Jenna L. A. Donohue

In other work, I have defended what I call a “deliberative account of moral complicity,” according to which an agent can become complicit in the wrongful conduct of another agent by failing in a deliberative obligation that they have to help that other agent deliberate correctly about what to do. The possibility of deliberative complicity raises a problem: should the deliberative agent focus her attention on fulfilling her deliberative duty and risk causal complicity? In this paper, I articulate this pressing difficulty and defend a default entitlement to engage with other agents in what I call the deliberative mode. Assuming that the default entitlement is in place (or than an agent is justified in thinking it is in place), an agent who causally contributes to the wrongful action of another will not be morally complicit in that wrongful action if she fulfills her deliberative duty.

Amazon recently announced the removal of a privacy setting on its Echo devices that had allowed users to opt out of having their voice requests sent to the company’s cloud servers (Rascoe 2025). While users may still choose not to save voice requests, those requests will be sent to “Amazon’s secure cloud” before deletion. This policy change exacerbates the already serious privacy concerns that Echo and other “always-listening” devices (such as Apple’s HomePod and Google’s Home) raise. In order to do what they are designed to do, such systems continually listen for their “wake” word: a word that is designed to alert the device to listen and respond to user commands. Because they are always listening and frequently recording, these devices carry a high risk of inadvertently recording private conversations without consent. The privacy invasions made possible by these devices are significant, and ought to be taken seriously by both regulators and ordinary members of the public. In this paper, I explore the privacy concerns raised by “always-listening” devices by focusing on a case study: our increased reliance on Zoom meetings for professional and personal purposes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because many of us were newly on Zoom with classmates, coworkers, and friends during this period, we were newly exposed to others’ always-listening devices. Even those of us who had deliberately avoided always-listening devices for privacy reasons may have been unwittingly and unwillingly recorded while in Zoom meetings with others who had always-listening devices in their homes. While these privacy-oriented individuals may have consented (explicitly or implicitly) to being recorded for expressly educational purposes such as a class’s being recorded so an absent or sick student could watch it later, they are unlikely to have understood themselves as consenting to being recorded by an always-listening device. After arguing that these individuals’ privacy rights were likely violated, I draw implications for the regulation of always-listening devices. I argue that existing privacy laws provide affected individuals with little legal recourse, and that further legislative action in this area is required to protect citizens’ reasonable privacy concerns.

Many theories of moral responsibility include some sort of knowledge condition. If an agent lacks full knowledge of what they are doing, the harm it is causing, or that what they are doing is wrong, that agent is either excused or in some way less responsible for their wrongdoing. In this paper, I argue that this kind of knowledge condition is not only mistaken but also importantly problematic: it overlooks the ways in which society’s expectations and demands of attention and knowledge are gendered.

In some circumstances avoiding complicity seems to require acting paternalistically, while avoiding paternalism seems to require moral complicity in another’s wrongful projects. In order to solve the conflict we will need to investigate the concepts of paternalism and moral complicity and, more importantly, our moral interest in them in the first place. Why do the wrongs of paternalism and moral complicity matter to us? And what does this tell us about what it means to set out to treat others well, where that includes both respecting their agency and helping them to act rightly? I will suggest that adopting a deliberative conception of moral complicity will go some way toward helping us navigate the conflict between avoiding paternalism and avoiding moral complicity. I will also argue that once we notice the conflict and adopt a deliberative conception of moral complicity, we are in a better position to notice something crucial: the concepts of paternalism and moral complicity cannot be fully understood in individualistic terms. Rather, we must consider the structures and contexts in which they arise.

Silence sometimes constitutes moral complicity. We see this when protestors take to the streets against racial injustice. Think of signs with the words: “Silence is complicity.” We see this in instances of sexual harassment, when we learn that many knew and said nothing. We see this in cases of wrongdoing within a company or organization, when it becomes clear that many were aware of the negligent or criminal activity and stayed silent. In cases like this we consider agents morally complicit in virtue of their silence. Flagrant injustices cry out for action, and sometimes remaining silent amounts to complicity in those injustices. What philosophy owes us is an account of how it could be that silence constitutes complicity. In this paper I argue that one possibility is an account grounded in problematic deliberative contribution. The core idea of “deliberative complicity,” as I call it, is that agents have moral duties concerning the moral deliberation of other agents, and failures in these duties can amount to moral complicity. For example, an agent aware that a colleague is sexually harassing his students has a deliberative obligation to report the misconduct, and their silence in failing to report constitutes a failure to fulfill their deliberative obligation, a failure that grounds their moral complicity in the harassment. If my argument is successful, it provides a distinctive reason to prefer a deliberative account of moral complicity: it can capture cases of silent complicity that other views of moral complicity cannot. And further, by turning our attention toward our interpersonal deliberative obligations, a deliberative account of complicity can incorporate helpful resources from recent work in social epistemology and speech act theory as we set out to determine when and why silence amounts to complicity. And when it does, we cannot stay silent. We must speak.

The spread of misinformation and fake news raises important problems for our society and for our democracy. From the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to vaccine hesitancy, from suppressing voter turnout to peddling conspiracy theories, we know that these problems are real and need to be taken seriously. While misinformation is not a new problem for democracy, it can spread more quickly and easily because of new media’s design and popularity. Given these problems, it is encouraging that some technology companies are taking steps to reduce the spread of misinformation and fake news on the platforms they manage. Despite this seemingly positive development, some scholars have criticized some interventions designed to combat the spread of misinformation and fake news as paternalistic. For example, a 2019 Facebook intervention called Click-Gap aimed to reduce the amount of low-quality content (including fake news and misinformation) that users see on their NewsFeed. Click-Gap has been criticized as an instance of epistemic paternalism because it was adopted (1) with the goal of improving the epistemic status of its users and (2) irrespective of what the company believed the wishes of its users to be. If interventions like Click-Gap are problematic because paternalistic, those of us interested in the ethics of technology would face a dilemma—either endorse technology companies treating their users paternalistically or endorse their failing to act to combat the spread of misinformation and fake news on their platforms. Both options seem to me to be problematic. While paternalism may sometimes be permissible, I think we should be very hesitant to endorse a paternalistic relationship between technology companies and their users. The relationship does not seem to bear the right sort of structure to one in which paternalism might be appropriate, if it ever is. The second option seems, if anything worse: surely technology companies should not stand by and change nothing about their platforms despite the spread of misinformation and fake news in those spaces. In this paper, I argue that Click-Gap and interventions like it are not paternalistic, contrary to the conclusion of other scholars. Further, I will argue that the focus on paternalism itself is actually a red herring here. While not just any intervention or strategy that purports to reduce fake news and misinformation is permissible, we should want technology companies to take user well-being seriously and be able to take that well-being as a direct reason for action. Their doing so is not paternalistic nor even morally problematic, and it should not be criticized as such.