Group duties without decision-making procedures

When making ascriptions of group responsibility, what sense of responsibility do we use? As an individual member of a group that has been held responsible, what kinds of burdens or duties trickle down to me? And what criteria must groups meet in order to be candidates for group, rather than individual responsibility? My thesis attempts to make sense of these questions, focussing particularly on extremely large groups of people, such as an entire country, or citizens from affluent nations, and how they can qualify as responsible for states of affairs in other nations. I believe that, as members of responsible groups, they share in certain duties, such as duties of compensation, to people across their borders. First, I distinguish between two kinds of normative responsibility that are ascribed to groups: substantive responsibility and attributive responsibility. I go on to illustrate an existing rival position on group responsibility, collectivism, which claims that groups must possess group agency in order to be held responsible. In contrast, I seek to defend a minimalist account of group responsibility. I will argue that, given certain minimal conditions, including like-mindedness, the enjoyment of group benefits, and group inaction, substantive responsibility can distribute amongst individual group members. Finally, I will explain how my minimal account of shared responsibility can be usefully applied to the debates over historical injustice and global deprivation. It can be employed to justify how current-day generations, whose countries have perpetrated historical injustice, continue to owe compensation to people in other countries, as well as how we, as citizens of rich countries, have duties of justice to people in developing countries who suffer great poverty.

Journal of Social Ontology, 2020

In Group Duties, Stephanie Collins proposes a 'tripartite' social ontology of groups as obligation-bearers. Producing a unified theory of group obligations that reflects our messy social reality is challenging and this 'three-sizes-fit-all' approach promises clarity but does not always keep that promise. I suggest considering the epistemic level as primary in determining collective obligations, allowing for more fluidity than the proposed tripartite ontology of collectives, coalitions and combinations. Recently, my friend Jane suffered a bad fall on a joint trail ride. Alice and I, the two other riders in the group, stopped and jumped off our horses to assist Jane. Alice quickly took hold of Jane's riderless horse and I handed her my reins, too, indicating that I would attend to Jane who was still on the ground and obviously in pain. After checking on Jane I called an ambulance and while I started making my way to the nearest road to meet the paramedics, Alice stayed behind, taking care of our three horses and keeping an eye on Jane. By the time the ambulance arrived and paramedics were loading Jane onto a stretcher, a cyclist had stopped and offered assistance. He then helped the two paramedics carry the stretcher up the embankment to the road where the ambulance was parked. When Jane had her accident, Alice and I, in an instant, divided up the roles that we each needed to play in making sure that Jane was safe and being looked after. The paramedics, a well-rehearsed professional team, did their best to help Jane and, finally, the cyclist, a passer-by, joined in the effort and assisted, too. Being cooperative is natural to us and we have set up our social world in a way that both presupposes and requires constant joint efforts. We rely on each other all the time, assuming that others will play their part in these shared endeavours as we are playing ours. When Jane had her accident, Alice and I, in an instant, divided up the roles that we each needed to play in making sure that Jane was safe and being

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2014

There is virtually no philosophical consensus on what, exactly, imperfect duties are. In this paper, I lay out three criteria which I argue any adequate account of imperfect duties should satisfy. Using beneficence as a leading example, I suggest that existing accounts of imperfect duties will have trouble meeting those criteria. I then propose a new approach: thinking of imperfect duties as duties held by groups, rather than individuals. I show, again using the example of beneficence, that this proposal can satisfy the criteria, explaining how something can both have the necessity characteristic of duty, while also allowing agents the latitude which seems to attach to imperfect duties.

Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems part 1 - AAMAS '02, 2002

The act of delegating a task by one agent to another can be carried out by the performance of one or more communicative acts. Such acts may not only be directed to another individual, but also to a group of agents. In this paper, the semantics of imperatives are explored with reference to extant logics of agentative action, and in the context of the referent of an imperative being either an action or a state of affairs. The particular case of issuing of an imperative to a group of individuals is then discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives, and the importance of distinguishing between groups with differing characteristics emphasised by analysis of an extended real-world example.

Julie Zahle & Finn Collin (eds.): Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate, 2014

Collectives are more or less structured groups of human beings. Responsibility-collectivism is the view that the moral responsibility of at least some such collectives is something over and above the combined moral responsibility of individual group members. This paper focuses on one of the key conditions of responsibility: the requirement of control. It is plausible that this requirement also applies to collective agents and so collective responsibility presupposes group-control. Responsibility-collectivists have often tried to unpack the idea of group-control as non-causal control. I argue that non-causal control is not an admissible basis for attributing responsibility. Only causal group-control is. This is because non-causal group control does not provide the right kind of information regarding the ancestry of a certain outcome. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the difficulties which arise for responsibility-collectivism if one understands group-control as causal group-control. One of these difficulties is whether causal group-control is consistent with ontological individualism. The second concerns the relationship of group-control and individual control. I argue that the first difficulty is manageable, but only at the price of having to accept a solution to the second difficulty which runs counter to the original aim of the responsibility-collectivist of characterizing irreducible collective responsibility as compatible with individual responsibility. Worse still, responsibility-collectivists may have to choose sides in other areas of social ontology as well. This further raises the price of this position.

