Complicity is, in many ways, a moral mystery. It is an unruly state of moral conditioning in which an individual or an entity invariably becomes implicated in another’s wrongdoing. Allegations of complicity may take different forms, varying in degree or content depending on how one is associated with the wrongdoer or the wrongdoing. The workshop set out to unravel the core of complicity by raising crucial conceptual issues from the perspectives of ethical theory, the philosophy of action, moral and political philosophy, and social ontology.
ISOS News is a blog series where we invite members to share their experiences with various ISOS initiatives. This month, we continue our streak of posts about workshops funded by ISOS's small grants program. That's because the application window for 2027 is now officially open! Click here to learn more about who is eligible to apply, what criteria the committee uses, and how to submit an application.
The two-day workshop on complicity and collective responsibility, held at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, brought together reputed philosophers, faculty, and graduate and doctoral students in philosophy and other areas of the humanities for what turned out to be an unusually generative two days of discussion. It had the rare touch of spilling beyond its formal boundaries. What emerged was not just a program of talks with usual Q&A sessions, but a shared effort to think through some of the most critical moral and political issues of our time.
The workshop was organized by the Centre for Philosophy (a department of philosophy at the School of Social Sciences, committed to furthering interdisciplinary research interests in philosophy along with the study of traditional branches of philosophy) at JNU, and supported by a Small Grant from ISOS, a funding program specifically designed to support events like this one, in regions where such work might otherwise go unfunded. Its aim was to bring together at least three overlapping communities: experts in the field, doctoral students in relevant areas, and a group of scholars with backgrounds in humanities and social sciences.
As the event unfolded, the diverse nature of presentations meshed perfectly with the presence and participation of an audience which included people from philosophy as well as other disciplines like sociology, political studies, and international relations among others. With growing inputs on the importance of complicity and collective responsibility that were not tied to any specific discipline, it resulted in an open-ended and rigorous academic event in which disciplinary boundaries were more like invitations than constraints.
Complicity is, in many ways, a moral mystery. It is an unruly state of moral conditioning in which an individual or an entity invariably becomes implicated in another's wrongdoing. Allegations of complicity may take different forms, varying in degree or content depending on how one is associated with the wrongdoer or the wrongdoing. The workshop set out to unravel the core of complicity by raising crucial conceptual issues from the perspectives of ethical theory, the philosophy of action, moral and political philosophy, and social ontology.
In doing so, the workshop successfully created an interdisciplinary forum for examining normative issues of complicity and collective responsibility. It offered a place for analytic moral philosophy to be in dialogue with feminist theory, political philosophy, postcolonial studies, and contemporary political analysis. The ten speakers came together from institutions across India and abroad, including universities in Finland, the Czech Republic, and China. The audience was also notably broad: over a hundred attendees on both days, comprising students, faculty members, and researchers from different institutions in India, such as JNU, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), University of Delhi, and other neighbouring universities.
The workshop opened with a concept note presentation to frame what is at stake with complicity. It drew attention to certain guiding questions that were neither too abstract nor too focused on the specifics of real-world conditions. What does it mean to be implicated in a collective wrong? How is responsibility distributed when institutions fail? What obligations are inherited from historical injustices whose perpetrators and victims are no longer alive? These are questions that bring analytic moral philosophy to bear on some of the most pressing concerns in political and social life. The program had been put together with that connection in mind.
Over two days, the program covered a wide terrain. Arto Laitinen (Tampere University) began by asking a deceptively simple question: when institutions fail, how much of that failure falls on lay members who had no direct hand in it? Kyle Fruh (Duke Kunshan University) discussed the phenomenon of sportswashing. He argued how mega sports events such as the Olympics, FIFA World Cups, and other international tournaments not only distract from violations of basic principles of justice but also actively recruit audiences, athletes, and sponsors into complicity. Bhaskarjit Neog (JNU), who convened the workshop, mapped out a live debate in the philosophical literature on the issue of whether causality is necessary for complicity, or if mere endorsement or association is good enough. Mohinder Singh (JNU) explored Hannah Arendt's thoughts in posthumanist context, while Amrita Banerjee (IIT Bombay) offered a feminist phenomenological account of how the unequal burden of domestic care work could constitute a form of temporal injustice. Banerjee showed how and why framing such cases merely as individual moral failure seriously conceals its structural problems.
Day two brought equally rich material. Säde Hormio (University of Helsinki) presented an integrity-based account of complicity in structural harms that sits in productive tension with the kind of hopelessness that structural critiques can sometimes produce. Ondřej Beran's (University of Pardubice) contribution flipped the received framework by asking about complicity in good collective outcomes: does being swept up in a shared positive act involve the same moral structures as unreflective complicity in harm? Rajarshi Dasgupta (JNU) brought things closest to the ground with a case study of migrant workers in Indian mega-cities, using it to examine situations where achieving something genuinely right requires doing something genuinely wrong. Bastian Steuwer (Ashoka University) addressed cases of structural socioeconomic discrimination where no individual is identifiable as the culprit and the complaint is against the system as a whole. Nishad Patnaik (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi) closed the workshop by defending the claim that temporal distance, i.e., the fact that the perpetrators and victims of slavery or colonialism are no longer alive, does not dissolve our moral obligations, because the effects have not ended.
What in our opinion really distinguished the workshop was the depth and quality of participant engagement. The heartening part of it is that these discussions were led by young MA and PhD scholars. Questions and interventions from the floor extended the scope of the papers beyond their original framing, bringing in perspectives from disciplines beyond philosophy that sharpened the philosophical argument. The informal conversations over coffee at the end of each day allowed those threads that couldn't be fully developed in the sessions to continue. This made the seminar feel like one big conversation that had built its own momentum over the two days.
The ISOS Small Grants program offers awards of up to 2000 USD to support workshops and summer schools in social ontology around the world. The grants are open to ISOS members and are designed to reach researchers who lack access to funding elsewhere. Applications from underrepresented regions are particularly welcome. Beyond the financial support, the program is oriented toward building the field: successful applicants are encouraged to share what they've done with the wider community, including through blog posts like this one. The next funding round will open in autumn 2026.
Säde Hormio is a philosopher at the University of Helsinki. Her work focuses mainly on questions of collective responsibility and social epistemology, especially around institutional knowledge and ignorance. She served in the ISOS Steering Committee during 2024–2026.
Bhaskarjit Neog teaches philosophy at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India. His areas of interest are social ontology, ethics, and moral and political philosophy. His 2024 book What Responsibility? Whose Responsibility? explores the possibility of a non-individualist explanation of collective responsibility.
Astik Yadav (email.astik@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Centre for Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His PhD work focuses on collective intentionality and forms of agency. His other areas of interest include applied ethics, social and political philosophy.
"International Social Ontology Society" is registered as a non-profit organization in Austria.
