Citizen Responsibility and the Reactive Attitudes: Blaming Americans for War Crimes in Iraq

This chapter takes seriously the notion that individuals may bear responsibility for the transgressions of their group even where they do not bear the hallmarks of individual culpability. More specifically, I shall contend that citizenship itself can ground responsibility for the crimes of one’s nation-state. I seek to locate and interrogate the grounds upon which we may, in the first instance, hold group members responsible for a transgression of their group. The focus here is then on responsibility assigned directly to members, and not derivative of the responsibility of the group.The account of citizen responsibility that I advance differs from an individualist account insofar as it severs moral and causal responsibility: I argue that the citizen may bear moral responsibility even though she did not participate in, facilitate, or even tolerate the abuses committed in her midst. The account also severs the notions of guilt and blameworthiness: I argue that the citizen may be an appropriate object of blame (and hence appropriately subject to resentment and indignation) even though she need not conceive of herself as guilty. Finally, I suggest that this fracturing of the traditional troika of guilt, resentment, and indignation has implications for the way we think about moral responsibility more generally.I begin by articulating an account of the relationship between the citizen and her nation-state that grounds the citizen’s responsibility for a transgression of her nation-state independent of the extent of her participation in that transgression. I do not anticipate, however, that that account will induce guilt in every American who encounters it. The resistance to guilt is itself interesting and, in the second Part of the paper, I seek to investigate its source. To that end, I undertake an exploration of the moral psychology of guilt and resentment, especially as these emotions pertain to understandings of responsibility for war crimes among members of the perpetrator and victim populations. I end by gesturing to the ways in which the account challenges accepted truths about moral responsibility and its relationship to the reactive attitudes

Responsibility for Historical Injustices: Reconceiving the Case for Reparations

The twentieth century ended with the vindication of many of its most mistreated victims\u27 cries for reparation.2 Holocaust survivors retrieved over $8 billion in assets frozen in bank accounts or looted by the Nazis;3 Japanese Americans interned during World War II received compensation from the U.S. government;4 Chile compensated descendants of Pinochet\u27s victims;5 Japan redressed Korean comfort women ; 6 and Canada paid damages to Aboriginals for forced assimilation of their children.7 Absent from the list was the longest suffering and most visible of groups seeking repair - African Americans.

The Unemotional Corporation

Because corporations are not capable of experiencing emotions, we should stop thinking of them as persons. Corporations are monsters – not in the sense that they are hell-bent on evil but in the sense that they lack certain capacities that are the hallmarks of our humanity. In particular, and like most supernatural creatures populating both mythology and the movieplex, corporations lack the ability to appreciate what it might feel like to be the victim of a wrong and, not unrelatedly, the ability to feel bad when they do wrong. To put it in our folk terminology, the corporation lacks a heart

Burdening Substantial Burdens

In Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, the Supreme Court held that religious believers could establish that their free exercise was substantially burdened just so long as they—or the corporation they had formed—believed that it was. This highly deferential stance paved the way for yet another challenge to the contraceptive mandate. In Zubik, religious organizations (ROs) contend that it is not just subsidization of contraception that can make an employer complicit in contraception use. Instead, even filling out a form registering one’s objection to the mandate can do so. The government has responded by vigorously arguing that filling out a form cannot reasonably be construed as a substantial burden. One can read the Court’s per curiam opinion as an implicit endorsement of the RO’s claim that the accommodation process substantially burdens their free exercise. Nonetheless, without a decision on the merits, it is not clear just why the ROs should prevail on the substantial burden question. Nor do the parties’ submissions provide the needed clarity as the arguments on each side are irredeemably flawed. Or so at any rate I argue here. I nonetheless believe that there is good reason for ROs to contest the accommodation process, as it requires that the ROs ratify contraceptive use, in contravention of their religious beliefs. On these grounds, I find that the existing process imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise. But I also take seriously the rationale behind the contraceptive mandate and I conclude by seeking to vindicate women’s rights to free contraception in ways that the ROs should find congenial

Defense of Others and Defensless Others

When the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA) was signed into law on April 1, 2004,1 the federal government dishonored nothing less pedigreed than its founding philosophy. The UVVA criminalizes harm to the fetus and sanctions such harm with the punishment that would have befallen the accused had the women carrying the fetus been the one to sustain the injuries instead.2 This Article argues that recent efforts at fetal protection, like the UVVA, defy and defile liberalism, the political theory underpinning this nation\u27s constitution,3 and thereby conduce to the subordination of women.

Free Speech and Off-Label Rights

When a litigant invokes a constitutional right toprotect interests different from the ones underpinningthe right, he engages in what this Article calls anoff-label rights exercise. The Free Speech Clause hasrecently become an especially prominent, and troubling,site of off-label rights exercises. Two of the mostprominent cases in the Supreme Court’s last terminvolved litigants who invoked their constitutionalrights to free speech to protect interests unrelated tospeech or expression. In Janus v. American Federationof State, County, & Municipal Employees, a stateemployee argued that forcing him to pay for the union’sbargaining activities violated his rights againstcompelled speech. But the union would be speaking forhim—representing him along with all of his fellowemployees in labor negotiations—whether or not he wasmade to pay union dues. His free speech claim was thena smoke screen used to protect a purely pecuniaryinterest—or an off-label rights exercise, and anopportunistic one at that.Second, in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. ColoradoCivil Rights Commission, a baker who opposed same-sexmarriage on religious grounds argued that requiringhim to provide custom wedding cakes to same-sexcouples violated his free speech rights. But, as in Janus, speech was incidental to the baker’s true interest. Hadthe Court granted the baker’s free speech claim—findingthat he could deny a gay couple a wedding cake withunique artistic designs but still requiring him to providean unadorned cake—the baker would likely have beenno better off. For speech or artistry does not implicate awedding vendor in a same-sex marriage any more thana non-expressive contribution does. Here, too, then thefree speech claim was off-label—an effort to leverage thelaw’s greater solicitude for speech relative to religiousfreedom even while the baker does not have theexpressive interests grounding constitutional rights tofree speech.This Article uses cases like the baker’s, which theCourt will almost surely revisit, to advance a theory ofthe proper scope of constitutional rights, distinguishingbetween on- and off-label rights invocations. To that end,the Article’s first aim is to establish that artistic weddingvendors’ invocations of the Free Speech Clause are infact off-label.The Article’s second and larger aim is to critiqueoff-label constitutional rights exercises. This Articleargues that every off-label rights exercise demeans theasserted right and risks creating intolerable inequalityrelative to the person who shares the litigant’s trueinterest but who cannot make her claim fit within thecontours of the misappropriated right. For that reason,the Article concludes that courts have good reason todeny off-label rights claims—especially in cases like thewedding vendor challenges

The Challenges of Conscience in a World of Compromise

The process of crafting and passing legislation might be thought to be the locus of compromise par excellence.1 Yet, where the law that results impinges upon moral or religious belief or practice, the issue of compromise arises anew, in both senses of the word: Individuals who oppose the law on moral or religious grounds believe that their political obedeience will compromise them in a fundamental way. Their plea for an exemption from the objectionable legal requirement is, then, a bid for further compromise.2 Compromise in the first sense concerns an undercutting of the self, while compromise in the second sense involves a grant of concessions. Yet, unlike compromises that arise in the legislative process, or at least in some ideal version of it,3 the compromise involved in an exemption from a neutral law of general application involves neither an exchange of benefits nor the prospect of mutual benefit-two hallmarks of compromise in, say, political (and other) negotiations.4 There are several reasons to doubt the wisdom or fairness of the requested exemptions, then