ABSTRACT
Indirect Distribution Accounts reason that reparative responsibilities need not be distributed amongst individuals in accordance with their particular relationships with the injustice in question, in contrast to Direct Distribution Accounts. Instead, the crux rests with the collective in which the responsible individuals are involved – for instance, whether they are complicit in culpable groups, such as their states. Three prominent indirect distribution accounts are examined and applied to authoritarian contexts. Whilst complicity-centric accounts hold much initial promise under conditions where direct blame for actions cannot be accurately assigned to individuals, they suffer from the fundamental issue afflicting complicity accounts of remedial responsibility at large – that is, the problem of action description. A recently propounded account by Avia Pasternak, drawing upon Kutzian complicity theory, has sought to conceptualise responsibility in authoritarian states through the lenses of intentional citizenship, though the proposed account strains in accounting for numerous subsets of agents, including affirmative non-participants who identify strongly with, but do not participate in per se, their state. Finally, structural injustice-centric theories may not be most appropriately applicable to normatively unique contexts within authoritarian states. Given the shortcomings in both Direct and Indirect Distribution Accounts, a new approach to reparative justice is evidently needed.