Erkenntnis 9, 79, 2014, pp. 1623-1639, DOI 10.1007/s10670-014-9632-y

"ABSTRACT Christian List and Philip Pettit develop an account of group agency which is based on a functional understanding of agency. They claim that understanding organizations such as commercial corporations, governments, political parties, churches, universities as group agents helps us to a better understanding of the normative status and working of those organizations. List and Pettit, however, fail to provide a unified account of group agency since they do not show how the functional side of agency and the normative side of agency are connected. My claim is that a constitutive account of agency helps us to a proper understanding of group agency since it ties the functional part of acting to the group agent’s self-understanding and its commitment to specific norms, principles and values. A constitutive model of agency meets much better what List and Pettit seek to accomplish, namely conceiving of group agents as artificial persons, constituted by normative principles and entertaining normative relations to others to whom they are accountable. "

Philosophical Studies, 2023

According to some collectivists, purposive groups that lack decision-making procedures such as riot mobs, friends walking together, or the pro-life lobby can be morally responsible and have moral duties. I focus on plural subject-and we-modecollectivism. I argue that purposive groups do not qualify as duty-bearers even if they qualify as agents on either view. To qualify as a duty-bearer, an agent must be morally competent. I develop the Update Argument. An agent is morally competent only if the agent has sufficient positive and negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. Positive control involves the general ability to update one's goal-seeking states, whereas negative control involves the absence of other agents with the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with updating one's goal-seeking states. I argue that even if purposive groups qualify as plural subjects or we-mode group agents, these groups necessarily lack negative control over updating their goalseeking states. This creates a cutoff point for groups as duty-bearers: Organized groups may qualify as duty-bearers, whereas purposive groups cannot qualify as duty-bearers.

Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility

Though common and seemingly important, attributions of group blameworthiness and group obligations can also seem metaphysically or ethically suspect. Often, no individual member of the group had control over the outcome for which they are blamed, and no individual member can make a difference as to whether the group discharges its obligation. This makes it difficult to understand group attributions in terms of attributions of corresponding individual blameworthiness and obligations. Moreover, the groups themselves often fall short of standard conditions of moral agency. They seem to lack many properties normally associated with agenthood, including beliefs about their circumstances, and they lack the sort of stable inner organization that might make it clear what capacities they have and what demands can be properly directed at them, other than those directed at their members. In response to this agency challenge, philosophers who want to defend attributions of collective obligations to groups of these kinds have either (i) argued that the groups in question have the requisite capabilities to have obligations of their own or (ii) suggested ways in which the existence of related individual obligations can make it true that these groups have obligations. Philosophers who have defended attributions of collective responsibility and blameworthiness have suggested that members of the relevant collectives can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This chapter details some cases where it is natural to attribute obligations or blameworthiness to groups that cannot be plausibly attributed to their individual members, and discusses the agency challenge mentioned above as well as proposed replies and problems and prospects for these. The most promising replies, I will argue, understands these groups’ obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents.

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2014

There has been considerable recent interest in the “collective moral autonomy” thesis (CMA), that is, the notion that we can predicate moral suc- cesses, failures, and duties of collectives even if there are no comparable suc- cesses, failures, and duties among members.1 One reason why this position looks appealing is because the opposing individualist position seems to have what we might call an accounting problem. Individualists maintain that only individuals can be subjects of moral success, failure, or duty; however, many reasonable judgments about collective actions include moral information on a scale and of a stringency that it does not seem possible to predicate even of the duties of members who have steering power in the actions of the collective. Here I offer a paradigm for thinking about responsibility judgments in organized collective cases to help individualism solve its accounting problem, and allow us to account within a strict individualist perspective for moral information that ostensibly favors CMA. I begin by presenting this problem of moral accounting in organized collectives, and the cases and arguments that favor CMA (§1).2 These arguments already weaken once we avoid potential misunderstandings of the prospective duties of steering members; I show that on a descriptively and normatively appropriate view, steering members must be thought to face reasons at the group scale very directly (§2). I then argue that retrospective evaluation cannot depart from the contents of those wide prospective member duties (§3). Finally, I offer a view of responsibility judgments in collective cases that binds retrospective and prospective responsibility in the required way (§4). This solves the accounting problem that individualism seems to have, signifi- cantly strengthens what might be required of steering-level group members in organized collectives, and neutralizes a core reason for favoring CMA over individualism.

Philosophical Papers, 2008

As Virginia Held, Larry May and Torbjörn Tännsjö have argued, it can be plausible to hold loosely structured sets of individuals morally responsible for failing to act collectively, if this would be needed to prevent some harm. On the other hand it is commonly assumed that (collective) agency is a necessary condition for (collective) responsibility. I show that loosely structured inactive groups sometimes meet this requirement if we employ a weak (but nonetheless non-reductionist) notion of collective agency. This notion can be defended on independent grounds. The resulting position on distribution of responsibility is more restrictive than Held's, May's or Tännsjö's, and I find this consequence intuitively attractive. * I thank Wlodek Rabinowicz and the participants in the higher seminar in Practical Philosophy in Lund, as well as Åsa Andersson, for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.