Chapter 3 considers the concept of shared, or collective, responsibility, a term which developed its own ambiguous ecosystem over the ten-year Interlaken process, but which reduced its meaning to an overly narrow focus on the ECHR control system. I propose that the protection of human rights in grey zones is a matter of first principles, which requires us to consider the object and purpose of the Council of Europe, which itself was established as a direct consequence of war. I argue that systemic and persistent limitations in the functioning of the broader CoE system in areas of conflict must consequently change the nature of the response. I suggest that such situations give rise to an ordre public imperative shared amongst all Member States. I further suggest that public order, when used as a tool for the intra-territorial effectiveness of the ECHR, constitutes a legal norm as it creates an exception to the state’s right to act voluntarily (i.e. it limits the possibility to declare a diminished level of responsibility for a particular region) on one hand, and it generates an imperative to act collectively, on the other.

The typical arguments concerning privatization are instrumental, relying heavily on comparing the performance of a public functionary with that of its private counterpart. This chapter challenges this approach for leaving unaddressed other important consequences of shifting responsibilities to private entities. Privatization cuts off the link between processes of decision-making and the citizens and, therefore, erodes political engagement and its underlying notion of shared responsibility. Consequently, privatization undermines individuals’ public autonomy.

The effects of privatization are not restricted to the question of whether a public prison is better or worse qua prison than its private counterpart, or whether private forestry is better or worse qua forestry than its public counterpart. Stripping the state of its responsibilities erodes public responsibility, for privatization is not only the transformation of detention centers, trains, tax inquiry offices, forestry operations, and so on, considered one service at a time. It is also the transformation of our political system and public culture from ones characterized by robust shared responsibility and political engagement to ones characterized by fragmentation and sectarianism.

In the Conclusion to this book, we move from looking back to assembling a future. This chapter shows that the metaphorical uses of disability that have been examined throughout the book remain with us in the present. And it attempts to set out some approaches towards ending this practice of making meaning out of bodies. This will require, the conclusion argues, more than a commitment to neoliberal diversity initiatives and to inclusion (though inclusion remains nonetheless urgent) – it will require us to decolonise the way that we look, and to disassemble the classical tradition in favour of models that insist on the receiver’s accountability. Maria Oshodi’s 1992 play Hound is an important text in this chapter, which looks beyond the line, or inheritance model of classical reception to the example of Stacey Park Milbern’s ‘crip ancestorship’ model. Ultimately, the conclusion is invested in the core questions of this book: what kind of an ancient world would we need to imagine, who would we need to take as our ancestors, and how might we organise the models that figure our relationship with it and them, in order for a more equal future to become our reality?

The discussion concludes by reviewing paradigmatic socio-political logics of hybrid sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower within colonial theatres of criminal accusation, as revealed by the preceding analyses of archived Albertan texts. It traces a ‘coloniality’ within accusatory performances framed by racialized, patriarchal, and marginalizing criminal justice institutions (Maldonado-Torres 2007). In composite, the chapters point to several key social and political foundations through which accusations of crime provided conditions for colonial criminalization to emerge. It is significant that such accusations and the law that they sustained were from the outset placed in the service of dispossessing social, political, and economic ambitions. The book concludes by reflecting on two legacy bequests of colonial accusation that might be used to think in ways that exceed the socio-political horizons that contour today’s vast, unequal, and repressive criminal justice systems.

Calls to ‘be responsible’ render relations, dependencies, and interdependencies visible, and they make demands and claims on others and on oneself. To speak about responsibility is to speak of our diverse attempts to build a good life within relational worlds, and our commonplace failure to do so. By exploring the modes and meanings of responsibility in an array of cultural settings, this chapter reveals how calls for responsibility hinge upon specific enactments of agency, freedom, intentionality, reflexivity, mutuality, responsiveness, and recognition. Yet there remains no stable or universal expression and arrangement of these enactments of responsibility; as an anthropology of ethics makes clear, responsibility’s seemingly self-evident or essential nature dissolves upon closer ethnographic attention. In explicating a multiplicity of responsibilities, this chapter explores how calls for responsibilities shift with scale, from the individual to the collective, within diverse temporal frames, and in response to technologies, techniques, and ideologies that bring new accountabilities and agencies to life.

While not typically considered a postcolonial writer, Ishiguro’s work often engages with the question of British and Japanese imperialism and colonialism, either directly in works such as An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and the Ishiguro-scripted film The White Countess, or through subtle allusion to the American post-war occupation of Japan in A Pale View of Hills or the Suez Crisis in The Remains of the Day. Writing from the ‘inside’, from the perspective of individuals who are unwittingly complicit in the structures of oppression entailed by colonial rule, Ishiguro offers complex and unsettlingly sympathetic depictions of the psychological denials and displacements that allow individuals to operate within these regimes. Focusing on An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and The White Countess, this chapter responds to the ways in which Ishiguro’s fiction attends to the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and historico-political forces.

