I think any chain of moral responsibility breaks down when you go to a scale like this. Is homeless person who still eats because of someone else's brutal exploitation elsewhere "reaping rewards".
Whether one is guilty or not for mass scale evil in the world becomes extraordinarily hard to calculate - and moreover, pointless to calculate and serves only as empty accusation fodder on social media.
Basically, everyone, regardless of guilty, ought to be working to make the world a better place, probably a different place. How to do that is another post - or "an exercise left to the reader".
I don’t think reaping rewards equals guilt. It just means that regardless of you wanting the rewards, you will get them. I’m not trying to say that people who have problems can’t complain since someone will always have it worse.
This sounds like an issue with the limitations of the philosophical framework of cause and effect, which breaks down in complex systems. Also your comment on applying a process oriented solution, which is also the key difference between responsibility and blame that the op referred to. Responsibility is process, or action, oriented. Blame tries to invert that process.
There was an interesting discussion posted on HN the other day where rodney broke was suggesting the programming paradigm of cause and effect, of discrete input and output, was limiting.
Can't help but to see a link between these ideas, however disparate they might be.
Whether one is guilty or not for mass scale evil in the world becomes extraordinarily hard to calculate - and moreover, pointless to calculate and serves only as empty accusation fodder on social media.
Basically, everyone, regardless of guilty, ought to be working to make the world a better place, probably a different place. How to do that is another post - or "an exercise left to the reader".