strong Accounts of Collective Agency 34
II. Moderate Accounts of Collective Agency 41
III. Weak Accounts of Collective Agency 56
IV. Collective Agency and Collective Moral Agency 63
V. Citizen-Inclusive States as Agents: The Upshot 66
4. Is the Citizen-Exclusive State an Agent? 69
I. The Structure of the Citizen-Exclusive State 69
II. From Decision to Action (Intention and Implementation) 76
III. Subordinates as Extended Minds 80
IV. Is the Citizen-Exclusive State an Agent? 81
V. Is the Citizen-Exclusive State a Moral Agent? 87
VI. Relationship between the Citizen-Exclusive State and
Its Citizens 95
5. Citizens’ Culpability and Responsibility for States’ Actions 96
Part One: Culpability 96
I.Citizens’ Culpability for States’ Actions 98
II.A Thought Experiment Three Ways 99
III.Responsibility for Weak Shared Agency 103
IV. One-Off and Episodic Agency, or, Culpability for
Joint Action 109
V. Citizens are not Culpable for States’ Actions 113
vi 
Part Two: Responsibility 116

VI. Commissioning, Coercion, Complicity 116
VII. Association, Benefiting, Privilege, Capacity 126
VIII. A Note on Comparative Demandingness 136
IX. Citizen Responsibility in Summary 137
6. Governmental Culpability 139
I. Collective Punishment: Some Clarifications 142
II. The Challenge: Group and Member Culpability 145
III. Corporations, Armies, Governments 149
IV. Collective Culpability and Distributed Punishment 154
V. Getting Members off the Hook 160
VI. Double-Counting Responsibility 167
7. Conclusion 172
References 175
Index 183
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a Marie Curie grant from the

European Commission (2014–16). I worked on this book while
being employed at the University of Sheffield and the University of
Melbourne, and spending time on research leave at the Australian
National University and the University of Edinburgh. I am grateful to
all of those universities for their support, and to their faculty and graduate
student communities for their generous engagement with my work.
The person I owe the greatest intellectual debt to for this work is
Stephanie Collins at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne,
with whom I have worked on several papers on topics related to this
book, and discussions with whom have really pushed me and helped
me to develop and clarify my thoughts on this topic.
An earlier version of this book won the GRIPP 2018 Annual
Montreal Political Theory Manuscript Award, and I owe huge thanks
to the GRIPP community for a fantastically helpful manuscript work-
shop in May 2018 at McGill University. I am particularly grateful to
the commentators Amandine Catala, Pablo Gilabert, Victor Muniz-
Fraticelli, Catherine Lu, Daniel Weinstock, and Peter Dietsch; and to
Richard Healey and Angie Pepper for discussion.
I was lucky to be able to visit the Philosophy Department at the
Australian National University for a few months in every year that
I worked on this project, and benefited immensely from discussions
with the faculty and graduate students there. I am especially grateful
to Christian Barry for always managing to find ways to help me spend
time back in Australia, during the period that I was living in the UK.
For extraordinarily detailed and constructive comments on the full
manuscript, I am grateful to Ken Shockley. These comments made a
big difference to the final manuscript, and I count myself very lucky
that he was willing to be so generous with his time.
viii 
For discussion on the various chapters in this book I am grateful to

audiences at the Australian National University, the University of
Otago, Waikato University, the University of Auckland, Princeton
University, the University of Aarhus, the University of Bristol, the
University of Nottingham, and the University of Edinburgh; and in
particular to Chris Bennett, Jens-Christian Bjerring, David Bloch,
Lars Christie, Stephanie Collins, Niall Connolly, Ryan Cox, Luara
Ferracioli, Sarah Hannan, Johannes Himmelreich, Rachel Jolly, James
Jordan, R.J. Leland, Kieran Oberman, Jennifer Page, Mike Robillard,
Wolfgang Schwarz, Daniel Viehoff, and Nancy Yang.
Finally, a big thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for, and the
commissioning editor of, Oxford University Press for all their help
and support.
1
Introduction
There are many actions that we attribute, at least colloquially, to

states. For example, between 2008 and 2015 Norway donated
$1 billion to protect the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Brazil, in turn,
reduced deforestation in the Amazon by more than 75 per cent
(Reuters 2015). Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan have
together taken in more than five million refugees of the Syrian Civil
War; Turkey nearly three million, and other countries two million
between them (UNHCR 2017). These examples are positive, but there
are also negative examples. For example, the failure of COP15, the
2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, to reach a binding
global agreement on climate action was attributed to stonewalling by
China, India, and Sudan (Lynas 2009; Rapp et al. 2010). The Iraq
War, regarded by many at the time and many more since as unjust,
was initially waged by a coalition of states lead by the United States,
including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland. Australia
routinely violates the human rights of asylum seekers, and stands in
violation of international law, by turning back boats to prevent
asylum seekers from making claims, and by sending asylum seekers
to Nauru and Manus Island for indefinite detention and eventual
offshore resettlement. More generally, states can harm both other
states and their own populations. Between states there is and has been
war and colonization; within states historically there has been geno-
cide, oppression of minority groups, human rights violations, and the
insidious forms of harm that come from institutionalised racism,
misogyny, heterosexism, ableism, and so on, and from the ideology
of conservative politics.
    
But how should we think about culpability for these kinds of

actions, or more generally, about responsibility for them? When
states act, who exactly is implicated in those actions, and who has
the ability to steer them in a different direction? To answer this
question, several steps are necessary. First, what is ‘the state’? Assum-
ing that this thing performs the kinds of actions we tend to attribute
to states, can we nonetheless make the stronger claim that it is an
agent? At least in the case of individuals, the reason we tend to think
there is responsibility for actions is because agency stands behind
those actions. In fact, when it doesn’t, we tend to deny that there is
responsibility, for example when agency is compromised by psych-
osis, or sleepwalking, or coercion, or having been drugged, and so on.
If there is no agency behind what we think of as states’ actions, where
does this leave culpability for states’ actions?
In Chapter 2, I present a range of different models of the state,
arguing that two are particularly plausible and will be useful for our
purposes. The first model includes citizens as part of the state
(or something like citizens; I refine this in the subsequent discussion,
although for ease of reference I use ‘citizens’ as a placeholder through-
out the book), while the second model excludes citizens. In Chapters
3 and 4, I take each of these models up in turn, working through
whether either can be vindicated as an agent by a range of theories of
collective agency. I argue that on the citizen-inclusive model dis-
cussed in Chapter 3, the state is not an agent, and so that model
cannot get us culpability for what we think of as the state’s actions.
Still, this is not the end of the story for citizens’ responsibility for
what their states do, because there are multiple paths to responsibility
and culpability is only one. In Chapter 5, I explore some of these
alternative pathways. In Chapter 6, I return to the citizen-exclusive
model discussed in Chapter 4, and focus on the question of what the
culpability of a group like that might mean for its members. This kind
of group is interesting and challenging because it is different in
important ways from the kinds of groups on which theorists of
collective obligation and collective responsibility have focused. The
preferred citizen-exclusive model of the state defended in Chapter 4
 
features both hierarchical relations between members, and nested

agency, which exists when a collective agent has collective agents
as its parts (and so on, all the way down to individual human
agents). I defend a particular account of the distribution of culpability
between members of these kinds of groups. Chapter 6 is concerned
with the ‘internal’ question of what the collective culpability of a state
might mean for members of a state.
I should acknowledge that I am coming at this set of questions
from the perspective of an interest in social metaphysics. While there
is a substantial volume of work on the possibility of collective belief,
collective intention, and collective action, and some work on collect-
ive agency, collective obligation, and collective responsibility, there is
little work on how these concepts apply to large-scale groups and
groups that don’t have an egalitarian internal structure. To be clear,
that doesn’t mean there isn’t a theory about the responsibility of
corporations or states for their actions, it just means that that theory
doesn’t usually connect up with the work in social metaphysics. This
is a project aimed at bridging that gap. When it is argued that citizens
of a state should pay for the historic injustices committed by their
state, for example, to what extent (if at all) can this conclusion be
justified by thinking about the citizens as part-authors of the state’s
actions, or members of the same collective agent that has persisted
over time since the authoring of the injustices, or in some other way?
If it can’t, then is there any other way to reach the conclusion that
citizens should pay, or are we simply wronging citizens by making
them pay?
In ‘Collectives’ and Individuals’ Obligations: A Parity Argument’,
Stephanie Collins and I included states among the groups that we
thought could be agents in their own right:
We will assume that the formal, long-lasting groups that structure our social,
political and economic world—such as states, firms, churches and inter-
national organisations—bear group agency. To motivate this, consider that
groups like states and firms are highly organised, with a range of intricately
related roles. They have complex decision procedures, which systematically
produce a range of decisions and a distribution of yet more roles for enacting
    
those decisions. The result of these processes within the collective is a set
of decisions, a set of individual roles for enacting those decisions and a
distribution of the roles among individuals: results produced not by one
member—or by the conjunction of each member’s independent processing—
but by the members taken together as a system. The actions of members
partly constitute actions of the group when the members act within and
because of their role.
(Collins and Lawford-Smith 2016a: 42 [my emphasis])
Instead of simply taking that for granted, Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are

dedicated to figuring out whether states deserve their place among
those other groups; indeed whether any such ‘formal, long-lasting
groups’ deserve their place among the small-scale egalitarian groups
that are so often the subjects of analysis in social metaphysics.
This book focuses in particular on democratic states. That’s not
because they are the easy case; rather the opposite, it’s because they
are the hard case. In a dictatorship or a monarchy, so long as the
dictator or monarch is an agent (which they usually will be) we
simply identify the state with that person and can be confident that
it is an agent. Actions by the dictator are the actions of the state, but
that doesn’t implicate anyone further than the dictator, and culpabil-
ity will usually rest with the dictator alone—although others may
yet be complicit in what he or she does. Democracies are harder
because there is obviously an explanatory relationship between what
the citizenry votes for, and even what polling reveals about what the
citizenry wants, and what the state does. But this connection is not
determinate; other factors are also relevant. Direct democracies are
different from representative democracies, and ideal democracies
(which don’t exist) are different from actual (non-ideal) democracies.
One conclusion of the book will be that there is no actual democracy
for which the state is a collective agent that includes the citizens as
members. That might be a surprising conclusion for some.
Before we begin, a note about the politics of what I am arguing
for here. The title of the book is ‘Not In Their Name’. I am arguing
throughout that when the democratic state acts, it does not act in the
citizenry’s name, at least not if that means that the citizenry is any
 
part of what acts. Citizens are rarely, if ever, implicated in their states’
actions. This may appear to have the unpalatable implication of
letting citizens off the hook for holding their states to account. After
all, if what her state does has nothing much to do with Jane citizen,
why should she go to any trouble to get it to do differently? But if all
Jane and Joe citizens thought this way, wouldn’t that just lead to
widespread political apathy and the state running even further amok?
And isn’t it true that all Jane and Joe citizens together have control
over what the state does, because what the state does depends at least
in part on what they do together? I will explain what is wrong with
moving from Jane alone to all the Janes and Joes together in Chapters
3 and 4. Here I just want to make the point that citizens’ not being
culpable for the state’s actions doesn’t preclude their taking respon-
sibility for the state’s actions; indeed this is the focus of the discussion
in Chapter 5.
Some might wonder why we should be concerned with culpability,
so long as there’s responsibility of some form or other. Culpability is
important because it is the strongest justification of responsibility,
and produces the most demanding obligations. Those who are culp-
able in producing injustice are the ‘ideal’ bearers of obligations to
repair the situation in order to create justice. They cannot easily
appeal to the costliness of fulfilling those obligations in order to
escape fulfilling them. When they are unable or unwilling to bear
those obligations, only then do we look to ‘non-ideal’ bearers of
obligations, such as those who have benefited from the injustice, or
stand in relevant associative relationships with its victims, or who
have a significant capacity to assist its victims. But such bearers can
more easily appeal to costliness in order to escape their obligations. If
citizens together are culpable for what their states do then we don’t
have a difficult job to do in justifying how costs can be passed on to
citizens when states must rectify injustices they have perpetrated, and
if citizens together know they’re culpable for what their states do they
are likely to be more engaged in the exercise of collective oversight, so
that such injustices will be minimized. In short, citizens’ culpability
for states’ unjust actions will be a good thing, if we can get it.
    
