Only to the degree that they knew what they were doing, thus, aimed their actions (e.g. at bad or evil), and had causal control over the relationship between their actions and the (socio-political) consequences of these. When knowledge, intentions and control (causal efficacy) exist, an individual (actor or agent) can be regarded as accountable for particular misdeeds, e.g., 'crimes against humanity'; this is a post-Holocaust ethical gain. My question has to do with ordinary people (and their ethically blameworthy beliefs); people who carried on the business of living, while more or less inadvertently maintaining and even directly benefiting from a particular status quo (e.g. white people, generally, from apartheid in South Africa): Can they be regarded as having acted with such knowledge, etc. as would make them answerable for the past? I think not and my argument focuses on the following: (i) our status as ordinary actors, the kinds of recommendations epistemology should be seen as issuing to all agents including ordinary people (e.g. regarding justification, grounds for beliefs, counter-evidence for the grounds of our beliefs), and (ii) the force of individual, human agency in the face of the ideological, economic, military, and political power-relationships which constitute 'a society'. I think these draw clear limits around our ordinary responsability for the past.