Silence as complicity and action as silence

Philosophical Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02246-z Silence as complicity and action as silence J. L. A. Donohue1 Accepted: 6 October 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Silence sometimes constitutes moral complicity. We see this when protestors take to the streets against racial injustice. Think of signs with the words: “Silence is complicity.” We see this in instances of sexual harassment, when we learn that many knew and said nothing. We see this in cases of wrongdoing within a company or organization, when it becomes clear that many were aware of the negligent or criminal activity and stayed silent. In cases like this we consider agents morally complicit in virtue of their silence. Flagrant injustices cry out for action, and sometimes remaining silent amounts to complicity in those injustices. What philosophy owes us is an account of how it could be that silence constitutes complicity. In this paper I argue that one possibility is an account grounded in problematic deliberative contribution. The core idea of “deliberative complicity,” as I call it, is that agents have moral duties concerning the moral deliberation of other agents, and failures in these duties can amount to moral complicity. For example, an agent aware that a colleague is sexually harassing his students has a deliberative obligation to report the misconduct, and their silence in failing to report constitutes a failure to fulfill their deliberative obligation, a failure that grounds their moral complicity in the harassment. If my argument is successful, it provides a distinctive reason to prefer a deliberative account of moral complicity: it can capture cases of silent complicity that other views of moral complicity cannot. And further, by turning our attention toward our interpersonal deliberative obligations, a deliberative account of complicity can incorporate helpful resources from recent work in social epistemology and speech act theory as we set out to determine when and why silence amounts to complicity. And when it does, we cannot stay silent. We must speak. Keywords Moral complicity · Silence · Expressive action · Moral responsibility · Duty to Object; Deliberative Duties There comes a time when silence is betrayal. - Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence (1967) * J. L. A. Donohue 1 University of Arkansas, 318 Old Main, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA Vol.:(0123456789) J. L. A. Donohue 1 Introduction Silence sometimes constitutes moral complicity1. We see this when protestors take to the streets against racial injustice. Think of signs with the words: “Silence is complicity.” We see this in instances of sexual harassment, when we learn that many knew and said nothing. We see this in cases of wrongdoing within a company or organization, when it becomes clear that many were aware of the negligent or criminal activity and stayed silent. In cases like this we consider agents morally complicit in virtue of their silence. Flagrant injustices cry out for action, and sometimes remaining silent amounts to complicity in those injustices. What philosophy owes us is an account of how it could be that silence constitutes complicity. But two major extant philosophical views of moral complicity are based on (1) causal contribution, on the one hand, and (2) intentional participation, on the other2. And silence is difficult to classify as either of these. It doesn’t seem that one of the silent bystanders to sexual harassment needs to causally contribute to the harassment through his silence in order to count as complicit. Nor does it seem that he needs to participate intentionally in order to count as complicit. Of course sometimes an agent might remain silent as a way of participating intentionally in wrongdoing, such as when a museum security guard purposefully fails to sound an alarm as a thief passes by. But these sorts of explanations won’t cover all cases of silent complicity. Sometimes we are complicit in virtue of our silence even though we do not intend to participate in or support anything at all by staying silent. Since views of complicity based on intentional participation and causal contribution cannot explain silence as complicity, philosophy has work to do: we need an account of moral complicity that can make sense of silence. What might such an account look like? In this paper I argue that one possibility is an account grounded in problematic deliberative contribution. The core idea of “deliberative complicity,” as I call it, is that agents have moral duties concerning the moral deliberation of other agents, and failures in these duties can amount to moral complicity. For example, an agent aware that a colleague is sexually harassing his students has a deliberative obligation to report the misconduct, and their silence in failing to report constitutes a failure to fulfill their deliberative obligation, a failure that grounds their moral complicity in the harassment. In addition to providing a promising explanation of how silence can amount to moral complicity, deliberative complicity allows us to extend in a novel way recent research in speech act theory and social epistemology to the ethical domain of moral complicity. For instance, Jennifer Lackey (2018, 2020, 2021a, 2021b) argues that there is a duty to object when others assert content that we take to be false or misleading. Sanford Goldberg (2020) argues that we are entitled to assume that those who are part of a conversation and remain silent in the face of an assertion don’t 1 Throughout, I focus on moral and not legal complicity. Though the categories are not unrelated, they are distinct (Mellema 2011, 2016, 1–2). 2 For examples of causation-based accounts, see Gardner (2004, 2007), Petersson (2013), and Jensen (2020). For examples of intentions-based accounts, see Kutz (2000, 2007), Lepora & Goodin (2015), and Barzagan (2013). Silence as complicity and action as silence object to the content of that assertion. Ishani Maitra (2012) argues that silent observers can grant authority to speakers in cases of hate speech. Mary-Kate McGowarn (2004, 2009, 2012) argues that speech acts can themselves not only cause but also constitute harm3. A. G. Holdier argues that some silences—particularly silences he calls slurring silences—can harm directly (2024). Insights from these areas of philosophy have not been taken up by moral complicity researchers, though, who have often focused not on speech, content, and our responsibility for the beliefs of others but rather our causal and intentional participation in the world4. Taking my view of moral complicity, one based on deliberation instead of causation or intention, can help us to see that these insights from other areas of philosophy have much to say about when and why we are complicit, when we are5. A deliberative account of moral complicity faces an important and distinctive problem, though, a problem that does not face the two extant philosophic (...truncated)