If we can’t get citizens’ culpability for states’ unjust actions, as I will

argue is the case, we are left with two choices. Either we say something
false—that citizens are culpable—in the hope of it bringing good
political outcomes, or we don’t, and tackle head-on how to get the
political outcomes we want. What would democracy have to be like in
order for citizens to be part of the agency of the state, and therefore
potentially culpable for what it does? If our current democracies are
too flawed to incorporate citizens within the agency of their states, we
should be talking about ways to strengthen democracies so that they
do. I am all for working towards a future in which the state acts ‘in our
name’, a future in which claims about what ‘we, the people’ want are
truly reflective of the citizenry. The sooner we admit that we’re not
there yet, the sooner we can start working on how to get there.
2
What is The State?
To figure out who is culpable for what states do (and in some

cases, fail to do), and to understand how states might be brought to
do differently—both in terms of how they treat their citizens and in
the context of international agreements—we have to first figure out
what the state is. In this chapter, I will present a range of different
characterizations of the state, drawn from across political science,
international relations, political philosophy, and international law.
I will present the motivation for focusing on one of these models
in particular.
Two questions need to be kept separate in this discussion. The first
is how to draw the boundary of the group, assuming that the state is a
group and not merely an individual (I will present one model that
denies this). The second is how to determine membership. We may
be able to give the necessary and sufficient conditions for a group’s
being a state without therefore revealing what it would take for an
individual to be a member of the state. The conditions for member-
ship may be quite separate from the conditions for statehood.
The first question is conceptually prior, so I will address it first, but
the second question is important for when it comes to thinking about
culpability, so I will return to it. There will be a reflective equilibrium
between our conception of the state and our conception of collective
agency (the first of which is the focus here, and the second of which is
the focus of Chapter 3). To be charitable to the question of whether
the state is a collective agent we need to be open about both the
conception of the state and the conception of collective agency, and
work for an intuitive balance between the two.
    
Further complicating matters, it is likely that there are multiple

conceptions of the state which suit the multiple purposes we might
have for theorizing about it. I will present a range of different
characterizations of the state, making a distinction between those
that make the state a unified agent and those that fragment the agency
of the state. By ‘unified’ I mean that there is overarching coordination
such that the members of the state are not stuck in cooperation
problems with one another, and by ‘fragmented’ I mean that there
is no such overarching coordination. I will give the motivation for
focusing on a citizen-inclusive characterization, and then return to
give an account of membership in the state on that characterization.
Finally, I will say which of the remaining characterizations is the most
plausible should it not be possible to defend a citizen-inclusive char-
acterization as being a unified agent.
I. The Options
Let us start with what I call the ‘exclusive’ end of the spectrum of
characterizations of the state, on which there are fewer rather than
greater numbers of individual agents who make up the state. Fiona
McGillivray and Alastair Smith (2000), and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
(2002), have independently argued that we should conceive of inter-
national relations in terms of political leaders, which is to say, single
individuals like a president or prime minister.1 Bueno de Mesquita
argues that this characterization has greater predictive power than
alternative characterizations of the state, that states’ actions can be
better predicted by looking at what is in the political survival interests
of the leader than by what is in the interests of those the leaders are
meant to be governing (2002: 7).
1
I take the claim that international relations is relations between individual political
leaders to be close enough to the claim that states are political leaders (international
relations is relations between states, and relations between states are relations between
political leaders), but for those who find this an unwarranted reading of those authors, it
can simply be understood that I borrow from their characterization of international
relations and apply it to the characterization of states.
    ? 
If ‘Australia’ just is Malcolm Turnbull,2 then there are not even

prima facie issues of agency and moral responsibility to resolve.
Turnbull is an individual human agent, and presuming he is not a
sociopath, also a moral agent. That means what is in his political
survival interest as an individual (here what would keep him in the
role of prime minister of Australia) can stand in tension with what is
in the interest of all the individual political leaders of the world taken
as a group. For example, it can be in Turnbull’s interest to fail to
accomplish the emissions reductions Australia pledged at COP21 and
ratified in the Paris Agreement, while it is in the group of political
leaders’ interest that Turnbull accomplish or even surpass the emis-
sions reductions that were pledged.
Furthermore, if making a low emissions reduction pledge at
COP21 was an intentional action of Turnbull’s (rather than, say, an
accident, an unintended side effect of another intentional action, or
an action for which Turnbull has an excuse—say a mistake in com-
munication), and making a low pledge caused (or will cause) harm
(injustice, wrong), then he can be held responsible for this. Under-
standing states as political leaders makes the agency question easy.
The question, of course, is whether we’re satisfied with an under-
standing of the state that excludes everyone else involved in political
action from that agency. What about those in Turnbull’s cabinet?
What about all the public servants? What about ordinary citizens,
whose interests such leaders are apparently charged with pursuing?
Alternative models of the state bring these people in, but at the cost of
making the agency question much more complicated.
A second alternative keeps the state unified, but extends inclusion
to the national government, acting as an individual agent would. This
is known as the Unitary Actor model (see e.g. Allison 1969; 1971).
Here the individual members of government make up a collective
agent, which is able to act rationally in the pursuit of its goals. On this
model it is not Turnbull who decides not to meet Australia’s COP21
pledge, it is the Australian government. The Australian government
2
Turnbull was Prime Minister of Australia as at July 2018.
    
includes all individuals who have roles in the parliament (the Queen,
represented by the Governor General, 150 members of parliament,
and 76 senators); the executive (the prime minister, the cabinet, and
eighteen government departments administered by the senior minis-
ters who are members of cabinet); or the judiciary (seven justices in
the High Court; a great many more in the subsidiary Federal Courts,
Family Courts, and Federal Circuit Court). On this characterization
of the state, we have a collective agent made up of hundreds of
individuals, all with differential status and influence, acting together.
A third alternative similarly keeps the state unified, but extends
inclusion even further. This is a definition of the state given in
international law, in particular the definition given in the Montevideo
Convention (1933), according to which:
The state as a person of international law should possess the following

qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) govern-
ment; and d) the capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
(International Conference of American States 1933)3
Staying with the example of Australia, (c) gives us all the hundreds of
individuals mentioned above in the second alternative, the Unitary
Actor model; but rather than making this collective of individuals the
state, it makes the state the thing that has a government, a territory, a
population, and the capacity to enter relations with other states. We
can make sense of Australia in this way, as having a defined territory
(namely the large continent to the north-west of New Zealand),
a permanent population (namely Australian citizens and permanent
residents), a government (namely the members of the executive,
legislature, and judiciary as outlined above), and finally, the capacity
to enter into relations with other states (for example, the capacity to
ratify the COP21 Paris Agreement and be one of many states together
bound by international law to that agreement).
There is a further question about how to understand the condi-
tions. Are they conjunctive, such that when all four hold, we have a
3
See also the discussion in Collins and Lawford-Smith (2016b: 158).
    ? 
state? If that is the case, more needs to be said about the relation
between each element. For example, we cannot just take any old territory
(e.g. the north and south islands of New Zealand) together with any old
government (e.g. the government of Singapore), and any old population
(e.g. the population of Samoa). But is it sufficient that (a) the population
and (c) the government be located within (b) the territory, and either (c)
the government, or (c) together with (a) the population, be what
enable (d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states?
That is to say, if the population of Australia and the government of
Australia are both located within the perimeter of the Australian
continent, and it is the government of Australia or the government
together with the population that give Australia the capacity to enter
relations with other states, is that enough to make Australia a state?
Reflecting on the case of statelessness caused by ocean-level rise
helps to adjudicate on this matter (see e.g. Alexander and Simon
2014). If the Maldives are submerged as ocean levels rise due to global
warming, then the people of the Maldives will be taken in by other
states as refugees, and their territory will be lost under the ocean. Still,
we can imagine the government reconvening elsewhere, perhaps in
order to advocate for the refugee claims of the Maldivian people.
All four elements are separable; the Maldives is a state only as long as
(a)–(d) come together (lacking any one is sufficient to statelessness),
and therefore the conjunctive view is sufficient.
The alternative would be to look for an entity that itself has each of
these four elements, for example a sovereign that has control over a
population and a territory, operates through a government, and is
(thereby) able to enter into relations with other states. On this
interpretation, in order to be a state the sovereign must meet these
conditions, but that does not make the state equivalent to those
conditions or some subset of them. The primary exercise of agency
might still be attributable to the sovereign, rather than to the govern-
ment through which the sovereign acts, or to the people. This is
plausible in the case of authoritarian sovereigns, but it also equates
the sovereign with the permanent population in the case of democ-
racies, because the sovereign is the people as a whole governing
    
themselves, and this sovereign has control over a permanent popula-

tion, namely, itself (this is democratic self-governance).
Notice that, more broadly, if we are interested in democracies then
the sovereign view and the conjunctive view amount to the same
thing when it comes to agency. On the former, the sovereign is
the population taken as a whole, so exercises of agency are attribut-
able to the population as a whole (i.e. are inclusive of the citizenry);
on the latter the relation between the population and the government
is that the government is the apparatus through which the population
exercises its will, so exercises of agency are still attributable to the
population as a whole. (For non-democracies, the conjunctive inter-
pretation is inclusive of the citizenry and the sovereign interpretation
is exclusive, and this may better reflect our intuitions about the moral
responsibility of the population for the actions of the state in those
cases. This will be important for the discussion in Section II.)
A fourth alternative which keeps the state unified is also inclusive
of citizens, and comes from classical political theory. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1792) famously defended the idea of the whole society as
sovereign, distinct from a government charged with dealing with
applications of the law within the society. On this model, again, the
citizens are included within the state, in fact it is the citizens taken
together that are the most important element of the state, its sover-
eign. The government acts independently, so as to preserve both the
generality and legitimacy of the sovereign. Because this model agrees
with the Montevideo Convention model in its central commitments
(i.e. society as sovereign, plus government), I will simply treat these
two models together in what follows.
It is worth noting that some version of this model is widespread in
classical political theory, where citizens’ collective self-governance is
at the centre of the picture. Robert Wolff, writing on democracy as a
solution to the conflict between authority and autonomy, proposed that
Democracy attempts a natural extension of the duty of autonomy to the

realm of collective action. Just as the truly responsible man [—person—]
gives laws to himself, and thereby binds himself to what he conceives to
be right, so a society of responsible men [—people—] can collectively bind
themselves to laws collectively made, and thereby bind themselves to what
    ? 
they have together judged to be right. The government of a democratic state

is then, strictly speaking, no more than a servant of the people as a whole,
charged with the execution of laws which have been commonly agreed upon.
(Wolff 1970: Sec. II.1, 15)
Wolff thinks that autonomy always trumps authority. Just as a

person should always decide for herself what she will do, so too
should the people of a democratic state decide for themselves what
they will do. The government can execute those decisions on the
people’s behalf. On this model, the government does not lead, is not
autonomous from, and certainly does not exercise authority over,
the people.
There are advantages to using one of the characterisations of the
state given so far. The first is that all the accounts given so far present
the state as a unified (rather than fragmented) entity, and so vindicate
our ordinary understanding of the state as the sole agent of domestic
political affairs, and one among other such agents in international
political affairs. The next two characterisations I will give revise that
understanding, fragmenting the state into multiple competing loci of
agency. The second advantage belongs to two accounts in particular
(namely, the account from international law, and the account from
classical political theory), and it is that they include citizens within the
understanding of the state. This gives us a shot at vindicating both
ordinary intuitions about democratic responsibility for states’ actions,
and ordinary practice on which citizens pay taxes that fund, in part,
their states’ liabilities, and on which citizens take flak abroad for the
political situation in their home countries (i.e. are held to account by
others for their country’s politics). Still, it is interesting if we can’t
vindicate a model with one or more of these advantages, because it
shows that a revision of our ordinary understanding of democratic
responsibility is necessary. (Note also that part of the instinct to hold
citizens responsible for what their states do might be vindicated by
the kind of non-culpable responsibility that I will discuss in
Chapter 5). I will briefly present two fragmenting accounts before
moving on to consider whether any of these characterizations of the
state is even a prima facie candidate for being a collective agent (or, as
in the case of the next two accounts, as multiple collective agents).
    
