Law Commons^™

Citizen Responsibility And The Reactive Attitudes, Amy Sepinwall

Amy J. Sepinwall

This paper takes seriously the notion that individuals may bear responsibility for the transgressions of their group even where they do not bear the hallmarks of individual culpability. More specifically, I contend that citizenship itself can ground responsibility for the crimes of one’s nation-state, and I advance this contention in the context of a discussion about Americans’ responsibility for abuses committed in the course of the war in Iraq.

Moreover, the kind of responsibility I have in mind is not simply the forward-looking variety, which is what many forms of civil liability and reparations programs contemplate; nor is it simply …