Moral Responsibility for Distant Collective Harms (original) (raw)

Collective moral agency and self-induced moral incapacity

Philosophical Explorations, 2022

Collective moral agents can cause their own moral incapacity. If an agent is morally incapacitated, then the agent is exempted from responsibility. Due to self-induced moral incapacity, corporate responsibility gaps resurface. To solve this problem, I first set out and defend a minimalist account of moral competence for group agents. After setting out how a collective agent can cause its own moral incapacity, I argue that self-induced temporary exempting conditions do not free an agent from diachronic responsibility once the agent regains its moral faculties. For collective agents, any exempting condition is potentially temporary due to the 'malleability' of their constitution. Therefore, in cases of selfinduced moral incapacity and subsequent wrongdoing, unlike individuals, every collective agent can be (made) morally responsible for its actions even though it did not qualify as a moral agent at the time of wrongdoing. Hence, this is no reason for skepticism concerning corporate responsibility.

Moral Ignorance and Blameworthiness

Philosophical Studies

In this paper I discuss various hard cases that an account of moral ignorance should be able to deal with: ancient slave holders, Susan Wolf’s JoJo, psychopaths such as Robert Harris, and finally, moral outliers . All these agents are ignorant, but it is not at all clear that they are blameless on account of their ignorance. I argue that the discussion of this issue in recent literature has missed the complexities of these cases by focusing on the question of epistemic fault. It is not clear that all blameworthy morally ignorant agents have committed an epistemic fault. There are other important issues that pull us in various directions: moral capacity, bad will, and formative circumstances. I argue that bad will is what is crucial, and moral ignorance itself can be a form of bad will. I argue that we should distinguish between two sorts of bad will, and correspondingly, two sorts of blameworthiness. Ordinary blameworthiness, requires moral knowledge, and is based on akratic action. The other kind of blameworthiness, objective blameworthiness, applies when the agent is morally ignorant, and when this indicates bad will. Objective blameworthiness can be undermined by unfortunate formative circumstances.

Moral Dilemmas and Collective Responsibilities

Essays in Philosophy, 2009

In this paper, I work within Ruth Marcus's account of the source of moral dilemmas and articulate the implications of her theory for collective responsibility. As an extension to Marcus's work, I explore what her account means for the moral emotions and responsibilities of those complicit in perpetuating unjust systems of a nonideal world from which moral dilemmas arise. This move necessitates shifting away from the primacy of control. That one is born into unjust systems one had no hand in establishing does not excuse one from responsibility to mend them. Similarly, even if one's personal contribution in the perpetuation of unjust systems is negligible -- the injustices would continue whether one participated or not, and one's resistance would do little-to-nothing -- one nevertheless retains responsibility. This expanded sense of responsibility necessitates a specialized sort of moral emotion -- one that, like agent-regret or tragic-remorse, transcends the criterion of agentic control, but nevertheless can be classified neither as agent-regret nor tragic-remorse.

Dirty work, clean hands: The moral psychology of indirect agency

… Behavior and Human …, 2009

When powerful people cause harm, they often do so indirectly through other people. Are harmful actions carried out through others evaluated less negatively than harmful actions carried out directly? Four experiments examine the moral psychology of indirect agency. Experiments 1A, 1B, and 1C reveal effects of indirect agency under conditions favoring intuitive judgment, but not reflective judgment, using a joint/separate evaluation paradigm. Experiment 2A demonstrates that effects of indirect agency cannot be fully explained by perceived lack of foreknowledge or control on the part of the primary agent. Experiment 2B indicates that reflective moral judgment is sensitive to indirect agency, but only to the extent that indirectness signals reduced foreknowledge and/or control. Experiment 3 indicates that effects of indirect agency result from a failure to automatically consider the potentially dubious motives of agents who cause harm indirectly. Experiment 4 demonstrates an effect of indirect agency on purchase intentions.

