Our Own Vogons
I wrote this junior year for the John Locke competition. I won a prize but not one of the good ones. I was answering, as one might guess, the first header.
1. WHEN IS COMPLIANCE COMPLICITY?
“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.”
- Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, (1974)
The world has never been so connected. Globalisation bears gifts—look around you—but it certainly has its drawbacks, too. A mathematician crunching numbers propels technology which bombs civilians in foreign countries. A single mother buying groceries funds child slavery in third-world farms. Just about every human alive reinforces power apparatuses which subjugate, violate, and exploit. And as this entanglement only increases, the ethical frameworks with which we assign moral blame need updating. In particular, the decision of when compliance becomes complicity, the critical criterion in assigning that blame. This paper proposes that compliance is complicity when a moral actor had the knowledge and the capacity to obstruct an evil, and didn’t. Then, the paper asserts that the question is obsolete, as the notion of “capacity” cannot be meaningfully quantified, and focus should be instead directed on those evils with which people are complicit.
Finding when compliance is complicity ought to be a simple task; it is a four-word question, after all. Not easy, certainly, but simple. If the meanings of compliance and complicity can be nailed down, then their overlap is when compliance is complicity. So, what’s compliance? Dictionary definitions are insufficient; they break down under deeper scrutiny. But they are useful to begin with.
1.1. COMPLIANCE
com·ply, /kəmˈplī/
verb, (of a person or group) act in accordance with a wish or command.
Douglas Adam’s science-fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (197X) opens with a humorous little joke: the end of humanity.
The main character, Arthur Dent, awakes to the sight of bulldozers outside, yellow vehicles preparing to demolish his house to make way for a highway bypass. He protests, lying in front of the bulldozers in a desperate attempt to obstruct, to resist. He is not complying here, right? However, a bulldozer operator, representing the local council, informs Dent that he had been given ample time to levy any protests with the local council—his lack of protest was taken as compliance, so now he reaps what he sowed (or what he did not sow, anyhow). Of course, part of the comedy is that he was never notified about these plans.
Ultimately, his home is destroyed. Dent does not have long to grieve, though.
Immediately after, all of humanity looks up in inconceivable terror at a Vogon Construction fleet blackening the sky, yellow behemoths preparing to obliterate the planet to make way for a hyperspatial express route. A Vogon, representing the galactic council, informs humanity that they had been given ample time to levy any protests with the galactic council—the lack of protest was taken as compliance. Of course, it is worth mentioning that humanity was never notified. And the galactic council was located in Alpha Centauri, twenty-five trillion miles away.
Shortly after, Earth is vaporised.
Neither Dent nor humanity lodged a complaint to those in charge, and their silence was then taken as compliance. But it seems illogical to call Dent compliant—he put his life between the bulldozer and his home. So, to absolve Dent of compliance, his silence must evade the definition. A solution is that since Dent was unaware of the plans, maybe compliance requires knowledge: after all, one can neither act with nor act against something which they do not know. Modified definition: to comply is to act in accordance with a known wish or command.
1.2. COMPLICITY
com·pli·cit, /kəmˈplɪsᵻt/
adjective, involved knowingly or with passive compliance, often in something underhand, sinister, or illegal.
The stereotypical bank robbery is difficult not to notice. Guns are shot in the air, people shriek, robbers shout orders, and so on—no one gets to play the ignorance card. Everyone is seemingly complicit. The robbers definitely are—they did not stumble into their ski masks. They are involved knowingly, and unmistakably complicit. Meanwhile, a bank teller who opened the vault, a security guard who laid down their arms, a random customer kneeling with their hands in the air, etc., clearly exhibit passive compliance. But common sense says they aren’t complicit—they had no choice. The United States Department of Justice agrees with such a notion. In fact, banks even encourage their tellers to comply with robbers.
So, the dictionary definition is once more lacking. It is again useful to examine Dent and humanity. A houseplant could detect the parallelism between the two tragedies, but it takes a bit of additional attention to catch a disanalogous component—one with massive implications. Initially, since neither had been informed as to their impending doom, neither was compliant. This absolved Dent entirely—as seen above. But, when the Vogons informed humanity about why they were being destroyed, what did humanity do? Did they put themselves between the Vogons and Earth, à la Dent? Nope. They did nothing—they could do nothing. Therefore, they complied. But were they complicit?
It seems wrong to call humanity complicit in its own destruction—just as it seems wrong to call bank tellers complicit in a robbery. Blame is so intrinsically tied to the idea of complicity, and agency seems necessary for placing blame. What agency does someone held at gunpoint have? Complicity implies moral culpability, and moral agents need agency.
Modified definition: to be complicit is to be involved knowingly or with passive compliance when there is the capacity to do otherwise.
1.3. AN ANSWER?
Synthesising the two, compliance is complicity when a moral actor had the knowledge and capacity to obstruct an evil, yet complied instead. Although this answers the presented question, it sadly isn’t sufficient for the world we live in today.
