Collective Responsibility and Political Obligation: Shklar and the Failure That Binds

Abstract

Theories of political obligation investigate the conditions under which individuals are bound to their polity, while theories of collective responsibility examine the mechanisms through which a collective’s wrongdoing is attributed to its members. This paper argues that these are two formulations of a single underlying question, approached from opposite directions, and that both literatures falter for the same structural reason. Each seeks a standing relation between an individual and a collective from which a normative requirement can be derived. Voluntarist relations, such as consent and causal contribution, yield determinate obligations but apply to too few agents, whereas structural relations, such as membership and social connection, extend to all agents but fail to differentiate among them. The resulting dilemma stems from the form of the inquiry rather than from any particular candidate relation, since any relation specified independently of an agent’s actions will inevitably obtain of either too many or too few agents. The paper turns to Shklar, who inverts this approach by theorising injustice rather than justice, taking the victim rather than the agent as her starting point, and introducing the category of passive injustice to mark a failure rather than to provide a justificatory ground. This category addresses both questions simultaneously: a citizen’s failure to oppose a wrong she was in a position to oppose constitutes, under a single description, both her breach of political obligation and her share in the collective’s responsibility. Shklar’s distinction between obligation and loyalty in turn explains why the two literatures have developed in relative isolation from one another.