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Responsibility and Judgement in a World of Complexity

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Responsibility and Judgement in a World of Complexity Responsibility and Judgement in a World of Complexity David Chandler (Centre for Global Cooperation Research) [email protected] Draft presentation at the workshop 'Responsibility and Judgement in a World of Complexity', Institute for Development and Peace (INEF), Universität Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany, 4 February 2013 Comments welcome 1 Responsibility and Judgement in a World of Complexity Abstract This article seeks to analyze the ‘socialisation’ of responsibility as a product of the non-linear understanding of politics in an age of complexity. Modernist notions of both political and person responsibility presupposed the moral and political autonomy of the choice-making subject. This analysis explores the consequences of moral autonomy no longer being the grounding assumption of our complex world, with the implication being a much more process-based and socially-embedded understanding of the human subject. In our globalized, complex and interconnected world it is held that moral responsibility has a flatter and more democratic ontology. The world increasingly appears to indirectly reflect societally-shaped human behavioural choices – such as anthropogenic carbon emissions – through complex ‘emergent’ processes that are contingent yet deterministic. The attention to the social relations and interconnections increasingly removes both political and personal responsibility from the world as moral constructs. Discourses of responsibility thus facilitate new paternalist practices of intervention in both the private sphere and across international boundaries, problematising decision-making autonomy at the same time as reifying the relations of the market. Keywords ethics, responsibility, complexity, resilience, new paternalism Introduction Under liberal modernity there were two types of ethical frameworks, reflecting the division between the public and private spheres. These could be framed as deontological (framed from ethical first principles, in a Kantian understanding) and instrumental (based on ethical responsibilities to pursue certain goals of protecting lives or the national interest etc.). This classical division was clearly articulated by the first modern political theorist, Machiavelli, in his view that government needed a specific ethical approach, which enabled it to instrumentally pursue its interests. We can also see it at play in Max Weber’s famous division between ‘the ethics of responsibility’ and ‘the ethics of conviction’ – the first being doing what is right to achieve a goal and the second being the Kantian deontological framing.1 A more sceptical approach to the ‘ethics of responsibility’ was posited by Marxists, Realists and critical theorists (E. H. Carr being a leading example in international relations)2 who argued that all ethical frameworks reflected or naturalized the needs of power, with Trotsky famously advocating the divide between ‘Their Morals and Ours’.3 De-ontological ethics also presupposes the separation of the subject from the world. An ‘ethics of conviction’ depends on a strong sense of self, in fact, on the understanding that responsibility is a private matter of living with the self. This is articulated well in Socratic ethics that ‘it is better to suffer wrong, rather than to do wrong’ or ‘to be in disagreement with the world, rather than in disagreement with your self’.4 The ‘ethics of conviction’ differ from the ‘ethics of responsibility’ in that they are the ethics of the personal and private sphere. They have no external 2 grounding and hence an arbitrary, messianic and destabilising character, if they were to enter the public and political sphere. As Weber notes: ‘The man who embraces an ethics of conviction is unable to tolerate the ethical irrationality of the world. He is a cosmic, ethical “rationalist”.’5 The ethics of conviction can protest against the world, sometimes with hugely destructive consequences, but it is not interested in transforming the world, and there is no responsibility for the world as such.6 In a globalized and complex world, it is increasingly held that there is no longer a distinction between public ethics and personal ethics or between deontological and instrumentalist understandings of ethics. It is regularly argued that rationalist framings of the subject need to be rejected; that we are not somehow subjects separate or distinct from the world in which we live.7 Instead, we realize that we are entirely embedded and dependent upon our external environment and our social contexts.8 Rather than having decision-making autonomy, individuals are understood to have a constricted or bounded rationality, shaped by past experiences and by the associational practices and ideational processes in which they are embedded.9 In effect, the individual is no longer seen as an isolated actor but as a social product. It is also argued that our responsibilities expand in this world as our actions are inserted into powerful processes of complex global interaction, extending the impact of our individual actions and choices.10 In a globalized world, the most important impacts of our choices and decisions are unintentional, or are ‘side effects’ in the language of Ulrich Beck.11 This makes it very difficult to judge where responsibility lies for the world and to provide a moral compass for our everyday lives. In this way, responsibility has been democratised or societalised – discursive framings of responsibility have the imprint of societal inter-relations and associations rather than of the rationalist liberal subject. This article seeks to articulate how societal understandings of ethics operate to blur both the ethical responsibilities of the individual and those of states while instituting new understandings of inter-relational responsibility. These problem-solving or world- attentive ethics of resilience do not operate on the basis of modernist ethics, of a separation between the subject and the world. There is neither the public ethics of political ‘responsibility’ nor the private, deontological, ethics of ‘conviction’. Resilience discursively abolishes the divide between subject and object and that between the public and the private. For this reason, Weber’s assumption that: ‘We need to be clear that all ethically orientated action can be guided by either of two fundamentally different, irredeemably incompatible maxims:… an “ethics of conviction” or an “ethics of responsibility”’,12 needs to be rethought for politics in the age of complexity. In a world of complexity and non-linearity, ethical responsibility for our actions is dependent upon the processes into which they are inserted, dependent upon our complex associational attachments and our reflexive understandings of these. The field of ethical and political responsibility is therefore defined neither by our personal nor our public choices but by our embeddedness in emergent chains of causality.13 The following section considers the rise of ‘new paternalist’ understandings as a shift away from the liberal paternalist constructions of the 1990s, in which the West 3 assumed traditional political responsibilities for the outcomes of intervention, while assuming that ‘criminal’ elites and individuals bore sole responsibility for war crimes and human rights abuses. Traditional paternalism works on the basis of direct responsibilities, assuming direct political and legal authority over subjects, denied equal rights,14 the following sections discuss the evolution of what I describe as ‘new paternalism’, which works on the basis of indirect assumptions of responsibility, not the basis of legal, moral or political responsibility but on the basis of the ethics of resilience, the understanding of indirect side-effects caused by our embedded nature and our associational connectivity in a complex and globalised world. At the heart of new paternalism is the reification of market relations and outcomes. On the international level, powerful Western states take responsibility for the unintended or indirect outcomes of market forces and their institutional frameworks, this is neither political nor moral responsibility but a sociological recognition of the side- effects of complex global associational interconnections and their emergent properties. The sociologisation or societalisation of inequalities and conflicts argues that the world is irrational: that outcomes of liberal frameworks of political and legal freedoms and market exchange, in a world of difference and different temporalities, can reproduce inequalities and become a barrier to progress. Marxists are therefore right that the market is irrational and can reproduce inequality, where they are wrong is in the assumption that we can somehow stand outside the associational interconnections of a globalised world. The sociologisation of the market, as a self- emerging complex and adaptive process of indirect chains of connection and causation, in which we all embedded at different levels with different consequences, removes the liberal understanding of direct political or ethical responsibility for our choices. The ethical and political duties emerging from these indirect responsibilities operate on a different register to the traditional liberal framing of law, sovereignty, rights and intervention as, for the sociologically embedded subject, there is no assumption of pre-existing autonomy. Two examples of this framing of indirect responsibility are analyzed in the work of Paul Collier and Thomas Pogge. In conclusion, I will suggest that the flatter ontology
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