ABSTRACT
Complicity marks out a way that one person can be liable to sanctions for the wrongful conduct of another. There are at least three approaches to an analysis of complicity. The first is a juristic; it adverts to the theoretical grounds for complicity in the law. The second is a joint-action approach which grounds complicity in the shared actions and intentions of individuals engaged in a cooperative project. The third is a group-agency approach which locates complicity in the individuals who together compose a group agent. A comprehensive analysis of complicity would incorporate the insights of all three approaches into a univocal account. But that project is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I will focus mostly on the juristic approach, as it provides the most developed account of complicity. After describing the role of complicity in the law, I will argue that much of the motivation for presenting complicity as a separate basis of criminal liability is misplaced; paradigmatic cases of complicity can be assimilated into standard causation-based accounts of criminal liability. But unlike others who make this sort of claim (Moore 2007) I will also argue that there is still room for genuine complicity in the law and in morality. In defending this claim, I sketch an approach to complicity which grounds our liability for what others do not in our causal relation to their actions but in our “agency-relations” with others.