There are two further models: Organisational Processes, and Bur-

eaucratic Politics (Allison 1969). Both of these models fragment the
agency of the state, denying that there is a unified state and suggesting
that instead there are multiple agents themselves engaged in coord-
ination and cooperation problems, the outcomes of which are what
we think of as the state’s actions. The Organisational Processes model
sees agency as located in governmental organisations (departments),
for example in Australia the Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade, the Department of Defence, or the Department of Immigra-
tion and Border Protection. In Australia there are some eighteen
departments (and that is to leave aside the much greater number of
government agencies). What is crucial to the Organisational Pro-
cesses model is that there is no leader with overarching power to
coordinate these organisations, nor a formal procedure for resolving
disagreement between them (if there were, we might think there was a
unified agent after all).
Similarly, the Bureaucratic Politics model fragments the agency of
the state, but in this case not between organisations but between key
individual political figures in the administration, the results of whose
bargainings we think of as the actions of the state. For example, there
is ongoing bargaining between the Minister for Foreign Affairs (in
Australia, Julie Bishop), the Minister for Health (in Australia, Greg
Hunt), the Minister for Jobs & Innovation (in Australia, Michaelia
Cash), and so on.4 (Note that if we are to accept either of these latter
two models, the question will be whether government departments,
and key political figures, are collective agents. For government
departments, the question will have to be worked through in the
same way as I go on to do in Chapter 3. For key political figures,
the answer is straightforward, and the same as it was for the unified
model on which states are political leaders: they are agents because
the individual is an agent, and they are moral agents so long as the
individual is not a sociopath).
4
Correct as of July 2018.
    ? 
Of course, these are not the only plausible ways of thinking about
what the state is. Some think that culpability can be determined on
the basis of causation of, or causal contribution to, harm (injustice,
wrong). If we were interested only in the causes of actions commonly
attributed to ‘the state’ (or a particular state, like ‘Australia’), that
might give us reason to look at a much more diffuse group of people.
Both actions and omissions can be causes, even if people tend to have
different moral intuitions about the status of each as causes (see also
discussion in Henne et al. 2016; Livengood and Rose 2016). Citizens
have causal influence together on which party ends up in govern-
ment, even if no citizen has that kind of influence alone. The public
service has causal influence on what the government does, both as a
whole and by way of individual departments, even if no employee of
the public service has that kind of influence alone. Government itself
has causal influence on both domestic and international policy, and
the prime minister (or chancellor, president, head of state, etc.) has
perhaps the greatest influence of all.
But these are not the only people with influence. Within a given
country, there is also the domestic media, whose influence is often
significant and whose content can vary a lot depending on whether it
is privately or publicly funded. There are political lobby groups, such
as coal miners’ unions, and there are the representatives of particular
companies and corporations. The latter will tend to have greater
influence on elections in places where elections are privately funded
and without spending caps, and less influence on elections in places
where elections are taxpayer funded and spending is capped, but they
may still have influence between elections if, for example, they can
make credible threats of moving business abroad. Similarly, there can
be influence on what states do from outside the country, through
their relationships with other states, international and multinational
companies and corporations, international lobby groups and social
movements, and the foreign press.
While there is plausibly causal influence in all of these cases, there
are two reasons to resist using a model of ‘the state’ which unifies all
of these causal phenomena. The first reason is that doing so would
    
put serious pressure on the idea of the (at least partial) sovereignty of
states. Australia has some influence over New Zealand and vice versa;
but we still want to be able to say that New Zealand is New Zealand
and Australia is Australia, rather than being forced to say that they
are both part of the agency of the other. The second reason is that
approaches based on causation or causal contribution alone are
insufficient to understanding the collective agency of states. Many
things can be causes: a strong wind can cause a pile of papers to
scatter; a volcanic eruption can cause the ground for miles around to
be covered with pumice; a big group of people driving cars and flying
can cause temperature increase; an angry protest can cause the
disruption of a meeting; a couple can cause a delicious meal to be
cooked; I can cause my co-author to have an expensive glass of wine
placed in front of her in celebration of our paper being accepted. Only
some of these things have agency. The list of people and groups with
influence over actions commonly attributed to ‘the state’ is too
disparate to count as an agent.
We might still be interested in the moral status of the influence
each individual or group has over the state, but this would be handled
better by taking them one at a time and thinking about their relation
to the state. For example, ‘the media’ is highly disparate, so we might
want to separate different media companies and outlets, and then
think about the relation they stand in to the state. If they have
encouraged or facilitated the state’s wrongdoing, for example, they
may be morally (or legally) complicit in wrongdoing. I will set this
understanding of causal influence alone aside as a candidate for
understanding the state as a collective agent, and focus on the models
outlined earlier in this section.
II. Citizen-Inclusive States

There is something appealing about all of these characterisations of
the state. But as I have said already, two in particular come with a
high payoff in terms of vindicating ordinary intuitions and practices.
Those are the two citizen-inclusive models: the one that follows the
    ? 
Montevideo Convention, and the one that follows Rousseau, which

I have suggested we can treat as one. There are four considerations
that speak in favour of this model. Citizens pay taxes, both on their
incomes and via goods and services tax (GST) on their purchases, and
these taxes are partly used to fund the liabilities of their countries. For
example, if Australia were to decide to add a package of financial
reparations to supplement its 2008 apology to Aboriginal people for
historical crimes, this package would be paid for by the combined
taxes of many different Australians. This funding is what makes it
possible for Australia to make reparations.5 If Australians together
pay for the mistakes their countries make, isn’t that some sort of
evidence that they are—or they are at least part of—the state? The
citizen-inclusive models make sense of this. Citizens should pay,
because they are part of (or even all of ) the agent that did the wrongs
that need to be paid for.
Secondly, when Australia implements a policy that violates its
obligations in international law, there are at least some Australians
who experience feelings of guilt or shame in response. Prominent
theories of the social practice of blaming maintain that it is appro-
priate for the subject of blame to experience feelings of guilt and
shame, at least when she accepts the legitimacy of the judgement
being made by those who blame her (Fricker 2016). Australians may
feel that outsiders blame them for particular domestic or inter-
national policies (e.g. ‘Europeans despise us for our immigration
policy’), they may even feel that they are blaming themselves (e.g.
‘we should have elected a different government’), or that one sub-
group among them is blaming another (e.g. ‘we on the left should
have done more to stop the ascendancy of the right’). For this to
occur, there must be (or Australians must believe there to be) a source
of blame. They must see themselves (either each individual alone, or
some subset of individuals together) as the subjects of that blame, and
they must accept the legitimacy of the judgement that they are
5
Strictly speaking these liabilities could also be funded through international
borrowing.
    
blameworthy, that is, find it to be appropriate that they are blamed.

But why should Australians feel guilt or shame about what Australia
does if they’re not somehow responsible for what Australia does? And
what more direct way to be responsible than to be, or to be a part of,
what Australia is?
Thirdly, there is a widespread domestic phenomenon of ‘not in
our name’ protests, in which citizens take to the streets in order to
distance themselves from their government’s particular policies.
Examples include Jewish people in Tel Aviv (and, in fact, New
York) taking to the streets in July 2014 to protest the Israeli war in
Gaza, and British people taking to the streets in London in November
2015 to protest the UK’s plan to join in air strikes against ISIS in Syria.
One explanation of such people feeling the need to distance themselves
from their government’s policies is that the people of democratic
countries can be assumed to endorse their governments’ policies unless
they do something to express that they don’t. The existence of ‘not in
our name’ protests is evidence that at least some citizens believe that
their governments act for them, literally ‘in their name’.
Fourth and finally, when citizens of a country with an objectionable
domestic policy travel abroad, they are often held to account by
foreigners for what their governments are doing. At the time of
writing, Americans travelling outside of the US might experience
this in relation to Donald Trump; many Italians experienced it in
relation to Silvio Berlusconi, Australians in relation to Tony Abbott,
Americans again in relation to George W. Bush; the list goes on. We
can understand this in the context of the second point mentioned
above: outsiders attempt to blame insiders for their country’s policies,
and the question is whether the insiders will accept and internalise
this judgement.
Of course, it might turn out to be the case that some or all of these
social practices are unjustifiable and should be revised. That is to say,
perhaps citizens’ taxes fund their governments’ liabilities only
because there is no way to make the government itself fund its own
liabilities; perhaps citizens feel guilt and shame about what their
states do but shouldn’t; perhaps they take to the streets to express
    ? 
that their governments aren’t acting in their names, but in fact their
governments weren’t even pretending to be acting in their names;
perhaps others hold us to account when we travel but they shouldn’t.
But for now, we can attempt to vindicate these widespread social
practices, by taking seriously a model of the state on which citizens
are part of their states.
III. Membership: Location, Legal Status,

Relations, Causal Contribution
So far, whenever I have referred to the individuals that together make
up ‘the people’ of a state, I have used the term ‘citizens’. But this
shouldn’t be taken too seriously—it is a placeholder for ‘member’,
and the question of membership in the group that is ‘the state’ on this
inclusive understanding still needs to be resolved. The Montevideo
Convention mentioned ‘a permanent population’, while Rousseau
talked about the ‘whole society’ as sovereign. There is a range of
different ways to think about membership in the state, compatible
with giving an inclusive characterisation of the state. We might think
about a ‘snapshot’ of the people in the territory at a time; a sequence of
different people in the territory at different times where there is always
some overlap between those at one time and those at the next; a formal
requirement like holding the legal status of ‘permanent resident’ or
‘citizen’; standing in a relation such as being involved in reciprocal
exchanges with others in the territory; standing in a relation such as
being involved in the receipt of benefits from the government; having
made a causal contribution to what the state does; and so on.
Notice that many of these possibilities will get things wrong from
the perspective of common sense. Any number of tourists and visitors
are going to be in the territory at a given time, so they will feature in
the snapshot but they are clearly not members of the state (they will
usually be members of another state, namely their home state). The
same problem remains if we take a sequence of such people across
time, although considering membership across time rather than at a
time is an improvement. It captures the idea that there is nothing
    
essential about these particular people, but rather merely important

that there are some people or other, in a way sufficient to the
population having persisted without disruption over time. Overlap
is important. Imagine if an asteroid wiped out the entire population
of a state at once. We would think there were no state, at least on a
citizen-inclusive characterisation, because there would be no society-
as-sovereign, and no population. If there were no state, there would
be no members of the state. Or to put it the other way round, if there
were no members, no state would exist.
Formal status seems to get things roughly right, although there are
problems to do with illegal immigrants. Using citizenship will exclude
residents who contribute in important ways and plan to remain; using
the disjunction of citizenship and permanent residence will be more
inclusive of those people but will yet exclude illegal immigrants
who contribute in important ways and plan to remain. Even so,
making membership a matter of formal recognition would seem to
exclude important aspects of belonging to a state. For example, New
Zealanders have the right to live and work in Australia, without
becoming citizens. Imagine a New Zealander who has lived and
worked in Australia for twenty years, paid a considerable amount of
tax, married an Australian and had children, and been politically
active despite not being able to vote. When this person is deported
because of fraternisation with suspected criminals (as a new law in
Australia permits), we have the sense that this is an injustice—this
person was a member of the state, and this status has been unjustly
disregarded by those who signed off on the deportation. If this is right,
then there is something more to membership than mere formal status.
What about reciprocal relations with others in the territory? An
obvious contender for such relations is paying income tax and receiv-
ing goods funded by others’ income tax contributions. Some people
pay taxes, and those taxes are used to fund the range of the state’s
activities, many of which involve mutual support such as healthcare,
security against unemployment, legal services, education, and so on.
The problem with going this way is that some people who we would
intuitively want to count as members of the state (such as a person
    ? 
who has lived in the country for fifty years, holds a formal status such
as citizenship, and is politically active) won’t count because they don’t
work and so don’t pay income tax. We cannot solve this problem by
looking at GST instead, because everyone who visits pays this.
Using the relation of receiving benefits is subject to a similar
problem to taking whoever’s in the territory at a time or over time
to be a member, namely that it will include tourists and visitors who
are clearly not members of the state—although this does depend on
the kinds of benefits we have in mind. Anyone in the territory will
receive the protection of the police, for example, and the benefits of
many different kinds of public goods, such as roads. In some coun-
tries, they will receive even more extensive benefits, like healthcare.
Some goods are non-excludable, so it is in their nature that their
enjoyment can’t be restricted to members only (in which case, this
doesn’t tell us anything interesting about membership and non-
membership); but of those goods that are excludable, we might be
able to read membership off access. Welfare services are probably a
good example in many countries, because non-members generally
don’t have access to these. Are all and only those with an entitlement
to access welfare services the members of the state? While the ‘all’ part
looks plausible, the ‘only’ part does not; as earlier, some illegal
immigrants will not have access but will intuitively count as members.
Finally, membership as a specific kind of causal contribution might
seem to get things right if we focus on something like voting for what
the state should do. Voting is direct in a way that other political
activities, like protesting or joining in public deliberations, are not.
The government delineates the group whose votes it will aggregate (in
Australia, citizens over the age of 18), and being part of that group
means being a causal contributor to what the group votes for. The fact
an individual had a right to vote in an election, whether she made use
of it or not, seems to make her at least prima facie implicated in which
party or parties form a government and what they go on to do while
in government. The same is true for referendums and their outcomes.
The right to vote is a status that indicates that you are part of ‘the
people’, part of the group that governs itself. It screens off outsiders,
    
