Collective Responsibility: Organizations as Organic Entities

International Encyclopedia of Ethics Wiley-Blackwell, 2013

This book explores a universal question of human social order: Under what circumstances and to what extent is the individual to be held morally responsible for collective events? This question reaches far beyond the intentions and actions of a particular business enterprise, state or a similar large-scale collective. The philosopher Wolfgang Sohst (Berlin, Germany) investigates the subject with unprecedented thoroughness, covering the whole range of contemporary discussion on this subject. He provides a detailed analysis of the functions of individual members in such a collective, the structural prerequisites for them to be held responsible for acts which they have not directly committed themselves and the transmission of responsibility even to successor generations of the perpetrators collective. Table of contents: Introduction 1 Actors and Moral Action 1.1 On the concepts of actors and action 1.2 The simultaneous emergence of actor and action 1.3 The difference between a unit of event and a unit of action 1.4 The difference between legal and moral responsible action 2 The Continuum Between Individual and Corporate Actor 2.1 The relationship between a single human actor and a corporate actor 2.1.1 The primary responsibility of the individual actor and the ontological status of the collective 2.1.2 Additional arguments for putting collective responsibility onto the individual actor 2.2 The levels within structural consolidation 2.3 A different schematic view: Community, Society, State 2.4 Direct vs. organized sociality 2.5 Conflicts of application in assigning collective responsibility 3 Individual and Collective Actions 3.1 A better form of social reductionism 3.2 Corporate bodies as a bundle of agency relationships 3.3 The horizon of view for collective social phenomena 4 The Corporate Entity as a Moral Subject 4.1 Are corporate actors also morally responsible? 4.2 Corporate bodies as norm subjects 5 Possible criteria for the moral qualification of collective action 5.1 Membership in a group 5.2 Success of an action 5.3 Shared intentionality or purpose, common interests and common consciousness 5.4 Social relationships between actors as a condition of collective action 5.5 Subjective and factual feelings of collective responsibility 5.6 The community of shared values 5.7 Social identity 5.8 Origin and ethnic belonging 5.9 No equality in injustice 6 Norm-based and Purpose-oriented Organization 6.1 No collective responsibility without inner organization 6.2 Collective shame as an indication of collective responsibility 6.3 Individual responsibility for collective norms 6.4 The collective organization as an independent unit of purpose for the collective 6.4.1 The actualistic perspective 6.4.2 Structural persistence 6.4.3 Possible counter-examples of structural persistence 6.5 The other side of collective responsibility 6.6 Interim Result 7 Moral Responsibility of the Individual from an International Perspective 8 Social Norms and Our Responsibility for their Fulfillment 8.1 Norm dimensions 8.2 The overarching importance of norm ranking in assigning collective moral responsibility 8.3 Private and public norms 8.4 Subjective ‘ought’ and personal responsibility 8.5 The obligation to morally acceptable and coherent behavior 9 The Difference between Culpability and Responsibility 10 The Temporal Horizon of Collective Moral Responsibility Index Bibliography

Scandinavian Journal of Management, 2003

Societies achieve their purposes through organizations. But organizations may develop into instrumental entities bereft of ethical debate. Roberts (Account. Org. Soc. 16(4) (1991) 355) claims that their hierarchical accountability systems powerfully reinforce instrumentality and individualize accountability. Based on the Habermasian 'work' and 'interaction' dichotomy, he discusses ways of counteracting such consequences. We criticize this attempt in certain respects and propose a responsibility/accountability (R/A) framework-allowing for an extended exposition of individual senses of R/A, and of organizational forms that could contribute to promoting such senses. We believe that a framing of this kind should benefit analysis and facilitate a shift in focus away from top-down control and non-reflective accountability and towards individual agency and responsibility within the context of decentralized forms of organization. r

2020

This chapter will develop standards for assessing individual moral responsibility for collective action. In some cases, these standards expand a person’s responsibility beyond what she or he would be responsible for if performing the same physical behavior outside of a group setting. I will argue that structural diff erences between two ideal types of groups— organizations and goaloriented collectives— largely determine the baseline moral responsibility of group members for the group’s collective action. (Group members can be more or less responsible for collective action beyond that baseline due to personal qualities like knowledge of the intended collective outcome.) The same individual physical behavior can make the member of a goaloriented collective responsible for the entire collective action to an equal degree with her fellow group members, whereas the typical organization member is only responsible for his contributory action. I will proceed with a culpability standard of re...

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility, 2020

This chapter address the question how moral responsibility that attaches in the first instance to groups of agents (as opposed to organizations or institutions) should be distributed to the individual members of the group. It identifies the conditions under which such a group is collectively morally responsible for having done something and argues that in these cases, in the absence of other conflicting duties or responsibilities, and assuming members act freely and are aware of the consequences of what the group does, each member of the group is culpable to degree he would be if acting alone regardless of the size of the causal contribution and regardless of whether it was overdetermined

My aim in this article is twofold. First, I will illuminate the triangular conceptual connections between responsibility, authority, and power as they are exposed in the organizational realm; second, I will show how the three concepts are distinct. Relying on the work of Peter Strawson and his followers on responsibility for my point of departure, I will show that the connection between the inner corporational authority and its inner matching responsibility is different from the connection between the outer corporational forces and influences and the CSR that they develop in reaction to these. This will expose another important distinction between two kinds of responsibility: the organizational kind, as instantiated in organizations, and the social kind, which constitutes the outer aspect of the CSR. Though many thinkers address different kinds of responsibility, a comparative perspective of these different concepts is missing. I attempt to bring three of these separate discourses together to examine them alongside one another, evaluating them in the light of their differences and similarities. This will expose a new typology of 'responsibility' that penetrates and illuminates the relations between corporations and society and as such enhance our understanding of organizational responsibility.

