5 - Hard complicity I: Benefitting from and enabling wrongdoing

Summary

Most people associate economic complicity only with criminal activities. For them, it is clearly immoral to facilitate money laundering, human or drug trafficking, arms smuggling, or child pornography and prostitution. However, as we will see shortly, moral complicity extends to many more cases besides illicit activities. In what follows, we examine the basis, the object, and the subject of accountability when it comes to benefitting from and enabling wrongdoing.

BASIS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY: WHY CULPABLE?

Why is it morally blameworthy to benefit from and enable wrongdoing? The theological, philosophical, and economic arguments of chapter 3 on the problem of overdetermination apply just as well to this section's concerns. This section extends those earlier insights even further, in addition to examining the economics of facilitating misconduct.

Christian ethics

Benefitting from and enabling wrongdoing goes against the divine order of creation. It impedes the appropriator's moral life. To benefit from and enable wrongdoing knowingly and intentionally, despite the availability of alternatives, is to harm our own virtue and character formation. To be human is to reflect and to communicate the goodness and perfection of God using our signal faculties of reason and freedom. To appropriate the fruits of wrongdoing when we could have avoided doing so is to damage our capacity to communicate and reflect such divine goodness and perfection.

Kaveny (2000, 305) argues that “intimacy with evil” poses dangers to character formation. There is a great likelihood of “contamination” from “seepage” and “self-deception” given the close proximity to evil.