who can join in protests and participate in public deliberations both

online and off. (I will say more about voting in Chapter 3 too, when
we turn to the question of whether this citizen-inclusive character-
isation of the state is an agent).
Focusing solely on causal contribution, is it plausible to say that all
and only those who vote are members of the state? Clearly not,
because this excludes those with the right to vote who choose for no
good reason not to make use of it. So let us focus instead on the
counterfactual causal contribution involved in having the right to
vote, where you would make a causal contribution if you exercised
that right. Are all and only those with a right to vote members of the
state? As with standing in a particular relation to the state or to
others in the state, the ‘all’ part looks plausible, while the ‘only’ part
does not. Voting is restricted to people of a certain age, but it is
obviously not the case that someone is a member of the state only if
she is 18 or above (for example). Similarly, permanent residents
and illegal immigrants may lack a right to vote, but may be politic-
ally active and thereby make a causal contribution to what the state
ends up doing.
We cannot get around this by moving from the formal right to vote
to something weaker like the option to participate in the political
process in general. This would bring in all sorts of people who have
nothing to do with the state, for example wealthy foreigners (when
wealth enables political interference, e.g. through campaign dona-
tions); foreign officials (when strong reciprocal relations between
states make it the case that they can make causal contributions to
each other’s policy); the international media; other states’ govern-
ment officials; those involved in the administration of international
law; chief executive officers (CEOs) of multinational corporations;
and so on. (This would be a nice way to simply implode the idea of
there being discrete, semi-sovereign states, but if we want to hang on
to that idea for the time being then we should probably reject using
mere participation in order to establish membership.)
One might object that causal contribution is not a good way to
think about membership. After all, one individual agent can make a
    ? 
causal contribution to what another individual agent does, without

that thereby making the two part of a group (for which we can then
ask whether that group is an agent). I could give my friends the right
to vote on which dress I buy from Gorman. Their cheerful participa-
tion in this exercise would be no indication that they were then
members of some group with me, or that there would be any good
reason to ask the question of whether we together were an agent. But
the objection is a little too fast. It seems to matter whether their vote
determines what I do, or whether I retain ultimate authority over my
choices. I could choose, for example, to overrule them all because
I like the obnoxiously colourful silk dress the best, even though they
all voted for the more sombre blue corduroy shift. On the contrary, a
vote determines who is elected to government. So while mere partici-
pation in the political process is too weak to establish membership,
the right to vote is strong enough to do so.
The discussion in this section should make clear that while there
are many apparently obvious and plausible ways to account for
membership, they all come with unintuitive implications. The con-
ception of membership that does the best in terms of ruling in those
who are intuitively members and ruling out those who are intuitively
not members is the possession of a right to vote. The right to vote
does well on all of the plausible ways of thinking about membership
outlined above, namely location, legal status, relations, and causal
contribution. The group of those who have a right to vote in Australia
overlaps in large part with the group of those who are in the territory
at the time of a given Australian election (although it leaves out the
tourists and visitors, which is an advantage); and with the group of
those who have the legal status of citizenship (but not permanent
residents, which is a disadvantage); and with the group of people who
are involved in reciprocal taxpayer relationships with each other
within the territory; and with the group of people who pay taxes to
the state and receive benefits from the state (although it leaves out
some such people); and with the group of people who have the option
of making a causal contribution that, together with others’ contribu-
tions, determines at least some of what the state will go on to do.
    
In short, the right to vote seems to capture much of what is intuitive

about all of these different conceptions of membership.
IV. Membership: Normative Interaction,

Duty Transferral
Stephanie Collins and I have argued for an account of membership in
states based on the idea of robust transfer of moral duties.6 Individuals
have all sorts of moral duties, some of which can (and some of which
can only) be discharged by being passed to collectives. The state is one
such collective, perhaps even the main such collective. For example,
an individual, call her Chloé, might have a duty to do what she can, at
not disproportionate cost, to alleviate the suffering of some of the
world’s poorest people. She might discharge this duty by passing it to
the state, where the state fulfils her and others’ duties by implement-
ing a generous programme of foreign aid.
For an individual to transfer one such moral duty to the state, she
must meet between one and four requirements.7 The first is disjunct-
ive: she either works to change the capacities of a state to which she
already belongs, so that it might eventually be able to fulfil that
particular duty on her behalf although it is currently unable to do
so, or she checks that the state she belongs to is in fact fulfilling that
duty on her behalf.8 If she meets the second disjunct of this
6
Collins and Lawford-Smith (2016b).
7
Here I depart slightly from Collins and Lawford-Smith (2016b), because there we
say she must meet four conditions. But it seems to me now that she cannot meet the
second, third, or fourth if she has found that the state currently lacks the capacity to
discharge her duty on her behalf. If that is what she finds then she must work to make
it the case that the state is able to do so, but that is the end of what she must do. Some
might wonder why this counts as ‘transferring’ her duty at all; why not instead say that
she ought to discharge it individually? In some cases, that will be up to her. In others,
she will only be able to do anything at all through a collective, and there it is much
more important that she work on making it the case that the collective has the
capacities necessary. See further discussion in Collins (2013).
8
In the story about collectives in general (rather than states in particular), there are
four disjuncts: either take steps to create a new collective, or join an existing collective,
or work to change the capacities of a collective to which you already belong, or check
    ? 
requirement, then she must also meet the second, third, and fourth
requirements. These are that she wills that the collective fulfil the duty
on her behalf, she communicates to the collective that she wills this,
and she reasonably believes that the collective will in fact fulfil the
duty on her behalf (Collins and Lawford-Smith 2016b: 153–4).
To illustrate, suppose that Chloé lives in New Zealand. For Chloé
to have transferred her duty to (do what she can at not dispropor-
tionate cost to) alleviate the suffering of some of the world’s poorest
people to the New Zealand state, she would first need to find out
whether New Zealand has a programme of foreign aid in place
generous enough to count as fulfilling her and other New Zealanders’
duties. If it does not, then she must work to make it the case that the
state will come to have such a programme, for example by starting a
petition that it create one and encouraging others to sign it. Once she
has done that, she will have satisfied the first disjunct of the first
transfer requirement, and that is all she needs to do.
If New Zealand does have such a programme, then she will have
satisfied the second disjunct of the first transfer requirement, in
which case the second, third, and fourth requirements kick in.
Chloé would need to will that New Zealand fulfil, on her behalf,
her duty to alleviate the suffering of some of the world’s poorest
people. She would also need to communicate to New Zealand that
she wills this, perhaps by voting for parties that make clear com-
mitments to generous provisions for foreign aid, or by responding
positively to polling on whether New Zealanders are happy with
current levels of foreign aid spending. Finally, she would need to be
receptive to the available empirical evidence in a way that allowed
her to reasonably believe (as opposed to merely believe) that
that the collective you belong to is fulfilling that duty on your behalf (Collins and
Lawford-Smith 2016b: 153–4). The first two of these are largely irrelevant when we
think about states, because many states have been formed, and most people belong to
one or another of them. But there can be exceptions to this, so that, for example,
people who are stateless will need to join existing states, and people who are very
dissatisfied with the capacities or operations of their existing states may need to take
steps to create new ones (perhaps by seceding, or amalgamating with other states).
    
New Zealand will in fact alleviate the suffering of some of the

world’s poorest people on her behalf.
This process of duty transfer is sufficient to the state’s then having a
duty, and to making it true that when it fulfils this duty it does so on
behalf of the individual who transferred it (Collins and Lawford-
Smith 2016b: 155). The duty itself does not necessarily retain the
same content. In being passed on it is transformed in some way (see
further discussion in Lawford-Smith 2012: Sec. 2). Consider an indi-
vidual’s duty to do what she can, at not disproportionate cost, to
pursue a particular good outcome. This will have different content for
a given individual than it has for the state, because the individual and
the state have very different capacities (Collins and Lawford-Smith
2016b: esp. 154–5). In order for the state to fulfil its duty, it must
distribute tasks that, when executed, are together sufficient to the duty
being fulfilled (Collins and Lawford-Smith 2016b: 156).
Collins and I have argued that individuals are jointly and severally
responsible for seeing to it that the collective does its duty, which
means that they may have to do more than just the task assigned to
them; they may have to motivate others to do the tasks assigned
to them, and may even have to take on more of those tasks if others
fail, in order that the state’s action does not fail (Collins and Lawford-
Smith 2016b: 157). On this picture, individuals can have duties in two
quite different ways: initially, simply in virtue of important moral
outcomes that they are able to pursue, and then later, in virtue of
being distributed tasks by collectives jointly sufficient to pursue those
goods (and usually to pursue them in a more efficient way).
It was on this basis that we argued for one interesting version of
membership. (We conceded that there are many, and which is best
might depend on one’s purposes—see discussion in Collins and
Lawford-Smith 2016b: 167, 171). This was reliable or robust transfer
of duties to the state, and receipt of tasks distributed from the state.
Individuals must transfer certain of their duties on a regular basis; the
state must accept this transfer; the state must distribute tasks back to
these same individuals which will, together with others’ tasks, see the
state fulfil the duties that it has as a result of the initial transfer (even if
    ? 
there has been a transformation in their content, for the reasons

explained above). What makes this process of transfer between the
individual and the state, and the state and the individual, reliable or
robust is that the state would accept the transfer and distribute tasks
back, across a range of likely futures where economic, cultural, social,
and environmental conditions have changed.
An individual, then, is a member of a state when she has been, and
is likely to remain, involved in transferring her duties to the state, and
being distributed tasks from the state (Collins and Lawford-Smith
2016b: 169). Thus there can be individuals who have a right to vote
and yet who are not members because they alienate themselves from
political participation and do not engage in duty transfer (they do not
check that their state is doing what it ought to fulfil their duties, they
do not will it to fulfil their duties, they do not communicate to it that
they wish it to, and they do not take measures to come to reasonably
believe that the state is in fact fulfilling their duties) (Collins and
Lawford-Smith 2016b: 169). And there can be individuals who lack a
right to vote and yet who are politically active and engage in duty
transfer (they check that the state is doing what it ought to fulfil their
duties, they will it to fulfil their duties, they communicate via political
participation that they will it to fulfil their duties, and they take
measures to come to reasonably believe that the state is in fact
fulfilling their duties), and who are distributed tasks back, and so do
count as members.
Of course, there are challenges to our account. One is practical: it is
not easy to figure out who is engaged in reliable or robust duty
transfer with the state, so it is not easy to figure out who is a member
and who is not. It is particularly difficult to know what an individual
wills or reasonably believes, although it is not exactly easy to know
that she has checked on what her state is doing, or communicated to
her state what she wills. The most transparent condition for duty
transfer is that she has worked to change the capacities of the state,
but this is just one disjunct of one condition out of four. The practical
objection can be partially met by showing that there are various
heuristics that can be used in place of robust duty transfer that get
    
things roughly (but not perfectly) correct, such as holding a formal

status like citizenship or permanent residency, or having the right to
vote (where the latter is to be preferred for the reasons discussed in
Section III).
Another challenge to our account is related to the non-ideal pol-
itical conditions we find ourselves in. Many people in many different
states today are disillusioned with politics and alienated from
political participation. Many, that is, do not think there is any serious
chance of their states accepting the transfer of their duties, and so
would not bother willing such a transfer, or believing that the state
will act to fulfil their duties, or taking steps to come to reasonably
believe this. In states that are highly divided along value lines (the US
and UK are good current examples), individuals will know that one
political subgroup or another will win favour, and their own values
will be disregarded.
This has the implication that if we use the criterion of membership
suggested here, divided states will have very few members. There will
be a lot of people left over, on whose behalf states might claim to act
but on this picture in fact fail to act. If we have the intuition that these
people are members of states no matter how badly their states are
representing their interests, then we will have to look for another
account of membership than this one. But perhaps that is actually an
appealing feature of this proposal: it counts as members only those
whose intentions and beliefs are bound up in the right way with what
their states are doing. This actually stands to give us a reasonable chance
of making the state an agent (which I will come back to in Chapter 3),
rather than ruling it out in advance by including, for example, people
who are too young to meet any such doxastic conditions.
‘Member’ will be ambiguous in the context of some of the pro-
ceeding discussion. For example, talking about the ‘member-inclusive
state’ is unhelpful, because so long as the state is a collective of
some kind, it will have members; this does not distinguish the more
inclusive from the less inclusive models. For that reason, I will con-
tinue to use ‘citizen’ as the relevant placeholder instead. But it will be
a placeholder for the correct conception of membership: in principle,
    ? 
a reciprocal relation of robust duty-transfer; in practice (heuristically)

possession of the right to vote (by way of the discussion in Section III).
V. States as the Formal Apparatus

of Governance
In Chapter 4, I will turn to the question of whether the state on the
inclusive characterisation given above is an agent. If it is not then we
are back to the drawing board, with the catalogue of options pre-
sented earlier in this chapter (and others besides, because that cata-
logue was representative, not exhaustive). In the event that it is not it
is worth also saying something here about the most plausible of the
citizen-exclusive characterisations.
As mentioned already, we have reason to go for a unified account
of the state rather than one which fragments its agency—although of
course, a fragmented account would be better than no account at all.
The Unitary Actor model of the state equates the state with those
aspects of the formal apparatus of governance that produce consist-
ent, rational decisions (as an individual agent usually does). In a
democracy governed by the principle of the separation of powers,
this apparatus includes the parliament, the executive government,
and the judiciary (or in the better-known case of the United States,
the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary). This makes the
question of membership clear, too, because it’s clear whether a person
works in one of these branches of government or not.
Notice that this group is hierarchical in a way that the citizen-
inclusive characterisation of the state is not (or not obviously). Those
who are eligible to vote have one vote each, and these votes have equal
weight.9 But within the three branches of government, there are
hierarchies of position and influence. Taking Australia as the example
again, in the judiciary this ranges from clerks in the Family Courts
through to justices in the High Court; in the parliament from clerks
9
Although see also the complications detailed in Arrow (1950) and subsequent
literature.
    
through shadow ministers to the prime minister; in the executive

from entry-level public servants who work for various departments
that in turn work for each ministerial portfolio, through to the prime
minister, the Governor-General, and the Queen.
The hierarchical nature of this group may create problems of
different kinds when it comes to thinking about whether it is an
agent. But there are two reasons to think that the project of vindicat-
ing it as an agent will be easier than for the citizen-inclusive model.
The first is that many theorists have vindicated the idea that com-
panies and corporations are agents (see e.g. French 1979; Hindriks
2008a; Hess 2014), even though such groups are also highly hierarch-
ical, in a fairly similar way (and many of which involve different
branches of operations, in roughly the same way as just described).
The second is that governments have explicit mechanisms for delib-
erating and making decisions, and produce a range of purposeful
actions (e.g. setting the budget). Furthermore, representatives of
governments are sent to international meetings to negotiate on the
government’s behalf.
All of this is highly controlled, which bodes well for the question of
whether this smaller group might be characterised as an agent. I will
return to this model of the state in Chapter 4; in the meantime I want
to turn in Chapter 3 to the question of whether the citizen-inclusive
model of the state discussed in the bulk of this chapter can reasonably
be characterized as a collective agent.
3
Is the Citizen-Inclusive
State an Agent?
With these various plausible characterisations of the state in hand, we

can now turn to the question of which (if any) of these can be considered
to be collective agents. In this chapter, I will set out several different
accounts of collective agency,1 and assess whether the citizen-inclusive
state counts as an agent on them. In Chapter 4, I will turn to the question
of whether the citizen-exclusive state counts as an agent on them. Agents
are candidates for moral responsibility, which is to say, can defeasibly be
held responsible for what they do. So if the state is an agent on some or
other characterization discussed earlier, then we may be in a position to
hold the state responsible for what it does. On all but the Political
Leaders model this means holding a collective agent responsible for
what it does, which opens up further interesting questions about the
1
Two notes here. First, some of the theories I discuss are better understood as
theories of collective action rather than theories of collective agency, or theories of
‘shared’ rather than collective agency (where the former is individualist and the latter
is collectivist). In these cases, I am simply borrowing elements of those authors’
theories that I think can be straightforwardly co-opted as requirements of collective
agency, regardless of how the authors themselves think of their theories. Michael
Bratman (2009) and Margaret Gilbert (e.g. 1987), for example, discuss intentions and
beliefs respectively, both of which are important aspects of agency (i.e. an ongoing
capacity to act on the basis of intention and/or belief ). Second, I’m taking it on faith
that theorists of collective agency have been appropriately responsive to theories of
(individual) intentional agency. (Bratman, for example, builds his theory of collective
action around a theory of intentions originally developed for individuals.) Where they
haven’t, then those theories would provide an interesting further avenue for consid-
ering whether states are collective agents.
    
distribution of responsibility from collectives to members. In Chapter 5,

I will turn to the implications of the answers to the agency question for
citizens’ responsibility for states’ actions.
Before we begin, though, two clarifications will be helpful. First, we
are looking for a theory of collective agency, such that it makes
the whole group―identified by a particular understanding of the
state―classifiable as a collective agent, rather than some subset of
that group. To make this point clear, imagine a small group of forty
students. One of these is unhappy about a proposed rise in university
fees, and attempts to organize a protest, succeeding in getting a further
nine of the forty to gather outside the university administration build-
ing with placards. The remaining thirty students are simply in the
vicinity of the building, but don’t know about the protest, or have heard
about it but are not much bothered by the proposed rise in fees.
We might want to make a case based on intentions (or beliefs, or
desires, or other mental states―I will discuss various options soon,
but use ‘intentions’ as a placeholder to make this point) that the
student who organized the protest is the agent of the protest; we
might even want to make a case based on the connection between the
intentions of the organizer and the actions of the nine protestors that
those ten taken together are the agent of the protest; but nothing
seems to justify taking the forty students as the group and then saying
that that group is the agent of the protest. We need a pre-existing
group structure, and for the intentions and so on to be appropriately
connected to the actions taken by the group, before we take the group
to be the agent of the protest just because some within it decide upon
actions and those or others within it execute those decisions. The
forty students are not such a group; whether or not the state is such a
group is a question that remains to be settled. But it would be begging
the question to assume that it is, and then take the identification of a
locus of intentional action somewhere within the group to be sufficient
to take the whole group to be an agent.2
2
It is an interesting question whether there can be pre-existing group structure
sufficient to tie members of the group together as a collective agent when members
  -    ? 
Second, there is an ongoing dispute about the metaphysics of

groups, in particular the relation between higher-level properties
and lower-level properties. This dispute shows up in many different
subfields: the relation between biochemical structures and biological
function; the relation between neurophysiology and phenomenal
experience; the relation between the molecular structure of ordinary
objects and those objects in their ordinary functional roles; and here
the relation between human individuals and the groups they form
together. In social metaphysics it is not uncommon to hear argument
about whether groups are ‘more than the sum of their parts’ and
whether collective agents are ‘reducible to’ individual agents. I want to
make clear that this is a dispute about the metaphysics―specifically
the ontology―of our world, not a dispute which threatens the
explanatory power of talking in terms of collective agents. That is to
say, a whole range of metaphysical answers to the ontological question
about what groups are and whether they ‘really exist’ are compatible
with groups having explanatory power (see discussion in List and
Spiekermann 2013). For that reason, I won’t say more about those
particular metaphysical issues in the next few chapters, although they
will come up again briefly in the arguments in Chapter 6.
There are many and varied theories of collective agency. Rather
than trying to decide which of these is the right model of agency, and
then simply checking the various characterisations of the state given
in Chapter 2 against it, I will remain theory-neutral by outlining
have neither opted into the group voluntarily, nor are involved in either the exercise of
intention or the implementation of the intention. It seems that opting in voluntarily,
and retaining the ability to opt out, could be sufficient. So, for example, even if by
joining the Catholic Church one recognised that one would not be involved in church
decision-making, nor in exercising the decisions made by the Church, one might still
count as part of the collective agent that is the Catholic Church when the Church is
charged with wrongdoing and held to account. (That is to say, one can be a member of
a group without being directly implicated in exercises of the group’s agency.) But
when membership is non-voluntary it’s much less clear. If we can take citizens to be
members of existing states regardless of their actual (or even counterfactual) volition,
then it looks like we have much stronger grounds on which to claim that states
(inclusive of citizens) are collective agents, even if only because through some tiny
subset of those citizens the state is capable of intentional action.
    
several prominent accounts of differential strengths. I will discuss

what I take to be ‘strong’, ‘moderate’, and ‘weak’ accounts of collective
agency (where the weaker the account the easier it is for a group to
count as a collective agent under it, and vice versa). That way, the
reader who knows the literature can follow the discussion according
to her own preferred account, and the reader who doesn’t might come
to be persuaded of a particular account after considering the respect-
ive merits of each as they apply to the specific case of the state.
I aim to show two things in this chapter. The first is that if we use
strong or moderate accounts of collective agency, we can’t vindicate a
characterization of the state that is both unified and inclusive of
citizens, but that if we use a weak account, we can. The second is
that only the strong and moderate accounts allow collective respon-
sibility for collective agency, while the weak accounts allow only
individual responsibility for individual agency (despite their authors’
claims to the contrary).
I will start with two strong accounts: one offered by Christian List
and Philip Pettit (2011), the other by Pettit and David Schweikard
(2006). Then I will move to two moderate accounts: Michael Bratman’s
(2009),3 and Margaret Gilbert’s (1987). I will include a brief discus-
sion of my own preferred account at the end of this Section (II).
Finally, I will discuss two weak accounts: Christopher Kutz’s (2000a;
2000b), and Scott Shapiro’s (2011). Across the chapter, I will consider
rationality, autonomy, belief, intention, joint action, plan-conformity,
and participation as necessary elements of collective agency.
I. Strong Accounts of Collective Agency

I take two conditions to be features of one of the strongest accounts of
collective agency: rationality and autonomy. Note that these are
necessary, rather than sufficient conditions. To get sufficiency they
3
I could just as well have chosen the account given by Raimo Tuomela
(1984)―my aim here is to be representative rather than exhaustive of theories of
collective agency.
  -    ? 
must be coupled with one of the moderate accounts.4 Both rationality

and autonomy have been defended as conditions of collective agency
most prominently by Christian List and Philip Pettit (List and Pettit
2011), but also by Pettit in other places (Pettit 2003; 2007). The
requirement that to be a collective (they use the term ‘corporate’)
agent the group must be rational is a solution to the problem that
majoritarian decision-procedures can produce irrationality (Arrow
1951; List 2006). This is not a problem per se; individuals are occa-
sionally irrational, after all. The difference comes in the capacity that
each kind of agent has to remedy this irrationality. When an individ-
ual forms a belief that stands in contradiction with an earlier belief,
she can recognize this fact, and deliberate about which of her beliefs
to reject or update.
When groups form a belief that is in contradiction with an earlier
belief, they won’t necessarily have the capacity to recognize this fact,
and deliberate about what to do about it. If they can’t do anything
about it, then they are stuck being irrational, and this might lead them
into all sorts of problems. Thus List and Pettit require that collective
agents be rational, that is to say, have the capacity to form beliefs and
decisions over time that are mutually consistent. This is a strong
requirement, in that it is additional to whatever moderate require-
ments are specified (see also List and Spiekermann 2013). If the group
meets the moderate conditions but fails to put policies in place to
protect against irrationality, it will for that reason fail to count as an
agent in the strong sense.
The second condition is autonomy. At its weakest, this require-
ment is only that group beliefs be independent from members’ beliefs.
An independent belief could have the same content as at least one
member’s beliefs, so long as it was formed by a different process. For
example, suppose that both a book club and one of its members
4
I don’t discuss List and Pettit’s moderate conditions in Section II, preferring
alternative accounts. But briefly, they require groups to have the equivalent of
representational and motivational states, and the capacity to process these states
into action. Those who are interested should consult List and Pettit (2011: ch. 1),
or, for a useful review, Tuomela (2011).
    
