Deciding what is the right thing to do is hard enough when it’s just individuals interacting with each other. We could call that “conspiracy” if we wanted to. Complicity is a whole different matter.

I’m going to go at this etymologically first. I know as well as you do that the origin of a word does not determine what it will come to mean, but sometimes I think it points us in the right direction.

Picture a football huddle or an intimate little knot at a cocktail party or a coffee hour. The individuals are close enough together that the breath of each mingles with the breath of the others. That’s the picture that “conspire” gives us. Their breath (spiro) mingles (com-). It helps if we think of individuals as representing themselves only. If you can picture Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin comparing notes at Yalta, you will have a good notion of “conspiracy.”

Complicity is another matter entirely. Here we are considering being “folded in” to something. The something you are being folded into can be large and complex. You might not know about it. That would not keep you from being folded into it. The verb plicare, “to fold” is the root of a lot of interesting English words.

Let’s just keep those tendencies separate and see if it helps us.

Imagine three dinner settings. In one, let’s say a recently integrated restaurant in a border state, two white couples agree to harass their black server. It’s not hard to imagine. If “blackened sole” is on the menu, it would offer an easy transition, but the insults don’t need to be witty; they could just be mean so long as they are racist and have been agreed upon by the group.

In the second setting–the same white couples–one person suggests that it might be fun to “needle” the server. They, the one who proposed it, are supported by one other person and opposed by the other two. This sets up an elementary conflict of conspiracy and complicity.

In the third, a group of five guys, who have stopped in for a beer at the bar after their bowling league, are within hearing distance of the interaction with the server, but are not privy to the conversation among the two couples.

There is no question of conspiracy here and the question of complicity is oddly distant. What to do? Why?

We are not considering what the right thing to do is. We are considering how the various actions should be understood and critiqued. What standard is to be used? In setting #1, everyone has agreed and everyone will be required to participate in the harassment. If one of the group did not, they could be criticized by the others for failing to participate in a group action that had been agreed upon.

In setting #2, some have agreed and some have not. It is perfectly appropriate for those who did not agree to intervene in the actions of those who did and to ask them to stop. There is a lot of play in just how that request can be put. It can be a reproof; it can be an appeal; it can be an effective change of subject. Should the objection itself become the subject at the table–I can nearly guarantee that it will–it will take some form of “Who do you think you are, criticizing the behavior I have chosen!” The answer–I can nearly guarantee it–will be “I am part of this group and I do not want to be part of the behavior you have chosen.”

This is complicated enough imagining that everyone is sober. If it is late in the meal and some are sober and some are not, it becomes more difficult.

But now we come to setting #3, the guys who just stopped in for a beer. They overhear the harassment and have a quick conversation among themselves about what to do. Let me pause briefly to say again that I am not considering in this post, what would be good behavior. I am trying to think about on what grounds behavior could be criticized or defended. I have suggested that settings #1 and #2 involve questions of conspiracy. I want to say now that setting #3 involves complicity.

The guys in the third group will have to say something like this. “I know that we are not a part of that table of couples, but what they are doing is wrong and we should say something.” And someone else would say, “What they are doing is a shame, certainly, but it does not involve us. Let’s just leave.” [1]

The normative question that faces the guys in setting #3 is whether they are required to do something about the behavior of their neighbors. In the social setting such that they are folded into it? Are they folded in because they have heard what was said? Is it because they are acquaintances of those people? The people in setting #3 would surely not make the case about a similar situation that was going on in a restaurant across the street. They would hear about that event the next day if they heard about it at all and they would look at each other and say, “What a shame!”

Just one more step toward questions of complicity. You live in Springfield, Ohio, where, according to J. D. Vance, hordes of undocumented Haitian immigrants are abducting and consuming their neighbor’s cats. You are now folded into an event that is large and ugly. You have the choice of lamenting it or counteracting it. You will probably describe one choice as better than the other.

I would. But on what grounds? Any rationale I can think of jams the accelerator to the floor and disconnects the brakes. Why is that a good idea?

[1] Or possibly, we know them in other settings–work, volunteer activities, book groups–and what we do here will have implications there. Is it worth it? Maybe a quiet word in private would be better than a scene in a restaurant.