Political theorists are familiar with the idea, captured vividly by Hobbes’s Leviathan (and its cover’s image), that the state can be viewed as an artificial person, a collective agent, that in theory is authorized by the people and acts on their behalf. For Hobbes, this narrative of authorization and collective agency meant that the sovereign can do no wrong, morally speaking. But what if we follow the more common intuition that the state can sometimes (or often) use its enormous power to wrong citizens and noncitizens? The two books reviewed here explore this question. They begin with this familiar conception of political authority as collective agency and explore questions of responsibility in the context of moral wrongdoing. They do so in rigorous, innovative, and interesting ways. Much can be learned by contrasting the respective fashion in which they take up the question of responsibility, and this review focuses on comparing their approaches.

The central question for Holly Lawford-Smith’s Not in Their Name: Are Citizens Culpable For Their States’ Actions? is whether ordinary citizens can be viewed as culpable for the wrong actions of the state. To address this question the book focuses on the relationship between collective agents and the individuals who partake in their activities. The basic units of this account are individuals who join together in shared projects to advance their goals with various degrees of intentionality, coordination, and organization. At the core of the framework is a distinction between strong, moderate, and weak conceptions of collective agency, merged with a realist empirical understanding of democracy. The participation of many citizens in contemporary democratic life is very minimal, typically no more than in casting their vote once every four years. They can be understood as part of the state as a collective agent only in the weak sense of sharing the broad intention of establishing a government. Voters cannot be viewed as having jointly accepted all or even most of the particular rules of the democratic process, let alone be viewed as having control over the way their government makes or revises decisions. Further, the weak sense of corporate agency created by periodic voting cannot be viewed as moral agency. Citizens do not have access to the evidence required to make the necessary moral judgments, and they do not have enough control over governmental action to respond to the moral judgments they do form. In contrast, Lawford-Smith argues that government employees and officeholders can be viewed as constituting a collective moral agent in the strong meaning of the term, because they intentionally joined the government and in doing so explicitly agreed to the set of rules by which it operates.

Based on this distinction and with the aid of various thought experiments, Lawford-Smith concludes that citizens cannot be viewed as sharing collective responsibility for state action (hence the book’s main title, Not in Their Name). The book examines other forms of responsibility, suggesting that it is harder to apply active forms of responsibility— commissioning, coercion, and complicity—but easier to hold citizens accountable for “passive” forms of responsibility, such as in association with those who partake in committing wrongdoing and benefiting from it, enjoying privilege by virtue of being citizens of that country, or in having a capacity to help when a wrong is done. In contrast, those who are part of the formal organization of government can be viewed as culpable. The book examines questions related to the morality of different ways of turning culpability into punishment, based on considerations related to the structure of the hierarchy of the organization.

I find Lawford-Smith’s distinction between culpability and various types of responsibility useful. But I wonder if her focus on rigid analytic categories (and not on social theory, as I discuss at the end of the review) makes her account downplay the responsibility of ordinary citizens. If, as a matter of definition, our standards of responsibility require that we make a case for why every ordinary individual who innocently lives his or her humdrum life should be held responsible for the decisions of upper-level government officials, it is not surprising that we are likely to let them off the hook. But I think those who make a stronger case for the responsibility of citizens usually rely on a stratified account of society that accounts for different levels of responsibility or even culpability. To be sure, there is nothing in Lawford-Smith’s framework that would be opposed to such a differentiated account. In fact, the framework and considerations that she offers can be useful for those who want to work with a stratified account; in general, however, she focuses on whether it is plausible to hold all citizens responsible, and her discussions on issues such as privilege or capacity to influence does not follow differentiated paths in any systematic way.

Shmuel Nili’s The People’s Duty: Collective Agency and the Morality of Public Policy addresses similar ideas to those of Lawford-Smith but from a different perspective and by relying on a different social ontology. For Lawford-Smith, the focus is on individuals and the processes through which they interlock their actions. For Nili, the collective agent in question is “the people,” members of a political community who share civic bonds. “The people” in this book does not stand for an empirical account of the actual bonds that tie together members of a nation state. Rather, “the people” is a stand-in for a moral framework that allows discussion of how members of a self-governing territorial unit should think of themselves.

Nili recognizes that, in the real world, political action sometimes requires a difficult balancing of competing values under conditions of uncertainty, which may lead to questionable and difficult choices. Realist political theorists often tacitly assume that those who make these tough decisions are political leaders and that they should make these decisions behind closed doors. Nili proposes to bring these dilemmas into the open. A realistic normative political theory should not be based on a conception of peoplehood that views people as a naive or innocent entity. Rather, normative political theory should recognize tough dilemmas and provide guidance for how to address them. Thus, whereas Lawford-Smith discusses who should be culpable for wrongdoings done by the state as a collective agent, Nili is interested in the question of what constitutes wrongdoing in the first place, given that politics is often a “dirty” enterprise.