2010

The goals of this dissertation are to examine the existing philosophical literature on group agency and collective responsibility and to demonstrate that this literature fails to sufficiently address the hierarchical organization of corporations, thereby severely limiting the applicability of this literature to real-world business situations. Where references to corporate hierarchy are made in the group agency and collective responsibility literature, they are incidental and descriptive only. This is in contrast to general business literature, business ethics literature, and organizational theory literature, which each highlight the importance of corporate hierarchy from their respective points of view. In this dissertation, the concept of the hierarchical organization of corporations is carefully examined to show how it identifies 1) the roles and tasks required to meet corporate objectives and 2) the relationships, both simple and complex, that are created between and among the roles specified in the corporate hierarchy. By integrating this understanding of corporate hierarchy into the philosophy of group agency and collective responsibility that are articulated in the existing literature, an account of corporate group agency and collective responsibility is produced that better describes and explains the operation of group agents by providing concrete ways to describe how they form corporate intent, make corporate decisions and carry out corporate action. Furthermore, explanations of group agency that integrate the concept of corporate hierarchy provide a ix clear way to articulate claims of individual responsibility in the setting of corporate collective responsibility. From this account of group agency, improvements to business ethics are also recommended. These improvements come from viewing corporations as hierarchically organized group agents and integrating organizational ethical principles into existing business ethics. In addition, the relationships created in hierarchically organized group agents entail ethical responsibilities for the individuals who are part of a corporate group agent, both leaders and those who carry out leaders' decisions; and ultimately, it is the fulfillment of the responsibilities on each side of this hierarchically defined set of relationships that leads to an optimally functioning corporate hierarchy, and correspondingly, a fully functioning group agent. The implications of this work on corporations for other types of group agents are also explored, leading to the prospect of a clearer articulation of obligations and responsibilities in these groups, through the integration of a concept of organizational structure (of which corporate hierarchy is one clear example) in the study of these group agents. And finally, a new question is posed and briefly examined: is some kind of organizational structure one of the necessary or sufficient conditions of group agency?

SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2025

This article considers whether the idea of collective responsibility is relevant to the problems of morality and whether it is amenable to conceptualization in moral philosophy. It examines the discussion of collective moral responsibility from two angles: problematization of collective action and problematization of the collective agent, with a focus on revealing the specificities of the individual moral agent as the main topic of moral philosophy. The author demonstrates that the principle of conceptualization of collective moral responsibility is a reduction: The collective agent and collective actions are seen as forms of the individual agent and his actions by isolating the characteristics of the individual agent and his acts that warrant ascribing moral responsibility to them. This article determines types of such reduction: reduction to the individual, and reduction of qualitative and quantitative characteristics. Reduction to the individual leads to objectification of the individual, stripping him of agency in terms of the attribution of responsibility, but viewing him as the agent in terms of fulfilling a responsibility (the morally paradoxical status of the object bearing moral responsibility is called “noxal”). Reduction of characteristics does not make it possible to consider the collective agent a morally valid agent in its own right. Instead of a substantive definition, the collective agent is accorded merely a formal definition, with the main thought operation being analogy and association, which precludes considering reduced forms of the collective agent to be totally valid. Thus, the division of methods of conceptualizing moral responsibility into individualistic and holistic advocated by some researchers is not valid, because holism is essentially exhausted by the analogy and association of characteristics of the collective agent with those of the individual agent. The article concludes that the problem of collective responsibility lacks an adequate object, although the formal definition of the collective agent is sufficient for the legal regulation of collective activity without turning to morality.

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2006

I n this essay, I revisit my 2002 account of collective responsibility. It holds that someone can share a kind of moral responsibility for the actions of a group to which she belongs even when these actions occurred before she was born; for example, I hold that present-day Americans can share moral responsibility for actions associated with American slavery despite the fact that no one alive today participated in this shameful chapter in our national history. 1 I am revisiting this account for two reasons. First, I want to reconcile this account with my 2005 account of corporate moral responsibility. Second, I want to address the charge that my account confuses moral responsibility with moral taint. Gregory Mellema clearly states this concern about accounts like mine when he notes that if we do not consider the actions of individuals in the assignment of moral responsibility: then nothing prevents the inclusion of individuals on the basis of sheer circumstance such as being an American, being male, and so forth. But this way of speaking makes us liable to confuse moral responsibility with moral taint. (Mellema 1997, 140) Many theories of collective moral responsibility respond to this worry by requiring that an individual have had at some point in time control over whether she shares collective responsibility for a group's action. Although the accounts differ in the 1. See Silver and Kumar (2004) for a full treatment of this particular issue.

As understood here a collective action occurs when members of a collective act in light of a joint commitment to intend as a body to perform some action. Some members may have determined the relevant collective intention having been given the authority to do so by the others, who left such matters in their hands. This implies that insofar as collectives as such can be morally responsible, the responsibility of a given collective has no logical implications for the moral responsibility of one (or more) individual members of the collective.