#17: Complexity and responsibility
What should a complex notion of responsibility look like, for families, organisations, or for the global community as a whole?
I’m Luke Craven; this is another of my weekly explorations of how systems thinking and complexity can be used to drive real, transformative change in the public sector and beyond. The first issue explains what the newsletter is about; you can see all the issues here.
Hello, dear reader,
This week Twitter delivered a reminder about what occasionally feels like a past life: a review of my book Sustainable Materialism, which I wrote with David Schlosberg over a number of years last decade. In what is a very kind review, Anders Blok notes that the book “looks poised to be at the centre of academic debate and critique in the years to come.”
As I wrote in one of the first issues of this newsletter, the research that surrounded this book was hugely influential in shaping my perspective on systems and complexity. At the core of sustainable materialist practice is the idea of entanglement: human beings and their needs are conceptually and practically inseparable from ecological systems. The acceptance of that realisation is profound. In a complex, entangled world, common ways of understanding of responsibility are insufficient. It is not possible, for example, to assign responsibility to redressing a singular injustice to the actor that brought it about. Not only is injustice multiple and interconnected, so too are the actions that give rise to it. Individual notions of attribution and blame that are so deeply enmeshed in liberal political thought will simply not work for an entangled world.
As complexity becomes a more widely accepted conceptual frame, we need to pay greater attention to these ethical dimensions. Can ideas of complexity and individual responsibility meaningfully coexist? What should a complex notion of responsibility look like, for families, organisations, or for the global community as a whole? While not explicitly framed as a response to complexity, I’m drawn to Iris Marion Young’s social connection model as a starting point for these discussions. Young notes:
The social connection model of responsibility says that individuals bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes. Our responsibility derives from belonging together with others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which we seek benefits and aim to realise projects. Even though we cannot trace the outcome we may regret to our own particular actions in a direct causal chain, we bear responsibility because we are part of the process. (p.119)
There is so much to like about this model. It focuses on processes and relationships, not on outcomes, as the object of responsibility. It recognises that divining apparent cause-and-effect relationships is an insufficient basis for assigning responsibility or blame. While Young’s focus was structural injustice (climate change, sweatshop labour, etc.), her logic applies more broadly. Below I extend her arguments to direct them at the question of responsibility for the behaviour of complex systems. In doing so, I have attempted to distil five criteria I think we ought to use to assess any proposed model of responsibility that claims to take complexity seriously.
Non-isolation. It should begin from the premise that any attempt to isolate individual people, objects or actions is fraught. All systems are open systems.
Forward-looking focus. It should acknowledge that attempts to hold people to account for historic events or actions is conceptually problematic, because in complex systems:
There are no “stopping rules”. Complex systems are produced by ongoing processes and relations, rather than distinct events or actions. Despite what L. P. Hartley might have said, the past is not a foreign country. It matters precisely because it cannot be separated from the future.
Backward-looking explanations are often the product of retrospective coherence. Causal chains seem logical and ordered in hindsight, but the stories we tell ourselves are not accurate or complete depictions of how complex histories unfold.
Shared responsibility. It should recognise that all those who contribute by their actions to the behaviour of a system share responsibility for that behaviour.
Collective action. It should stress that forward-looking responsibility can be discharged only by joining with others in collective action. The behaviour of complex system can be altered only if many actors in diverse social positions work together to shift it.
Positionality. It should recognise that the power to influence the behaviour of a system is an important factor that distinguishes degrees of responsibility.
Obviously each of these criteria requires further elaboration and should be tested against models of responsibility that claim to flex their complexity credentials. This will very likely look different for different systems, at different scales, where there are different kinds of behaviour that we ought to value. Nonetheless, this sketch highlights the ethical challenges of entanglement and the deficiencies of how our institutions normally tackle issues of attribution, responsibility, blame, restitution, and justice. To be clear, acknowledging these challenges is not a justification for a collective get-out-jail-free card. We can attempt to influence the behaviour of the system without presuming to be sovereign over it. Complexity is not an excuse for inaction.
At the same time, this line of thinking does challenge some of our fundamental assumptions about what it means to live well together. What role, for example, should concepts like accountability should play in shaping our response to complexity? If the responses to Sonja Blignaut’s provocation below are anything to go by, there is significant variation in the way we even begin to tackle this question. Perhaps investing in a set of criteria would do us all some good.
By the way: This newsletter is hard to categorise and probably not for everyone—but if you know unconventional thinkers who might enjoy it, please share it with them.
Find me elsewhere on the web at www.lukecraven.com, on Twitter @LukeCraven, on LinkedIn here, or by email at <luke.k.craven@gmail.com>.