To answer this question, Nili presents the ideas of the people’s integrity and the people’s property. In contrast to Lawford-Smith’s individualist and constructivist account of collective moral agency, Nili presents an interpretive understanding of the people as a collective agent. People are not bound by shared intentions but by an identity, which consists of shared liberal values that are woven together by a story that narrates the history of how the people forged a civic bond; often this story emphasizes a struggle against oppression and for equal rights under a system based on the rule of law. The people’s identity weaves together shared values but in a way that is somewhat inconclusive and open to different interpretations. Thus, the idea of integrity is not sufficient guidance for determining the best public policies. There are multiple policies that are consistent with a liberal identity that has integrity. Just as an individual person who has integrity can deal with a difficult or messy moral situation in a dignified way, liberal people can do the same. But there are policies that cannot be consistent with the idea of integrity under any interpretation. The idea of the people’s integrity can provide guidance for which policies should never be pursued and how to address complex situations. For example, even though a particular policy, such as providing loans to corrupt but friendly leaders, might appear excusable in the context of policies related to international development, it cannot be consistent with a whole set of other values that are central to a liberal identity and therefore cannot meet the standard of integrity.

The idea of the people’s integrity is supplemented by the idea that the nation’s property ultimately belongs to the people as a collective agent. The institution of private property is not a natural or primordial arrangement but a social convention that should be viewed as made by the people in a manner consistent with their identity. In this context, Nili is not interested in deriving any redistribution implications from this idea (one may wonder why not—are significant economic inequalities consistent with the idea of the people’s integrity?). Rather, the idea of private property as a social convention serves as an additional lens through which to assess and weigh imperfect public policy options in the real world. This is particularly relevant in dilemmas related to the ousting of corrupt leaders. In these cases, it may appear tempting from a consequentialist future-oriented perspective to just let them go away without insisting on recouping the money they have stolen. The people’s property perspective cautions against such calculations, because in creating the impression that leaders are somehow entitled to privately benefit from proximity to public resources, they undermine the very principle of the people’s property.

In his book, Nili applies the ideas of the public’s integrity and the public’s property to a variety of policy issues related to domestic and international politics. In my view, the path from abstract normative principles to concrete policy issues is often more complicated and contentious than Nili makes it out to be. However, there is no doubt that Nili’s masterful use of real-world examples is helpful in grounding the discussion and making it easier to disagree with him. Rather than belaboring questions about specific policy claims, I want to raise a more general question about the theoretical framework used to arrive at these conclusions. Sharing Nili’s liberal inclinations, I find the idea that the government should be of the people appealing. Still, I wonder whether the notion of a liberal people with a singular identity that is based on a shared story can—and should—have traction as a moral ideal in our global and deeply pluralistic political world. Would a demand for integrity end up prioritizing one narrative of peoplehood, however benign and inclusive it appears, and marginalizing other plausible liberal identities? To make the point slightly differently, in contrast to Lawford-Smith, Nili takes the “people” and their liberal identity as given without any discussion of the processes—democratic or otherwise—through which the individuals who happen to reside in a territory are constituted as a people. I believe that fleshing out the procedural dimensions of people-making would make the reliance on “integrity” as a moral standard more difficult.

It is difficult to do justice in the context of a short review to the richness and sophistication of the analyses of these two books. However, given the focus of this review on their general approaches, I want to point out that both books choose to address questions of responsibility by bringing together moral and political theory without dealing with questions of social theory. Both books treat moral wrongs as a fact of life that needs to be reckoned with. They have almost nothing to say about the social conditions in which these wrongs are done as possible factors in our moral judgment. The main characters in Lawford-Smith’s account are individual citizens, officeholders, and government employees in various state agencies; for Nili they are the people (understood as a collective agent), politicians and bureaucrats, and corrupt leaders. Neither author discusses in any sustained way thicker social factors such as domestic and global social hierarchies, investments and multinational corporations, international power dynamics, the media environment, and the like (Nili’s discussion of group conflicts in Israeli society considers some deep social divisions but in a fairly stylized form). Again, it is debatable if social theory is relevant for our moral judgment and, if so, how. My intention here is not to fault these books for failing to take social theory into account but only to point out the choices their authors have made as food for future thinking on this important topic. Regardless, both books are highly valuable in their own right and are recommended for anyone who is interested in questions of collective moral agency and responsibility.