2. OUR OWN VOGONS
The difficulty, nowadays, is that there exist moral issues which fill a previously unoccupied niche. Lawson (2013) writes about the problem of collective wrongs, the idea “that it is unclear how to assign blame for collective wrongdoing to individual contributors when none of those individual contributors appears to be responsible for the wrongdoing in question.” This is perhaps the central moral dilemma of the 21st century. There exist issues similar to the Vogon Construction fleet’s threat in magnitude, but which are entirely anthropogenic. We are definitely guilty as a species. But what about as individuals?
Traditionally, legal philosophers like Kadish (1985), Hart (1959), and Honoré (1959) rely on causation to ascribe complicity. Today, though, causation (and, conversely, the capability to obstruct) is hard to determine. Lawson (2013) brings up an example of four people. Three each stab the fourth. It takes exactly two wounds to kill. Can any particular stabber be called a murderer? No one is sufficient, no one is necessary. Are they all guilty? All innocent (of murder)?
2.1. WE ARE ALL GUILTY
Hypothesis: we are all individually complicit. Democracies commit human rights abuses secretly. They associate with autocracies which commit human rights abuses openly. Companies exploit, enslave, plunder, and loot. Humanity as a whole degrades the environment beyond belief. We, as individuals, prop these systems up: we vote, we consume, we waste. But what now? Blame everyone for everything? If so, how horrifying. All great Neptune's ocean cannot wash this much blood clean from one's hand.
In the fantasy series The Good Place (201X), the main characters, in the afterlife, are driven by a desire to get to the Good Place—Heaven. One of the big reveals of the show occurs when the characters learn that no human has made it to the Good Place in over half a millennium. Even the most kind, most righteous, and most moral of people have been deemed unworthy. The explanation given by the show is that the world has become so interconnected that every small action ripples into negative consequences, and thus it is impossible to engage with society and remain pure; it is impossible to be good.
Such moral calculus cannot be taken too seriously—it’s a sitcom, at the end of the day—but it does speak to some deep truth about what happens when we blame everyone for everything. Are we really going to call genuinely good people evil? Small business owners, capitalist pigs? Babies, colonists?
2.2. WE ARE ALL INNOCENT
Another hypothesis: we are all individually innocent. However, this is problematic too. It is banal and cynical to simply say that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, handwaving potential moral failings as congenital requisites for participating in civilisation. This is incredibly unhealthy. When one is cognisant of so many Vogon fleets, ominously hovering right above them, life is dreary. But worse, if one believes themselves innocent, the implication is that they believe they can do nothing to thwart the Vogons—it won’t be their fault when Earth is vaporised. Inevitably, this leads to a jaded younger generation disabused with the notion of changing the world—essentially Seligman (196X)’s learned helplessness widespread.
It is thus no surprise that hopelessness is a crisis amongst younger populations—one linked closely to the unprecedented epidemic of depression and anxiety. A 2023 poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal found that 80% of Americans expect life for their children's generation to be worse than life was for their own. This is evidence that everyone cannot be simply be freed from their moral responsibilities. Responsibility must exist for a society to hold itself together. Duty and obligation—in one form or another—are what tie together the social fabric necessary for human prospering.
2.3. WHICH IS IT?
Both options seem bad. But at the same time, one might have to be the truth.
Those who believe in conspiracies often experience Vogon-level problems. They don’t see themselves as the issue, so everyone can’t be guilty. They refuse to be helpless, so everyone can’t be innocent. So they pick out a group to be guilty: lizard people, the deep state, some ethnic minority, and so on. The issue is that, for most of these systemic maladies, such a group doesn’t exist. There is no lever-pulling, button-pushing supervillain at the top. There is no hidden agenda. And perhaps that is the scariest part. There is no simple malignity we can excise. Humanity's inertia is immense, and all of human history has set us on this trajectory. The burden to redirect this hulking mass is on all of us and none of us.
3. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Our goal ought not to be minimising complicity, but minimising “the Bad” with which people are complicit. If our goal were the former, would the solution be isolation? A bunch of cabins in the woods? Anarcho-primitivism? This seems to be a misdirection of energy.
Perhaps, nowadays, we shouldn’t even care about when compliance is complicity. We are all complicit, we are all innocent, it matters not. Instead of playing Loki’s Wager with precisely how capable we are, let us imbue ourselves with the capability to change these systems.
But how do we change these systems? Climbing progressively taller trees will not take one to the moon; recycling doesn’t move the needle when eighty percent of carbon emissions are produced by fifty-seven companies. We need rockets—large, systemic changes. In fact, Žižek (2008) suggests that it is “[b]etter to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly.” In other words, it is better for one to do nothing than to impart upon (incorrectly) their kids that the three R’s will save us all, stifling their ability to launch rockets—to enact true change. To be clear, it is okay to climb trees—recycle, certainly. But don’t climb trees if it impedes the ability for others to build rockets. As Žižek (2008) goes on to say, “[t]he threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’… [p]eople intervene all the time, ‘doing something’; academics participate in meaningless ‘debates,’ etc.”
Engage in effective altruism, Be a good neighbor. Small things matter. They absolutely improve lives. But don’t normalise the little things as a substitute for the big things. At the end of the day, we must shoot for the moon.