There are important doctrinal and institutional obstacles in the way of proper treatment of collective legal responsibility of several States for global environmental harm, but no serious theoretical obstacles. Difficult theoretical issues do arise at the level of justification, however. The chapter investigates how legal and moral responsibility of individuals, States, and collectives of both all fit together as a normative matter, using global environmental harm as its case study. It argues that shared moral responsibility – the responsibility an individual has when acting together with others – is a very important moral phenomenon. By contrast we have no need for the idea of a collective (such as a State) itself being morally responsible. Ideally, the shared ex ante moral responsibilities of individuals together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be discharged by domestic law under the guidance of international law. Where non-complying States face sanctions, the burden of those sanctions will be imposed on individuals who are not responsible for their State’s failure. Yet citizens have political obligations to improve their States, including in the matter of compliance with international law. If the sanctions can be seen as doing citizens’ work for them, the burdens imposed do not seem objectionable.

This chapter raises the question whether attribution of wrongful acts to the State is based on ‘objective’ causal chains or ‘subjective’ mental states. It argues that attribution of conduct to the State is not primarily causal or fault-based. First, it shows that several of the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts cannot be understood in terms of causation or fault. Second, it argues that causal and fault-based theories of attribution are either circular or incomplete. Instead, the chapter claims, the logic of attribution is primarily functional. The rules of attribution converge around the central principle that an act of State is an act performed in the service of a State function, such as defence or detention. Functional attribution is best understood as ‘intersubjective’: it is determined not by objective causal chains or by subjective mental states, but by shared ideas about the functions of the State and what it means to perform them. The functional character of the rules of attribution allows them to adapt to economic and technological changes, such as the growth of corporations and the development of autonomous weapons.

The author concludes the volume by reflecting on the interface between philosophy and law, arguing that they are both complementary and interdependent. He shows examples of the legal translation of philosophical principles and stresses the necessity to establish a system of responsibility – that is, a clear system of sanctions – so that philosophical and legal norms do not remain mere gratuitous statements. The chapter reflects on the philosophical foundations of legal responsibility, the historical movement of gradual individualization of responsibility and the shift to joint obligation to respond to collective threats and challenges. It ultimately argues that classical responsibility reduced to an essentially inter-individual relationship is technically very sophisticated, both philosophically and legally, but insufficient to face collective challenges (in particular the environmental crisis).

This final chapter argues that there is a far greater crisis heading our way. What is far worse than nature ‘biting back’ with a deadly virus is that we now live with the disturbing knowledge that the natural world that sustains us all is liable to collapse. COVID-19 is not a ‘once in a hundred years’ event that we can soon confine to folklore. It is a warning shot across our bows, alerting us to the seriousness of the imminent challenges of climate change and the escalating crises of nature and social inequality. These cannot be addressed unless we discard the neoliberal straightjacket and revitalise a nurturing society.

It is often considered that the industrial revolution was Britain’s most unique contribution to world history. However, that achievement emerged from a society and economy that had enjoyed unprecedented success due to its adoption since c.1600 of the policies, principles and practices of collectivist individualism, a more valuable British legacy to the world than the unbalanced individualism adopted in the subsequent industrial revolution. It is a legacy that urgently needs to be rediscovered to enable us all to find the commitment to each other needed to meet our imminent challenges. Coexistence, anti-exploitation and nurturing are the moral codes of the collectivist-individualist ethics, a morality of giving, not taking.

Part V integrates the different strands in the previous chapters to explain how they account for why representation consolidated in England but not in the non-Western cases. Existing accounts typically focus on the lack of certain cultural templates, whether corporate bodies and estates or corporations. Two alternatives are first examined, namely that the difference can be explained by the absence of two of the main components of representative emergence in the English case, the principle of representation itself and the demand for justice mediated through petitions. Both Russia and the Ottoman Empire exhibited both traits, however. So then the chapter revises the common assumption that western representation depended on greater corporate rights and on the end of collective responsibility. Rather, the critical difference was that the English state was better able to resist the demands of groups for corporate privileges, at least in the period of parliamentary emergence, and to impose collective responsibility on a state-derived (rather than tradition-based) basis. This power is exemplified by its capacity to tax the nobility, which, as we have seen other European leaders were generally unable to do.