When am I Accountable for What Others do? The Causal Accounts and the Explanatory Challenge

Abstract The majority of authors in the complicity literature claim that causal accounts of complicity are inadequate because they fail to handle cases of causal overdetermination (Kutz, 2000, 2007, 2020; Lawson, 2013; Driver, 2015a, b; Bazargan-Forward, 2013, 2017, 2022; Mellema, 2016; Aragon and Jaggar, 2018; Williams 2019; Bennett, 2021; Donohue, 2021; Knowles, 2021). However, it has recently been argued that causal accounts can handle such cases (Lepora and Goodin, 2013; Petterson, 2013; Jensen, 2020). In this paper I scrutinize these defenses. I argue while they make some progress towards overcoming the standard overdetermination challenge, they are not fully satisfactory. More importantly, I present a novel challenge raised by cases of overdetermination—the explanatory challenge. I argue that, not only do these recent defenses not overcome this challenge, it is unlikely that any causal account can overcome it. Finally, I suggest that since causal accounts of complicity are inadequate, pluralism about complicity must be correct, because we cannot fully dispense with causation from our understanding of complicity.