The Social Creation of Morality and Complicity in Collective Harms: A Kantian Account

Journal of Applied Philosophy

This article considers the charge that citizens of developed societies are complicit in large-scale harms, using climate destabilisation as its central example. It contends that we have yet to create a lived moralitya fabric of practices and institutionsthat is adequate to our situation. As a result, we participate in systematic injustice, despite all good efforts and intentions. To make this case, the article draws on recent discussions of Kant's ethics and politics. Section 1 considers Tamar Schapiro's account of how otherwise decent actions can be corrupted by others' betrayals, and hence fall into complicity. Section 2 turns to discussions by Christine Korsgaard and Lucy Allais, which highlight how people can be left without innocent choices if shared frameworks of interaction do not instantiate core ideals. Section 3 brings these ideas together in order to make sense of the charge of complicity in grave collective harms, and addresses some worries that the idea of unavoidable complicity may raise.

A NOTION OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY IMMUNE TO THE THREAT FROM CAUSAL DETERMINATION

: This article sets out a notion of moral responsibility that incorporates the central features of the answerability conception advocated by T. M Scanlon, Hilary Bok, and Angela Smith, and of Michael McKenna’s more specific conversational account, but which excludes any notion of desert, whether basic or non-basic. The point of blaming and praising on this notion largely forward-looking: its main objectives are protection, reconciliation, and moral formation. Agents are blameworthy and praiseworthy by virtue of being appropriate recipients of blame and praise given these aims. Blaming on this conception can involve causing harm, but the justifiability of such harming does not reintroduce the legitimacy of desert. The resulting notion of moral responsibility is immune to any threat from the causal determination of action.

Consequentializing Moral Responsibility

In the paper, I try to cast some doubt on traditional attempts to defi ne, or explicate, moral responsibility in terms of deserved praise and blame. Desert-based accounts of moral responsibility, though no doubt more faithful to our ordinary notion of moral responsibility, tend to run into trouble in the face of challenges posed by a deterministic picture of the world on the one hand and the impact of moral luck on human action on the other. Besides, grounding responsibility in desert seems to support ascriptions of pathological blame to agents trapped in moral dilemmas as well as of excess blame in cases of joint action. Desert is also notoriously diffi cult, if not impossible, to determine (at least with suffi cient precision). And fi nally, though not least important, recent empirical research on people's responsibility judgments reveals our common-sense notion of responsibility to be hopelessly confused and easily manipulated.

The implications of being implicated. Individual responsibility and structural injustice

ethic@ - An international Journal for Moral Philosophy

Within the global justice debate the demandingness objection is primarily aimed at utilitarian theorists who defend a version of the 'optimizing principle of beneficence' to deal with the problem of global poverty. The problem of demandingness, however, is hardly ever raised within the context of the dominant institutional theories of global justice that see severe poverty as a human rights violation. Nor are the fundamental underlying questions posed by many of these theorists. Which specific responsibilities do individual moral agents have regarding institutional and structural forms of injustice (1)? Which political spheres, organized public spaces, or political practices are necessary to create a setting in which these responsibilities can be discharged (2)? Does a 'defensible and psychologically feasible conception of responsibility' (Scheffler 2002, 62) exist that is restrictive-yet demanding-enough to deal with the complex challenges of our globalizing age (3). This paper addresses questions (1) and (3) on the basis of a critical analysis of Iris Marion Young's social connection theory of responsibility.

Unwitting Behavior and Responsibility

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2011

Unlike much work on responsibility, George Sher's new book, Who Knew?: Responsibility Without Awareness, focuses on the relationship between knowledge and responsibility. Sher argues against the view that responsibility depends on an agent's awareness of the nature and consequences of her action. According to Sher's alternative proposal, even agents who are unaware of important features of their actions may be morally or prudentially responsible for their behavior. While I agree with many of Sher's central conclusions, I explore the worry that, as it stands, his account may only justify ascriptions of a relatively superficial form of responsibility.