Linda Radzik

This chapter surveys the variety of ways in which people who may appear at first to be bystanders, or mere bystanders, to wrongdoing, harm or danger might instead share responsibility with other actors. My discussion divides cases into three rough, non- exclusive categories: (a) shared responsibility for wrongs and harms; (b) shared responsibility to provide aid; and (c) shared responsibility to enforce moral norms. The third category has received the least discussion to date. My modest goal for this portion of the chapter is to highlight some ways in which the responsibilities of witnesses to wrongdoing need to be more thoroughly theorized. But, furthermore, I want to suggest that these cases show that active bystanders are not always preferable to passive ones. Sometimes, it is better for witnesses to wrongdoing to remain mere bystanders.

Increasingly, philosophers who write about moral responsibility and accountability practices invoke the concept of “standing,” a term they claim to borrow from legal contexts. Yet critics point out that these philosophers have been maddeningly unclear about what standing is. Worse yet, no single account of the concept of “standing” seems to accommodate its current usage. This essay presents a thin account of standing, defends its usefulness in philosophical analyses of accountability practices, and develops further conceptual tools for thinking about standing.

The last twenty-five years or so of thought about tort law have been remarkably productive and dynamic, as the dominance of the law and economics model has been challenged by theories that reintroduce the language of corrective justice. Over this same time period, theorizing about corrective justice has sprung up in response to a wide range of social, political and moral issues. I have in mind work on restorative theories in criminal justice; on postwar justice; on truth commissions, political reconciliation and transitional justice in contexts of regime change; on official apologies as responses to international crises, institutionalized abuse and historical injustices; and on interpersonal apology, the making of amends, and forgiveness as responses to everyday moral transgressions. In these writings, theorists explore what people owe to one another in the aftermath of various kinds of wrongdoing, and thereby subtly challenge our ideas about what should be included under the heading of corrective justice. One new strand of thought, which appears in many of these debates, suggests that corrective justice requires a form of reconciliation or relational repair. My goal in this chapter is to introduce this idea and explore what it might offer to the philosophy of tort law.

This chapter reviews and evaluates the most common strategies for defending the view that, whatever other reasons might support forgiving in a particular case, forgiveness is defective when the person purporting to forgive lacks standing. Various arguments in favor of limiting standing are used in order to clarify what standing might be. In the end, I endorse an interpretation of standing as the possession of a normative power, which allows for the possibility of third-party forgiveness in some circumstances.

This chapter reflects on public apologies as means of moral repair by considering the various roles the public might play in these moral dramas. Audiences to public apologies include people who are related to the transgression in different ways. This chapter focuses on those parties in front of whom public apologies are intentionally performed but who are neither victims nor wrongdoers. Do such third parties add something of value to the apology? If so, how? How might they play their role well? Under what circumstances might they forgive? How might things go poorly? This chapter argues that public apologies face a problem of “mission creep.”

The clinical literature on moral injury sometimes mentions the making of amends as part of a possible treatment plan. However, it is typically unclear how clinicians are conceiving of the making of amends or “atonement,” particularly in the context of the debilitating cluster of symptoms known as moral injury. This chapter reviews some culturally prominent conceptions of atonement. It then raises a number of objections to these and recommends an alternative model – a “reconciliation theory” of atonement – that can avoid these objections. This theory conceives of wrongdoing as damaging relationships among victims, wrongdoers, and communities, and of atonement as repairing this damage. Atonement for serious wrongdoing isn't easy, but it isn't impossible either. Atonement comes in degrees. When pursued well, it offers benefits to victims and communities as well as to wrongdoers themselves.