Enriching Responsiveness to Complicity through a Disposition towards World-in-Formation

Abstract

This article contributes to debates on complicity in injustice and violence by deepening the recent efforts to map out an ethics of responsiveness to complicity. The ethics of responsiveness aims to increase the affective engagement of people who disproportionately benefit from domination, exploitation, and exclusion, with the impact of their complicity on others. It articulates different strategies for tackling the dispositions that help the privileged disavow complicity. To extend the responsiveness approach, this article builds on Hannah Arendt’s theorisation of the relationship between politics, reality, and responsibility. A turn to Arendt helps us respond to the political problem of an erosion of the frameworks of judgement and action across society that enable critical engagement with complicity. I argue that the problem adds a burden on the privileged to strengthen and protect the institutions and processes that allow us to come to terms with reality together by developing a disposition towards ‘world-in-formation.’

A critical realist contribution to debates on complicity in systemic injustice and violence

“…She also recuperates a different conception of shared responsibility in Arendt's thought that specifically is linked to people's (in-)action. Young thus moves us beyond a focus on culpability and blameworthiness, through her more refined sense of social conditioning, but she also retains an insistence that responsibility and complicity are tied to past action (Vogler, 2020).…”