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Symposium on Just Responsibility: Ackerly response

It is a profound compliment that Robyn Eckersley, Michael Goodhart, Luis Cabrera, and Kristi Kenyon have engaged so thoughtfully with the arguments of Just Responsibility. In their treatments, the book speaks to the literatures of responsibility (Eckersley), global justice (Cabrera), ideal moral theory (Goodhart), and critical theories of knowledge (Kenyon). In Just Responsibility following John Stuart Mill, I argue that the problem of justice is not merely to redress those injustices that we can see. While the visible may be horrible and chronic injustices, they are in fact ‘the consequences of unjust power’ and not ‘injustice itself’ (Mill [1848] 2008, 345; Ackerly 2018a, 6, 39). To take the example Eckersley chooses as most illustrative, slavery is a consequence of unjust power. By contrast, the political, economic, social, and epistemological systems that enable slavery are injustice itself. Although foundationally exploitative and exploitable power inequalities are ‘injustice itself’, they may not be commonly understood as inherently exploitive due to their complex causality, normalization, and social epistemologies. However, a just responsibility does not require that we understand them in their completeness or in the same way in order to take responsibility for them. Just responsibility leads us to appreciate that our political community is a web of networks and thus responsibility is not a question of responsibility to whom or why, but rather a question of how to take responsibility. The conventional grammar of responsibility is too delimiting for taking on the scale of injustice itself. Thus, I present just responsibility as a theory of how to take responsibility based on the political theory of responsibility embedded in the actions of those wo do take responsibility for injustice itself, despite the lack of a common grammar. In practice, across normative disagreements as to why, people take responsibility for injustice itself. Just Responsibility explains why doing so is a theoretically coherent form of praxis. As I argue in the Introduction: