Collective Responsibility

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

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.

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.

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...

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

2013

The present doctoral dissertation aims to offer an indirect defence of the individualist position in the debate concerning collective moral responsibility. As such it swims against the general tide as it were. However, the individualism defended in the dissertation is of a rather weak kind, allowing a range of collective entities. Basically, the main claim of the thesis is that only human agents qualify as moral agents, and thus moral responsibility, either individual or collective, is to be ascribed to individual agents either individually or collectively. iii presupposes agency. I argue that, due to their constitution, collective agents are such agents that it necessarily would be unfair to hold them morally responsible in their own right. I proceed mainly in respect to Pettit's account of collective agents. However, although the focus is primarily on Pettit's account, I suggest that the idea of this paper is generalizable, as the premises or assumptions on which the critical points are based are widely shared by the proponents of the collectivist camp.

This paper deals with ascriptions of collective responsibility and the distribution of the responsibility from the group to the individuals. Specifically, this article proposes a solution to cases of collective responsibility which is also sensitive to the demands of normative individualism.

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.

Metaphilosophy, 2005

In this article we critique the collectivist approach to collective moral responsibility. According to philosophers of a collectivist persuasion, a central notion of collective moral responsibility is moral responsibility assigned to a collective as a single entity. In our critique, we proceed by way of discussing the accounts and arguments of three prominent representatives of the collectivist approach with respect to collective responsibility: Margaret Gilbert, Russell Hardin, and Philip Pettit. Our aims are mainly critical; however, this should not be taken to imply that we do not ourselves support an alternative account of collective responsibility. We advocate an individualist account of collective responsibility. On this view of collective responsibility as joint responsibility, collective responsibility is ascribed to individuals. Each member of the group is individually morally responsible for the outcome of the joint action, but each is individually responsible jointly with the others.

This paper focuses on collective moral responsibility in the backward-looking sense that subsumes collective moral blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For the sake of simplicity I focus on the former, to which I also sometimes refer as collective moral guilt or more briefly as collective guilt. For the same reason I focus on collective guilt over a bad action as opposed to an irresponsible belief or reprehensible attitude. I explore the relationship of collective moral responsibility to the moral responsibility of individual members of the collective in question.