The Argument from Normative Autonomy for Collective Agents

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.

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.

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.

In this paper I want to argue that acts of blame are performed by collectives, and not by any collective but only by collectives that satisfy certain conditions – broadly those that, by collec-tivizing reason, can be held to be autonomous subjects to which it makes sense to attribute attitudes, including participant reactive attitudes such as resentment. The actors involved must also be related to the collective in particular ways in order to hold and be held responsible, but they need not have the same attitudes as the collective. This implies both that our attributions of moral responsibility to an agent does not depend only on facts about the agent but also on facts about us, and that the reasons for which we hold responsible and by which we justify our moral practices, and which the agent can likewise appeal to in an attempt to avoid being held responsible, depend on the collective involved and its substantive ethical precepts. The answer to whether an agent is responsible, or is an appropriate object of a reactive attitude, is not to be settled purely by philosophical analysis, and even the kind of naturalistic description of the pattern of our reactive attitudes that [22] suggests in " Freedom and Resentment " will only go part of the way – the excuses and exemptions are things we might say in a dialogue where reasons are exchanged, but each collective has some leeway over what substantive reasons count as grounds of an excuse or exemption.

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

Journal of Social Ontology, 2020

Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment-as is arguably the case with Christian List and Philip Pettit's theory of group agency-face the so-called "problem of the first belief" that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for group agents. This paper introduces three possible solutions to the problem and discusses the effects that these solutions have in regard to the possibility of attributing moral responsibility to groups.

The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2023

A number of philosophers have recently argued that group agents can be morally responsible for their actions in virtue of having a certain kind of structured decision-making procedure which is responsive to reasons. However, accounts of group agent blameworthiness face some objections. One is that group agents cannot be responsible for wrongdoing because they are unable to experience certain kinds of emotional responses (Thompson, 2018). Another is that group agents who regularly commit wrongdoing due to certain structural impediments will always be excused for their wrongdoing. This paper demonstrates such problems can be avoided by adopting an Attributionist theory of group moral responsibility. On this approach, though group agents lack certain capacities, their ability to deny that certain facts provide moral reasons to act in certain ways is sufficient to mean they hold objectionable attitudes towards us, and those attitudes are sufficient to make group agents blameworthy.

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.

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2006

2010

This dissertation seeks to develop a novel account of the responsibility members of a group bear for transgressions in which they did not participate. More specifically, the dissertation argues that individual members of a group may be blamed for group transgressions independent of their participation in those transgressions, and it grounds their blameworthiness in a normative conception of membership. The account developed here is intended to apply to any institutional group -the university, corporation, advocacy group, nation-state, etc. Throughout the dissertation, I make reference to each of these kinds of groups (and some others) but the account has been developed with an eye to a special problem -viz. the problem of assigning responsibility to American citizens for U.S. wrongdoings in the course of the war in Iraq. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I address this problem, contemplating the responsibility borne by not only the generic citizen who neither supported nor opposed the war but also the citizen who did everything in her power to protest, and thereby prevent, the war and the abuses committed in its course.