Shared Responsibility in International Law: A Normative-Philosophical Analysis

Abstract

This paper analyses normative issues concerning shared responsibility among multiple actors, i.e. states and/or international organizations, that have contributed to harmful outcomes that international law seeks to prevent. More precisely, the term responsibility is used to refer to ex post responsibility for contributions to injury. Current international law has a hard time keeping up with the current reality of increased collaboration between states since international law is "the historical fruit of a primitive and horizontal conception of the international legal order" that holds on to the fiction of exclusive attribution of responsibility to one single state. This paper steps outside the legal (tool)box and starts from a philosophical analysis of 'responsibility' – the normative concept that has the central stage in these discussions. Under which conditions can an actor reasonably be held responsible for a specific harmful outcome? And which consequences should this responsibility have in terms of reparations of repercussions? As such, the paper taps into the more deontological literature in legal and political philosophy on the relation between agency and responsibility. Such a philosophical treatise could be helpful to get our normative intuitions in line and our priorities right and, as such, might provide some essential normative nuts and bolds for a more legal analysis of joint responsibility in international law.

Keywords: Andre Nollkaemper, Dov Jacobs, agency, joint responsibility, corporate responsibility, Philip Pettit

JEL Classification: K33