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, term responsibility is used to refer to ex post responsibility for contributions to injury. Current international law has a hard time keeping up with current reality of increased collaboration between states since international law is the historical fruit of a primitive and horizontal conception of international legal order that holds on to fiction of exclusive attribution of responsibility to one single state. This paper steps outside legal (tool)box and starts from a philosophical analysis of 'responsibility' – normative concept that has 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, paper taps into more deontological literature in legal and political philosophy on 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.