Philosophers increasingly invoke the concept of moral complicity across a wide range of domains in moral philosophy, political theory and applied ethics. Yet the literature remains deeply fragmented and difficult to make sense of. This article identifies three central axes of disagreement-over which cases count as complicity, what its normative upshot is and what grounds it. I argue that, although disputes about cases are relatively tractable, disagreements about upshot and ground remain deeply entrenched. I conclude by proposing that progress requires a framework of limited pluralism that integrates and refines insights from selected accounts of complicity. This framework helps make sense of the phenomenon that is complicity and provides a coherent structure within which the field can advance.

This dissertation develops a unified theory of moral complicity—explaining how agents can be morally accountable for wrongs despite not having control over whether they occurred. Despite its importance in ethics, political theory, and social justice, the concept of complicity remains theoretically fragmented. I argue that complicity should be understood through the lens of quality of will: agents are complicit when their substandard quality of will helps explain the wrongness of another’s wrongdoing.

The dissertation unfolds in four papers. The first challenges structural complicity accounts and argues they track a different normative kind from the dominant accounts of complicity. This narrows the scope of complicity, thus facilitating the pursuit of a unified account. The second critiques dominant causal theories by introducing the explanatory challenge. This sets up the need for a unified account. The third advances the unified account: According to the account, agents are complicit in a wrongdoing, if and only if, their substandard quality of will exacerbates the wrongfulness of that wrongdoing. The fourth extends this framework to show how present agents can become accountable for past wrongs. Together, the papers clarify the boundaries of complicity, expose the limitations of existing views, and offer a principled framework that unifies and extends our understanding of complicity.

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.

Despite its growing importance in applied ethics and political theory, the concept of complicity remains theoretically fragmented. The existing dominant—Causal and Participatory—accounts fail to offer a unified explanation that applies across the full range of paradigm cases. This paper develops and defends a unified account of complicity, the Moral Explanation Complicitous Accountability (MECA) view. According to MECA, an agent is complicit when their substandard quality of will helps explain a part of the wrongness of another’s wrongdoing. This framework synthesizes insights from causal and participatory accounts while offering a deeper explanatory foundation grounded in a modified Quality of Will theory. MECA successfully addresses foundational puzzles in the literature—such as how agents can be accountable without control—and clarifies whether complicity entails blameworthiness. In doing so, MECA not only unifies the complicity literature, but reconnects it with general theories of moral responsibility.