believe that Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee is a great book, but the member
formed her belief by reading the book and reflecting on what she liked
about it, and the book club formed its belief by asking for a show of
hands at the end of a session devoted to it. The beliefs have the same
content, but the group is autonomous from its members because its
beliefs are formed through a process involving a show of hands.
At its strongest, the requirement is that group beliefs be ‘discon-
tinuous’ with members’ beliefs (see discussion in Hindriks 2014).
A discontinuous belief would have to have different content to any
member’s belief, regardless of the belief formation process. For
example, if both the book club and at least one of its members have
the belief that Eggshell Skull is a great book, then the book club’s
beliefs are not discontinuous with its members, and so the book club
is not autonomous. But perhaps this is too strong. Why should
autonomy mandate discontinuity between members’ beliefs and
groups’ beliefs, rather than simply make it possible? The accounts
that I will classify as ‘moderate’ have discontinuity as a possible
consequence, for example Margaret Gilbert’s account of members’
‘letting beliefs stand’. Mandating discontinuity would rule out an
ordinary majoritarian belief formation procedure as creating auton-
omy at the level of the group,5 because the group’s belief would always
have the same content as the majority of members’ beliefs.
Ruling out majoritarian procedures would be somewhat helpful
from the perspective of rationality, but as I have just explained, it is a
very strong requirement on what it takes to be a collective agent, and
we might be interested in weaker accounts. Surely we want to allow
that group decisions line up with the decisions of all, or most, of the
members, and also permit that they depart. It is this possibility of
departure, in a more substantial way than is simply built in to
5
By ‘ordinary’ here I mean that each person counted by the majoritarian proced-
ure votes for what she actually wants. That modifier is necessary because there will be
unusual cases in which everyone votes for what she thinks others’ want and not for
what she herself wants, and each turns out to be wrong about what that is. In that case,
the outcome would be discontinuous in the strong sense that the group belief had
content that was not the same as any member’s individual belief.
Another random document with
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condition of things than I knew, and had a deeper hold upon public
attention than I had supposed. Invitations began to pour in upon me
from colleges, lyceums, and literary societies, offering me one
hundred, and even two hundred dollars for a single lecture.
I had, sometime before, prepared a lecture on “Self-made men,”
and also one upon Ethnology, with special reference to Africa. The
latter had cost me much labor, though as I now look back upon it, it
was a very defective production. I wrote it at the instance of my
friend Doctor M. B. Anderson, President of Rochester University,
himself a distinguished Ethnologist, a deep thinker and scholar. I had
been invited by one of the literary societies of Western Reserve
College (then at Hudson, but recently removed to Cleveland, Ohio),
to address it on Commencement day; and never having spoken on
such an occasion, never, indeed, having been myself inside of a
school-house for the purpose of an education, I hesitated about
accepting the invitation, and finally called upon Prof. Henry Wayland,
son of the great Doctor Wayland of Brown University, and on Doctor
Anderson, and asked their advice whether I ought to accept. Both
gentlemen advised me to do so. They knew me, and evidently
thought well of my ability. But the puzzling question now was, what
shall I say if I do go there? It won’t do to give them an old-fashioned
anti-slavery discourse. (I learned afterwards that such a discourse
was precisely what they needed, though not what they wished; for
the faculty, including the President, was in great distress because I,
a colored man, had been invited, and because of the reproach this
circumstance might bring upon the College.) But what shall I talk
about? became the difficult question. I finally hit upon the one before
mentioned. I had read, when in England a few years before, with
great interest, parts of Doctor Pritchard’s “Natural History of Man,” a
large volume marvelously calm and philosophical in its discussion of
the science of the origin of the races, and was thus in the line of my
then convictions. I sought this valuable book at once in our
bookstores, but could not obtain it anywhere in this country. I sent to
England, where I paid the sum of seven and a half dollars for it. In
addition to this valuable work, President Anderson kindly gave me a
little book entitled, “Man and His Migrations,” by Dr. R. G. Latham,
and loaned me the large work of Dr. Morton the famous
Archaeologist, and that of Messrs. Nott and Glidden, the latter
written evidently to degrade the negro and support the then
prevalent Calhoun doctrine of the rightfulness of slavery. With these
books, and occasional suggestions from Dr. Anderson and Prof.
Wayland, I set about preparing my Commencement address. For
many days and nights I toiled, and succeeded at last in getting
something together in due form. Written orations had not been in my
line. I had usually depended upon my unsystematized knowledge,
and the inspiration of the hour and the occasion; but I had now got
the “scholar bee in my bonnet,” and supposed that inasmuch as I
was to speak to college professors and students, I must at least
make a show of some familiarity with letters. It proved, as to its
immediate effect, a great mistake, for my carefully studied and
written address, full of learned quotations, fell dead at my feet, while
a few remarks I made extemporaneously at collation, were
enthusiastically received. Nevertheless, the reading and labor
expended were of much value to me. They were needed steps
preparatory to the work upon which I was about to enter. If they
failed at the beginning, they helped to success in the end. My lecture
on “The Races of Men” was seldom called for, but that on “Self-made
Men” was in great demand, especially through the West. I found that
the success of a lecturer depends more upon the quality of his stock
in store, than the amount. My friend, Wendell Phillips (for such I
esteem him), who has said more cheering words to me, and in
vindication of my race, than any man now living, has delivered his
famous lecture on the “Lost Arts” during the last forty years; and I
doubt if among all his lectures, and he has many, there is one in
such requisition as this. When Daniel O’Connell was asked why he
did not make a new speech he playfully replied, that “it would take
Ireland twenty years to learn his old ones.” Upon some such
consideration as this, I adhered pretty closely to my old lecture on
“Self-made Men,” retouching and shading it a little from time to time
as occasion seemed to require.
Here, then, was a new vocation before me, full of advantages,
mentally and pecuniarily. When in the employment of the American
Anti-Slavery Society, my salary was about four hundred and fifty
dollars a year, and I felt I was well paid for my services; but I could
now make from fifty to a hundred dollars a night, and have the
satisfaction, too, that I was in some small measure helping to lift my
race into consideration; for no man who lives at all, lives unto
himself; he either helps or hinders all who are in anywise connected
with him. I never rise to speak before an American audience without
something of the feeling that my failure or success will bring blame
or benefit to my whole race. But my activities were not now confined
entirely to lectures before lyceums. Though slavery was abolished,
the wrongs of my people were not ended. Though they were not
slaves they were not yet quite free. No man can be truly free whose
liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling, and action of others;
and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding,
protecting, defending, and maintaining that liberty. Yet the negro after
his emancipation was precisely in this state of destitution. The law on
the side of freedom is of great advantage only where there is power
to make that law respected. I know no class of my fellowmen,
however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and
safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class.
Protestants are excellent people, but it would not be wise for
Catholics to depend entirely upon them to look after their rights and
interests. Catholics are a pretty good sort of people (though there is
a soul-shuddering history behind them), yet no enlightened
Protestants would commit their liberty to their care and keeping. And
yet the government had left the freedmen in a worse condition than
either of these. It felt that it had done enough for him. It had made
him free, and henceforth he must make his own way in the world, or
as the slang phrase has it, “Root, pig, or die”; yet he had none of the
conditions for self-preservation or self-protection. He was free from
the individual master, but the slave of society. He had neither
property, money, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but
he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from
the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of
summer and the frosts of winter. He was in a word literally turned
loose naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky. The first feeling
towards him by the old master classes, was full of bitterness and
wrath. They resented his emancipation as an act of hostility towards
them, and since they could not punish the emancipator, they felt like
punishing the object which that act had emancipated. Hence they
drove him off the old plantation, and told him he was no longer
wanted there. They not only hated him because he had been freed
as a punishment to them, but because they felt that they had been
robbed of his labor. An element of greater bitterness still came into
their hearts: the freedman had been the friend of the Government,
and many of his class had borne arms against them during the war.
The thought of paying cash for labor that they could formerly extort
by the lash did not in anywise improve their disposition to the
emancipated slave, or improve his own condition. Now, since poverty
has, and can have no chance against wealth, the landless against
the land owner, the ignorant against the intelligent, the freedman was
powerless. He had nothing left him but a slavery-distorted and
diseased body, and lame and twisted limbs with which to fight the
battle of life. I, therefore, soon found that the negro had still a cause,
and that he needed my voice and pen with others to plead for it. The
American Anti-Slavery Society, under the lead of Mr. Garrison, had
disbanded, its newspapers were discontinued, its agents were
withdrawn from the field, and all systematic efforts by abolitionists
were abandoned. Many of the Society, Mr. Phillips and myself
amongst the number, differed from Mr. Garrison as to the wisdom of
this course. I felt that the work of the Society was not done, that it
had not fulfilled its mission, which was not merely to emancipate, but
to elevate the enslaved class; but against Mr. Garrison’s leadership
and the surprise and joy occasioned by the emancipation, it was
impossible to keep the association alive, and the cause of the
freedmen was left mainly to individual effort and to hastily
extemporized societies of an ephemeral character, brought together
under benevolent impulse, but having no history behind them, and
being new to the work, they were not as effective for good as the old
society would have been had it followed up its work and kept its old
instrumentalities in operation.
From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the
freedman, until he should cease to be merely a freedman, and
should become a citizen. I insisted that there was no safety for him,
or for any body else in America, outside the American Government:
that to guard, protect, and maintain his liberty, the freedman should
have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were
dependent upon the Ballot-box, the Jury-box, and the Cartridge-box,
that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this
country, and this was now the word for the hour with me, and the
word to which the people of the north willingly listened when I spoke.
Hence regarding as I did, the elective franchise as the one great
power by which all civil rights are obtained, enjoyed, and maintained
under our form of government, and the one without which freedom to
any class is delusive if not impossible, I set myself to work with
whatever force and energy I possessed to secure this power for the
recently emancipated millions.
Wendell Phillips
The demand for the ballot was such a vast advance upon the
former objects proclaimed by the friends of the colored race, that it
startled and struck men as preposterous and wholly inadmissible.
Anti-slavery men themselves were not united as to the wisdom of
such demand. Mr. Garrison himself, though foremost for the abolition
of slavery, was not yet quite ready to join this advanced movement.
In this respect he was in the rear of Mr. Phillips; who saw not only
the justice, but the wisdom and necessity of the measure. To his
credit it may be said, that he gave the full strength of his character
and eloquence to its adoption. While Mr. Garrison thought it too
much to ask, Mr. Phillips thought it too little. While the one thought it
might be postponed to the future, the other thought it ought to be
done at once. But Mr. Garrison was not a man to lag far in the rear of
truth and right, and he soon came to see with the rest of us that the
ballot was essential to the freedom of the freedman. A man’s head
will not long remain wrong, when his heart is right. The applause
awarded to Mr. Garrison by the conservatives, for his moderation
both in respect of his views on this question, and the disbandment of
the American Anti-Slavery Society must have disturbed him. He was
at any rate soon found on the right side of the suffrage question.
The enfranchisement of the freedmen was resisted on many
grounds, but mainly these two: first the tendency of the measure to
bring the freedmen into conflict with the old master-class, and the
white people of the South generally. Secondly, their unfitness, by
reason of their ignorance, servility, and degradation, to exercise so
great a power as the ballot, over the destinies of this great nation.
These reasons against the measure which were supposed to be
unanswerable, were in some sense the most powerful arguments in
its favor. The argument that the possession of suffrage would be
likely to bring the negro into conflict with the old master-class at the
South, had its main force in the admission that the interests of the
two classes antagonized each other and that the maintenance of the
one would prove inimical to the other. It resolved itself into this, if the
negro had the means of protecting his civil rights, those who had
formerly denied him these rights would be offended and make war
upon him. Experience has shown in a measure the correctness of
this position. The old master was offended to find the negro whom
he lately possessed the right to enslave and flog to toil, casting a
ballot equal to his own, and resorted to all sorts of meanness,
violence, and crime, to dispossess him of the enjoyment of this point
of equality. In this respect the exercise of the right of suffrage by the
negro has been attended with the evil, which the opponents of the
measure predicted, and they could say “I’ve told you so,” but
immeasurably and intolerably greater would have been the evil
consequences resulting from the denial to one class of this natural
means of protection, and granting it to the other, and hostile class. It
would have been, to have committed the lamb to the care of the wolf
—the arming of one class and disarming the other—protecting one
interest, and destroying the other—making the rich strong, and the
poor weak—the white man a tyrant, and the black man a slave. The
very fact therefore that the old master-classes of the South felt that
their interests were opposed to those of the freedmen, instead of
being a reason against their enfranchisement, was the most powerful
one in its favor. Until it shall be safe to leave the lamb in the hold of
the lion, the laborer in the power of the capitalist, the poor in the
hands of the rich, it will not be safe to leave a newly emancipated
people completely in the power of their former masters, especially
when such masters have not ceased to be such from enlightened
moral convictions but by irresistible force. Then on the part of the
Government itself, had it denied this great right to the freedmen, it
would have been another proof that “Republics are ungrateful”. It
would have been rewarding its enemies, and punishing its friends—
embracing its foes, and spurning its allies,—setting a premium on
treason, and degrading loyalty. As to the second point, viz.: the
negro’s ignorance and degradation, there was no disputing either. It
was the nature of slavery from whose depths he had arisen to make
him so, and it would have kept it so. It was the policy of the system
to keep him both ignorant and degraded, the better and more safely
to defraud him of his hard earnings; and this argument never
staggered me. The ballot in the hands of the negro was necessary to
open the door of the school house, and to unlock the treasures of
knowledge to him. Granting all that was said of his ignorance, I used
to say, “if the negro knows enough to fight for his country he knows
enough to vote; if he knows enough to pay taxes for the support of
the government, he knows enough to vote; if he knows as much
when sober, as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to
vote.”
And now while I am not blind to the evils which have thus far
attended the enfranchisement of the colored people, I hold that the
evils from which we escaped, and the good we have derived from
that act, amply vindicate its wisdom. The evils it brought are in their
nature temporary, and the good is permanent. The one is
comparatively small, the other absolutely great. The young child has
staggered on his little legs, and he has sometimes fallen and hurt his
head in the fall, but then he has learned to walk. The boy in the
water came near drowning, but then he has learned to swim. Great
changes in the relations of mankind can never come, without evils
analogous to those which have attended the emancipation and
enfranchisement of the colored people of the United States. I am
less amazed at these evils, than by the rapidity with which they are
subsiding and not more astonished at the facility with which the
former slave has become a free man, than at the rapid adjustment of
the master-class to the new situation.
Unlike the movement for the abolition of Slavery, the success of
the effort for the enfranchisement of the freedmen was not long
delayed. It is another illustration of how any advance in pursuance of
a right principle, prepares and makes easy the way to another. The
way of transgression is a bottomless pit, one step in that direction
invites the next, and the end is never reached; and it is the same
with the path of righteous obedience. Two hundred years ago, the
pious Doctor Godwin dared affirm that it was “not a sin to baptize a
negro,” and won for him the rite of baptism. It was a small
concession to his manhood; but it was strongly resisted by the
slaveholders of Jamaica, and Virginia. In this they were logical in
their argument, but they were not logical in their object. They saw
plainly that to concede the negro’s right to baptism was to receive
him into the Christian Church, and make him a brother in Christ; and
hence they opposed the first step sternly and bitterly. So long as they
could keep him beyond the circle of human brotherhood, they could
scourge him to toil, as a beast of burden, with a good Christian
conscience, and without reproach. “What!” said they, “baptize a
negro? preposterous!” Nevertheless the negro was baptized and
admitted to church fellowship; and though for a long time his soul
belonged to God, his body to his master, and he poor fellow had
nothing left for himself, he is at last not only baptized, but
emancipated and enfranchised.
In this achievement, an interview with President Andrew
Johnson, on the 7th of February, 1866, by a delegation consisting of
George T. Downing, Lewis H. Douglass, Wm. E. Matthews, John
Jones, John F. Cook, Joseph E. Otis, A. W. Ross, William Whipper,
John M. Brown, Alexander Dunlop, and myself, will take its place in
history as one of the first steps. What was said on that occasion
brought the whole question virtually before the American people.
Until that interview the country was not fully aware of the intentions
and policy of President Johnson on the subject of reconstruction,
especially in respect of the newly emancipated class of the South.
After having heard the brief addresses made to him by Mr. Downing
and myself, he occupied at least three quarters of an hour in what
seemed a set speech, and refused to listen to any reply on our part,
although solicited to grant a few moments for that purpose. Seeing
the advantage that Mr. Johnson would have over us in getting his
speech paraded before the country in the morning papers, the
members of the delegation met on the evening of that day, and
instructed me to prepare a brief reply which should go out to the
country simultaneously with the President’s speech to us. Since this
reply indicates the points of difference between the President and
ourselves, I produce it here as a part of the history of the times, it
being concurred in by all the members of the delegation.
Both the speech and the reply were commented upon very
extensively.
Mr. President: In consideration of a delicate sense of

