Are Individualist Accounts of Collective Responsibility Morally Deficient? (original) (raw)

The Collectivist Approach to Collective Moral Responsibility

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.

Collective Responsibility: Against Collectivism

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.

FOUNDATIONS AND CONSEQUENCES OF COLLECTIVE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

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.

From Individual to Collective Responsibility: There and Back Again

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

Collective Moral Responsibility

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

Who’s to Blame? - Collective Moral Responsibility and Its Implications for Group Members

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.

Distributing Collective Moral Responsibility to Group Members

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.

A Pluralist Approach to Joint Responsibility

Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2023

The dominant accounts of group moral responsibility argue that only those groups that have organizational capacities that mirror the agential capacities of rational and morally competent individuals are morally responsible agents. Undergirding these arguments is the taken-for-granted assumption that there is only one type of moral responsibility. This paper challenges this assumption and outlines a pluralist approach to the moral responsibility of groups. I first describe three types of groups that lack some of the capacities often assumed necessary for an entity to be morally responsible and suggest that these aberrant groups nonetheless warrant some of our reactive attitudes. Drawing on David Shoemaker's tripartite theory, I argue that this is so because aberrant groups, although they are not fully-formed moral agents, might still have morally relevant emergent capacities such as the capacity for having and expressing a largely coherent evaluative outlook, the empathic and coordinative capacities for having regard for other agents, or the capacity for judging. I argue that these three sets of capacities are independent of each other and that each is sufficient to make the group fit to be held responsible in some way.