189. GRENFELL - On Individual versus Collective Responsibility

Although I am scheduling this to be posted in a few weeks’ time, as I write this it is just a few days since the Grenfell Inquiry released its report on the 2017 disaster which saw 72 people burn to death in a London tower block. After waiting seven years for answers of where to lay the blame for the tragedy, unfortunately the report’s conclusions was that, essentially, everyone was responsible. From companies knowingly selling flammable cladding to an industry which knowingly bought it, the architects who designed buildings with it and the local councils who approved its use, to the governments which failed to regulate it, everyone, the report concluded, failed the victims of Grenfell.

But if everyone is responsible, is anyone responsible?

The day after the report was released I asked this question to a group of Philosophy Club students. Because of Godwin’s law, fairly soon into the discussion one of them inevitably tried applying the conclusion to the situation in Germany in the 1930s. It is easy to say that Hitler was responsible for the atrocities of the second World War, but, the student argued, he needed his troops to commit those atrocities at the scale on which he did. He did not act alone. And the Nazis couldn’t have done what they did without the citizens who said nothing as the atrocities began. Who did nothing as they continued. Hitler needed the contextual ground in which his vile ideology could grow and spread and thrive. He also needed the particular circumstances of his own upbringing and life which formed his hateful mindset in the first place. Would the same outcome have happened had he been raised by other people, in a different town, at a different time? And, of course, as Nazism started its reign of terror, Hitler needed international communities to appease and turn a blind eye. He needed centuries of anti-Semitism before him to lay the ideological groundwork, etc. which made his terror so acceptable to many.

The responsibility for the holocaust, like the responsibility for the Grenfell scandal, can be legitimately spread wide. An interconnected tangle of minor and major players, all making their individual errors, mistakes and intentional wrongs which, in combination, lead to a disaster.

But does that really make the individual German who did nothing to stop Hitler as responsible as Hitler himself, or the soldiers running the camps?

We talked about a common injustice in schools: the issue of collective punishment. One student messes about and suddenly a whole class find themselves losing their lunch break. Such a practice, common in my own schooldays, is thankfully ruled out by most contemporary school behaviour policies these days because it seems so obviously wrong now to punish people who did nothing in the same way that we punish an actual perpetrator of a wrongdoing. But then I asked if it isn’t true that the whole class might actually bear some genuine responsibility for the actions of the sole rebel? Are their hands really that clean? After all - a class is not really ‘disrupted’ unless those not messing about become distracted by the uproar and pay attention to the ‘disrupter’ instead of the teacher. Would better self-control by the class diffused the disruption? Didn’t each student in the room have the capability to tell their peer to be quiet or sit down instead of laugh and engage with them? Couldn’t they have shushed them or looked unimpressed instead of encouraging?

True - my students agreed. But such behaviour is the established social norm. No one wants to be seen as a ‘snitch’ or a ‘nerd’ and stop the fun just so that a lesson can continue uninterrupted. It would be social suicide.

Then isn’t it true, I asked, that the blame rolls out even further then? To the generations of students before them who have created those social norms in the first place? Should not only the whole class sit the detention, but perhaps too any alumni returning to the school for a reunion?

We laughed at the absurdity. But in each case we realised we can make a case that responsibility goes beyond the main perpetrators, and that the responsibility really is everyone’s. But there comes a point when the line is stretched too far. When the word ‘responsible’ starts to lose the intended meaning: that a person is blameworthy.

So I asked if the problem isn’t the recognition of so much collective responsibility, but the desire to use that information to blame?

This issue has been addressed by the fantastic philosopher, Iris Marion Young, who argues against traditional ‘liability model’ of responsibility in common use. The liability model ‘usually applied in legal and moral discourse’, we might call a symptom of our ideologically individualistic society. It is a model which seeks to blame atomised individuals for distinct things and punish them (and only them) accordingly. A model which assumes such individual action is entirely due to an individual’s free will and a rational decision-making to act one way rather than another. So, for example, in the Grenfell scenario it would be much easier to find one individual company owner to blame - a caricature comic book villain CEO, rubbing their hands together and gleefully seeking to profit from the sale of dangerous cladding - because that is a model (the liability model) of responsibility we easily understand. To discover that the cartoon villain does not, in fact, act in isolation troubles our common ideological assumptions. To attempt to explain that the villain is only able to profit from their flammable shoddy goods because others too are trying to profit or cut corners to make a saving in their own, interconnected, ways because our entire economic system is geared towards making maximum profit at minimum spend, and that the norms of this system were socialised into the cartoon villain from an early age, through their family, through their schools, through their culture…and that these norms which led to their desire for profit are norms we ourselves believe in and act upon in our own jobs and businesses…that is far too complicated a story for us to neatly point the finger of blame. The fact that it might just be the actual story, and that the reality simply is complicated doesn’t come into it.

Iris Marion Young, looking for a model of responsibility which can instead tackle these deeper structural injustices in society, for which we all might well be culpable, offers us an alternative ‘social connection model of responsibility’. This model does not look backwards, trying to apportion blame and seek to punish, but instead it looks forward, seeking only the practical outcome of trying to stop any more future injustices from continuing.

‘The social connection model finds that all those who contribute by their actions to structural processes with some unjust outcomes share responsibility for the injustice…Being responsible in relation to structural injustice means that one has an obligation to join with others who share that responsibility in order to transform the structural processes to make their outcomes less unjust.’

The same student who brought up the Nazis could immediately see, when presented with Iris Marion Young’s alternative idea of justice, the problem with the liability model and the benefits of the social connection model: we can blame Hitler for the holocaust, prosecute Nazis and war criminals…but we all saw this summer that this did not prevent future Fascism. The same far-right ideology that gave us the holocaust remains worryingly untroubled on the streets of the UK in 2024. By looking backwards instead of forward, we point fingers of blame, but do little to challenge and change the conditions collectively which allow racist hate to flourish. We were collectively responsible for the Holocaust because of the interconnected nature of our collective lives, and we remain collectively responsible for preventing any future genocides too.

And so also with Grenfell. Much as it would be legally useful to have a single name to bear the full responsibility for what happened that terrible night, we cannot deny that the complex collective of individuals named and shamed in the report really are responsible for the failings which led to the deaths of 72 people. To wish there was, instead, one name, or a small set of names, we could point a finger of blame at neither changes the fact of all those people’s shared responsibility, nor does it prevent future tragedies like Grenfell from occurring again. The social connection model better recognises that we all had a part to play in the structural injustices that led to Grenfell, that everybody really is to blame, and that this is not a mistake or a cop-out, but just a more accurate description of the complex web of events, norms, and practices which led to the disaster than the search for neat, individual, and largely illusionary, blame can provide.

If everyone is responsible, is anyone responsible?

Yes, the ‘social connection model’ replies - when everyone is responsible, everyone is responsible. Just like it says. ‘When harms result from the participation of thousands or millions of people in institutions and practices that produce injustice…such an isolating concept of responsibility is inadequate. Where there are structural injustices, finding that some people are guilty of perpetrating specific wrongful actions does not absolve others whose actions contribute to the outcomes from bearing responsibility in a different way.’

Grenfell was a preventable tragedy which a litany of interconnected people and structural injustices perpetuated by those people failed to prevent. Now that we know this, and our own individual roles in the collective responsibility for that tragedy, our duty is to ensure such a tragedy like this never can occur again.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. The journal ‘Teaching Philosophy’ calls it ‘a model of lucidity and honesty, packed with fine food for thought in the form of provoking ideas and arguments, as well as with plenty of motivational inspiration.’ You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

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I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com   

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