propriety as well as your own repeated intimations of
indisposition to discuss or listen to a reply to the views and
opinions you were pleased to express to us in your elaborate
speech to-day, the undersigned would respectfully take this
method of replying thereto. Believing as we do that the views
and opinions you expressed in that address are entirely unsound
and prejudicial to the highest interests of our race as well as our
country at large, we cannot do other than expose the same, and,
as far as may be in our power, arrest their dangerous influence.
It is not necessary at this time to call attention to more than two
or three features of your remarkable address:
1. The first point to which we feel especially bound to take
exception, is your attempt to found a policy opposed to our
enfranchisement, upon the alleged ground of an existing hostility
on the part of the former slaves, toward the poor white people of
the South. We admit the existence of this hostility, and hold that
it is entirely reciprocal. But you obviously commit an error by
drawing an argument from an incident of slavery, and making it a
basis for a policy adapted to a state of freedom. The hostility
between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained.
It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited
on both sides by the cunning of the slave master. Those masters
secured their ascendency over both the poor whites and blacks
by putting enmity between them.
They divided both to conquer each. There was no earthly
reason why the blacks should not hate and dread the poor
whites when in a state of slavery, for it was from this class that
their masters received their slave catchers, slave drivers, and
overseers. They were the men called in upon all occasions by
the masters, whenever any fiendish outrage was to be
committed upon the slave. Now, sir, you cannot but perceive,
that the cause of this hatred removed, the effect must be
removed also. Slavery is abolished. The cause of this
antagonism is removed, and you must see, that it is altogether
illogical (and “putting new wine into old bottles”) to legislate from
slaveholding and slave driving premises for a people whom you
have repeatedly declared your purpose to maintain in freedom.
2. Besides, even if it were true as you allege, that the
hostility of the blacks toward the poor whites must necessarily
project itself into a state of freedom, and that this enmity
between the two races is even more intense in a state of
freedom than in a state of slavery, in the name of Heaven, we
reverently ask how can you, in view of your professed desire to
promote the welfare of the black man, deprive him of all means
of defence, and clothe him whom you regard as his enemy in the
panoply of political power? Can it be that you recommend a
policy which would arm the strong and cast down the
defenceless? Can you, by any possibility of reasoning, regard
this as just, fair, or wise? Experience proves that those are most
abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are
whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest. Peace between
races is not to be secured by degrading one race and exalting
another, by giving power to one race and withholding it from
another, but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all
classes. First pure, then peaceable.
3. On the colonization theory you were pleased to broach,
very much could be said. It is impossible to suppose, in view of
the usefulness of the black man in time of peace as a laborer in
the South, and in time of war as a soldier at the North, and the
growing respect for his rights among the people, and his
increasing adaptation to a high state of civilization in his native
land, there can ever come a time when he can be removed from
this country without a terrible shock to its prosperity and peace.
Besides, the worst enemy of the nation could not cast upon its
fair name a greater infamy than to admit that negroes could be
tolerated among them in a state of the most degrading slavery
and oppression, and must be cast away, driven into exile, for no
other cause than having been freed from their chains.
Washington, February 7th, 1866.
From this time onward, the question of suffrage for the freedmen,
was not allowed to rest. The rapidity with which it gained strength,
was something quite marvelous and surprising even to its advocates.
Senator Charles Sumner soon took up the subject in the Senate and
treated it in his usually able and exhaustive manner. It was a great
treat to listen to his argument running through two days, abounding
as it did in eloquence, learning, and conclusive reasoning. A
committee of the Senate had reported a proposition giving to the
States lately in rebellion in so many words complete option as to the
enfranchisement of their colored citizens: only coupling with that
proposition the condition that, to such States as chose to enfranchise
such citizens, the basis of their representation in Congress should be
proportionately increased; or, in other words, only three-fifths of the
colored citizens should be counted in the basis of representation in
States where colored citizens were not allowed to vote, while in the
States granting suffrage to colored citizens, the entire colored people
should be counted in the basis of representation. Against this
proposition, myself and associates addressed to the Senate of the
United States the following memorial:
“To the honorable the Senate of the United States:

“The undersigned, being a delegation representing the
colored people of the several States, and now sojourning in
Washington, charged with the duty to look after the best interests
of the recently emancipated, would most respectfully, but
earnestly, pray your honorable body to favor no amendment of
the Constitution of the United States which will grant any one or
all of the States of this Union to disfranchise any class of citizens
on the ground of race or color, for any consideration whatever.
They would further respectfully represent that the Constitution as
adopted by the fathers of the Republic in 1789, evidently
contemplated the result which has now happened, to wit, the
abolition of slavery. The men who framed it, and those who
adopted it, framed and adopted it for the people, and the whole
people—colored men being at that time legal voters in most of
the States. In that instrument as it now stands, there is not a
sentence or a syllable conveying any shadow of right or authority
by which any State may make color or race a disqualification for
the exercise of the right of suffrage; and the undersigned will
regard as a real calamity the introduction of any words,
expressly or by implication, giving any State or States such
power; and we respectfully submit that if the amendment now
pending before your honorable body shall be adopted, it will
enable any State to deprive any class of citizens of the elective
franchise, notwithstanding it was obviously framed with a view to
affect the question of negro suffrage only.
“For these and other reasons the undersigned respectfully
pray that the amendment to the Constitution, recently passed by
the House and now before your body, be not adopted. And as in
duty bound, etc.”
It was the opinion of Senator Wm. Pitt Fessenden, Senator

