Moral responsibility and citizenship

There are many citizens whose capacities are limited, or whose lives are already over-burdened. For one reason or another, many people find just getting through the day to be an ordeal. We add an extra burden to their lives if we castigate them for failure to take part in extra activities that we assume to be the responsibility of citizens.

Just as this assumes too much of all citizens, it also diverts attention from the responsibility that should be demanded of others - non-citizens, governments, and corporations. We sometimes talk of “corporate citizenship” but corporations are not citizens. They should not, however, be let off the hook of exercising responsibility, any more than governments should - not as a moral attribute of citizenship, but as a requirement of law and democracy.

In conclusion, we should talk about moral or social responsibility more generally, and we should liberate it from talk about citizenship.

We should recognise that citizenship, in itself, does not make a person virtuous, and that being a non-citizen does not, in itself, make a person morally suspect.

If citizens speak out in support of terrorism, for example, what is unacceptable is not the fact that they are speaking as citizens. It is not like failing to support your country’s football team! What is unacceptable is the fact that they are supporting a destructive and nihilistic act. When non-citizens speak in support of terrorism, what is deplorable is not that they are doing this as non-citizens but, again, as supporters of such an act.

Whether we intend it or not, we reinforce a sense of alienation and undermine the sense of community we want to create if we talk in ways that divide people, categorising them as insiders and outsiders, rather than stressing our commonalities as people.

When we assume that citizenship carries with it a code of moral or social conduct, we do a disservice to virtuous non-citizens and we also blind ourselves to the causes of destructive and anti-social behaviour. The absence of citizenship does not cause it, and citizenship will not solve it.