Henry Wilson, and many others, that the measure here memorialized
against would, if incorporated into the Constitution, certainly bring
about the enfranchisement of the whole colored population of the
South. It was held by them to be an inducement to the States to
make suffrage universal, since the basis of representation would be
enlarged or contracted, according as suffrage should be extended or
limited; but the judgment of these leaders was not the judgment of
Senator Sumner, Senator Wade, Yates, Howe, and others, or of the
colored people. Yet, weak as this measure was, it encountered the
united opposition of Democratic senators. On that side, the Hon.
Thomas H. Hendricks of Indiana, took the lead in appealing to
popular prejudice against the negro. He contended that among other
objectionable and insufferable results that would flow from its
adoption, would be, that a negro would ultimately be a member of
the United States Senate. I never shall forget the ineffable scorn and
indignation with which Mr. Hendricks deplored the possibility of such
an event. In less, however, than a decade from that debate,
Senators Revels and Bruce, both colored men, had fulfilled the
startling prophecy of the Indiana senator. It was not, however, by the
half-way measure, which he was opposing for its radicalism, but by
the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, that these gentlemen
reached their honorable positions.
In defeating the option proposed to be given to the States, to
extend or deny suffrage to their colored population, much credit is
due to the delegation already named as visiting President Johnson.
That delegation made it their business to personally see and urge
upon leading Republican statesmen the wisdom and duty of impartial
suffrage. Day after day, Mr. Downing and myself saw and conversed
with such members of the Senate, whose advocacy of suffrage
would be likely to insure its success.
The second marked step in effecting the enfranchisement of the
negro, was made at the “National Loyalist’s Convention,” held at
Philadelphia in September, 1866. This body was composed of
delegates from the South, North, and West. Its object was, to diffuse
clear views of the situation of affairs at the South, and to indicate the
principles deemed advisable by it to be observed in the
reconstruction of society in the Southern States.
This convention was, as its history shows, numerously attended
by the ablest and most influential men from all sections of the
country, and its deliberations participated in by them.
The policy foreshadowed by Andrew Johnson (who, by the grace
of the assassin’s bullet, was then in Abraham Lincoln’s seat)—a
policy based upon the idea that the rebel States were never out of
the union, and hence had forfeited no rights which his pardon could
not restore—gave importance to this convention, more than anything
which was then occurring at the South; for through the treachery of
this bold, bad man, we seemed then about to lose nearly all that had
been gained by the war.
I was residing in Rochester at the time, and was duly elected as
a delegate from that city to attend this convention. The honor was a
surprise and a gratification to me. It was unprecedented for a city of
over sixty thousand white citizens and only about two hundred
colored residents, to elect a colored man to represent them in a
national political convention, and the announcement of it gave a
shock to the country of no inconsiderable violence. Many
Republicans, with every feeling of respect for me personally, were
unable to see the wisdom of such a course. They dreaded the
clamor of social equality and amalgamation which would be raised
against the party, in consequence of this startling innovation. They,
dear fellows, found it much more agreeable to talk of the principles of
liberty as glittering generalities, than to reduce those principles to
practice.
When the train on which I was going to the convention reached
Harrisburgh, it met and was attached to another from the West
crowded with Western and Southern delegates on the way to the
convention, and among them were several loyal Governors, chief
among whom was the loyal Governor of Indiana, Oliver P. Morton, a
man of Websterian mould in all that appertained to mental power.
When my presence became known to these gentlemen, a
consultation was immediately held among them, upon the question
as to what was best to do with me. It seems strange now, in view of
all the progress which has been made, that such a question could
arise. But the circumstances of the times made me the Jonah of the
Republican ship, and responsible for the contrary winds and
misbehaving weather. Before we reached Lancaster, on our
eastward bound trip, I was duly waited upon by a committee of my
brother delegates, which had been appointed by other honorable
delegates, to represent to me the undesirableness of my attendance
upon the National Loyalist’s Convention. The spokesman of these
sub-delegates was a gentleman from New Orleans with a very
French name, which has now escaped me, but which I wish I could
recall, that I might credit him with a high degree of politeness and the
gift of eloquence. He began by telling me that he knew my history
and my works, and that he entertained a very high respect for me,
that both himself and the gentlemen who sent him, as well as those
who accompanied him, regarded me with admiration; that there was
not among them the remotest objection to sitting in the convention
with me, but their personal wishes in the matter they felt should be
set aside for the sake of our common cause; that whether I should or
should not go into the convention was purely a matter of expediency;
that I must know that there was a very strong and bitter prejudice
against my race in the North as well as at the South; and that the cry
of social and political equality would not fail to be raised against the
Republican party if I should attend this loyal national convention. He
insisted that it was a time for the sacrifice of my own personal
feeling, for the good of the Republican cause; that there were
several districts in the State of Indiana so evenly balanced that a
very slight circumstance would be likely to turn the scale against us,
and defeat our Congressional candidates, and thus leave Congress
without a two-thirds vote to control the headstrong and treacherous
man then in the presidential chair. It was urged that this was a
terrible responsibility for me or any other man to take.
I listened very attentively to this address, uttering no word during
its delivery; but when it was finished, I said to the speaker and the
committee, with all the emphasis I could throw into my voice and
manner: “Gentlemen, with all respect, you might as well ask me to
put a loaded pistol to my head and blow my brains out, as to ask me
to keep out of this convention, to which I have been duly elected.
Then, gentlemen, what would you gain by this exclusion? Would not
the charge of cowardice, certain to be brought against you, prove
more damaging than that of amalgamation? Would you not be
branded all over the land as dastardly hypocrites, professing
principles which you have no wish or intention of carrying out? As a
mere matter of policy or expediency, you will be wise to let me in.
Everybody knows that I have been duly elected as a delegate by the
city of Rochester. The fact has been broadly announced and
commented upon all over the country. If I am not admitted, the public
will ask, ‘Where is Douglass? Why is he not seen in the convention?’
and you would find that enquiry more difficult to answer than any
charge brought against you for favoring political or social equality;
but, ignoring the question of policy altogether, and looking at it as
one of right and wrong, I am bound to go into that convention; not to
do so, would contradict the principle and practice of my life.” With
this answer, the committee retired from the car in which I was
seated, and did not again approach me on the subject; but I saw
plainly enough then, as well as on the morning when the Loyalist
procession was to march through the streets of Philadelphia, that
while I was not to be formally excluded, I was to be ignored by the
Convention.
I was the ugly and deformed child of the family, and to be kept
out of sight as much as possible while there was company in the
house. Especially was it the purpose to offer me no inducement to
be present in the ranks of the procession of its members and friends,
which was to start from Independence Hall on the first morning of its
meeting.
In good season, however, I was present at this grand starting
point. My reception there confirmed my impression as to the policy
intended to be pursued towards me. Few of the many I knew were
prepared to give me a cordial recognition, and among these few I
may mention Gen. Benj. F. Butler, who, whatever others may say of
him, has always shown a courage equal to his convictions. Almost
everybody else on the ground whom I met seemed to be ashamed or
afraid of me. On the previous night I had been warned that I should
not be allowed to walk through the city in the procession; fears had
been expressed that my presence in it would so shock the prejudices
of the people of Philadelphia, as to cause the procession to be
mobbed.
The members of the convention were to walk two abreast, and
as I was the only colored member of the convention, the question
was, as to who of my brother members would consent to walk with
me? The answer was not long in coming. There was one man
present who was broad enough to take in the whole situation, and
brave enough to meet the duty of the hour; one who was neither
afraid nor ashamed to own me as a man and a brother; one man of
the purest Caucasian type, a poet and a scholar, brilliant as a writer,
eloquent as a speaker, and holding a high and influential position—
the editor of a weekly journal having the largest circulation of any
weekly paper in the city or State of New York—and that man was Mr.
Theodore Tilton. He came to me in my isolation, seized me by the
hand in a most brotherly way, and proposed to walk with me in the
procession.
I have been in many awkward and disagreeable positions in my
life, when the presence of a friend would have been highly valued,
but I think I never appreciated an act of courage and generous
sentiment more highly than I did of this brave young man, when we
marched through the streets of Philadelphia on this memorable day.
Well! what came of all these dark forebodings of timid men? How
was my presence regarded by the populace? and what effect did it
produce? I will tell you. The fears of the loyal Governors who wished
me excluded to propitiate the favor of the crowd, met with a signal
reproof, their apprehensions were shown to be groundless, and they
were compelled, as many of them confessed to me afterwards, to
own themselves entirely mistaken. The people were more
enlightened and had made more progress than their leaders had
supposed. An act for which those leaders expected to be pelted with
stones, only brought to them unmeasured applause. Along the whole
line of march my presence was cheered repeatedly and
enthusiastically. I was myself utterly surprised by the heartiness and
unanimity of the popular approval. We were marching through a city
remarkable for the depth and bitterness of its hatred of the abolition
movement; a city whose populace had mobbed anti-slavery
meetings, burned temperance halls and churches owned by colored
people, and burned down Pennsylvania Hall because it had opened
its doors to people of different colors upon terms of equality. But now
the children of those who had committed these outrages and follies,
were applauding the very principles which their fathers had
condemned. After the demonstrations of this first day, I found myself
a welcome member of the convention, and cordial greeting took the
place of cold aversion. The victory was short, signal, and complete.
During the passage of the procession, as we were marching
through Chestnut street, an incident occurred which excited some
interest in the crowd, and was noticed by the press at the time, and
may perhaps be properly related here as a part of the story of my
eventful life. It was my meeting Mrs. Amanda Sears, the daughter of
my old mistress, Miss Lucretia Auld, the same Lucretia to whom I
was indebted for so many acts of kindness when under the rough
treatment of Aunt Katy, on the “old plantation home” of Col. Edward
Lloyd. Mrs. Sears now resided in Baltimore, and as I saw her on the
corner of Ninth and Chestnut streets, I hastily ran to her, and
expressed my surprise and joy at meeting her. “But what brought you
to Philadelphia at this time?” I asked. She replied, with animated
voice and countenance, “I heard you were to be here, and I came to
see you walk in this procession.” The dear lady, with her two
children, had been following us for hours. Here was the daughter of
the owner of a slave, following with enthusiasm that slave as a free
man, and listening with joy to the plaudits he received as he
marched along through the crowded streets of the great city. And
here I may relate another circumstance which should have found
place earlier in this story, which will further explain the feeling
subsisting between Mrs. Sears and myself.
Seven years prior to our meeting, as just described, I delivered a
lecture in National Hall, Philadelphia, and at its close a gentleman
approached me and said, “Mr. Douglass, do you know that your once
mistress has been listening to you to-night?” I replied that I did not,
nor was I inclined to believe it. The fact was, that I had four or five
times before had a similar statement made to me by different
individuals in different states, and this made me skeptical in this
instance. The next morning, however, I received a note from a Mr.
Wm. Needles, very elegantly written, which stated that she who was
Amanda Auld, daughter of Thomas and Lucretia Auld, and
granddaughter to my old master, Capt. Aaron Anthony, was now
married to Mr. John L. Sears, a coal merchant in West Philadelphia.
The street and number of Mr. Sears’s office was given, so that I
might, by seeing him, assure myself of the facts in the case, and
perhaps learn something of the relatives whom I left in slavery. This
note, with the intimation given me the night before, convinced me
there was something in it, and I resolved to know the truth. I had now
been out of slavery twenty years, and no word had come to me from
my sisters, or my brother Perry, or my grandmother. My separation
had been as complete as if I had been an inhabitant of another
planet. A law of Maryland at that time visited with heavy fine and
imprisonment any colored person who should come into the State;
so I could not go to them any more than they could come to me.
Eager to know if my kinsfolk still lived, and what was their
condition, I made my way to the office of Mr. Sears, found him in,
and handed him the note I had received from Mr. Needles, and
asked him to be so kind as to read it and tell me if the facts were as
there stated. After reading the note, he said it was true, but he must
decline any conversation with me, since not to do so would be a
sacrifice to the feelings of his father-in-law. I deeply regretted his
decision, and spoke of my long separation from my relations, and
appealed to him to give me some information concerning them. I saw
that my words were not without their effect. Presently he said, “You
publish a newspaper, I believe?” “I do,” I said, “but if that is your
objection to speaking with me, no word shall go into its columns of
our conversation.” To make a long story short, we had then quite a
long conversation, during which Mr. Sears said that in my “Narrative”
I had done his father-in-law injustice, for he was really a kind-hearted
man, and a good master. I replied that there must be two sides to the
relation of master and slave, and what was deemed kind and just to
the one was the opposite to the other. Mr. Sears was not disposed to
be unreasonable, and the longer we talked the nearer we came
together. I finally asked permission to see Mrs. Sears, the little girl of
seven or eight years when I left the eastern shore of Maryland. This
request was a little too much for him at first, and he put me off by
saying that she was a mere child when I last saw her, and she was
now the mother of a large family of children, and I would not know
her. He could tell me everything about my people as well as she. I
pressed my suit, however, insisting that I could select Miss Amanda
out of a thousand other ladies, my recollection of her was so perfect,
and begged him to test my memory at this point. After much parley
of this nature, he at length consented to my wishes, giving me the
number of his house and name of street, with permission to call at
three o’clock P. M. on the next day. I left him delighted, and prompt
to the hour was ready for my visit. I dressed myself in my best, and
hired the finest carriage I could get to take me, partly because of the
distance, and partly to make the contrast between the slave and the
free man as striking as possible. Mr. Sears had been equally
thoughtful. He had invited to his house a number of friends to
witness the meeting between Mrs. Sears and myself.
I was somewhat disconcerted when I was ushered into the large
parlors occupied by about thirty ladies and gentlemen, to all of whom
I was a perfect stranger. I saw the design to test my memory by
making it difficult for me to guess who of the company was “Miss
Amanda.” In her girlhood she was small and slender, and hence a
thin and delicately formed lady was seated in a rocking chair near
the center of the room with a little girl by her side. The device was
good, but it did not succeed. Glancing around the room, I saw in an
instant the lady who was a child twenty-five years before, and the
wife and mother now. Satisfied of this, I said, “Mr. Sears, if you will
allow me, I will select Miss Amanda from this company.” I started

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Not In Their Name: Are Citizens

Culpable For Their States' Actions?

Not In Their Name

NEW TOPICS IN APPLIED PHILOSOPHY

The Inheritance of Wealth

Not In Their Name

Not In Their Name

Part Two: Responsibility 116

This research was supported by a Marie Curie grant from the

For discussion on the various chapters in this book I am grateful to

There are many actions that we attribute, at least colloquially, to

    

But how should we think about culpability for these kinds of

features both hierarchical relations between members, and nested

    

Instead of simply taking that for granted, Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are

    

If we can’t get citizens’ culpability for states’ unjust actions, as I will

To ﬁgure out who is culpable for what states do (and in some

    

Further complicating matters, it is likely that there are multiple

    ? 

If ‘Australia’ just is Malcolm Turnbull,2 then there are not even

    

The state as a person of international law should possess the following

    ? 

    

themselves, and this sovereign has control over a permanent popula-

Democracy attempts a natural extension of the duty of autonomy to the

    ? 

they have together judged to be right. The government of a democratic state

Wolff thinks that autonomy always trumps authority. Just as a

    

There are two further models: Organisational Processes, and Bur-

    ? 

    

II. Citizen-Inclusive States

    ? 

Montevideo Convention, and the one that follows Rousseau, which

    

blameworthy, that is, ﬁnd it to be appropriate that they are blamed.

    ? 

III. Membership: Location, Legal Status,

    

essential about these particular people, but rather merely important

    ? 

    

who can join in protests and participate in public deliberations both

    ? 

causal contribution to what another individual agent does, without

    

In short, the right to vote seems to capture much of what is intuitive

IV. Membership: Normative Interaction,

    ? 

    

New Zealand will in fact alleviate the suffering of some of the

    ? 

there has been a transformation in their content, for the reasons

    

things roughly (but not perfectly) correct, such as holding a formal

    ? 

a reciprocal relation of robust duty-transfer; in practice (heuristically)

V. States as the Formal Apparatus