Bystanders who have witnessed a car accident have a duty to call for help and to coordinate their efforts to pull the injured to safety.
The member states of the United Nations have an obligation to collaborate and find sustainable ways to reduce extreme poverty and fulfill the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The European Union must enact and implement a plan to humanely protect refugees fleeing war zones and landing at their borders and shores.1 When we make these intuitively plausible claims, we are saying that as long as the groups or collectivities in each of these scenarios (i.e., bystanders, member states, the EU) can, within reasonable limits, rescue the injured, fulfill the SDGs or protect the endangered refugees, they have a duty to do so.2 More specifically, we are saying that these groups have collective duties of beneficence.
It has long been argued that keeping the analysis of moral responsibility and obligation solely at the level of individuals fails to capture significant normative elements of situations where groups have acted together to bring about collective harms and wrongs for which no individual can be held responsible. The literature in collective responsibility considers what kinds of groups can be held responsible; the conditions under which groups can be said to be responsible agents; and also, how (and when) responsibility distributes to its individual members (Cripps 2013; French 1984; Isaacs 2011; Kutz 2000; May 1992). More recently, a parallel debate has emerged that explores not what groups can be held responsible for (in a backward-looking sense), but rather, whether and under what conditions groups or collectives have responsibilities (in a forward-looking sense)—or what I will be calling “duties” or “obligations.” Though we commonly say that groups like bystanders or the UN member states have moral duties, either to refrain from violating rights or causing harms, or even to act together to prevent harms or protect rights, how should we understand these obligations? Notice that it is one thing to say that a corporation such as British Petroleum (BP) violated duties (certainly legal, plausibly also moral) when its negligent and reckless actions led to a deadly explosion and a devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and quite another to say that the affluent or perhaps all of humanity, as a group, have a duty to end extreme poverty.
The focus of this chapter will be on making sense of these latter, more controversial claims, that unstructured groups or collectivities that are not agents (or at least not yet agents) can have obligations—that is, collective obligations of beneficence—and that these collective obligations have moral implications for the members of these groups.
This is a challenge because it is commonly accepted that only moral agents have obligations, and none of the groups of bystanders, the UN member states or the European Union states are (collective) moral agents. So we must either be prepared to surrender these intuitively plausible judgments, or else explain why it is that these collectivities and their individual members are obligated to do anything at all.I have three main aims in this chapter. My first aim is to motivate the idea that there is something normatively significant about collective duties of beneficence such that our moral and political theorizing must broaden its focus beyond individual duties. My second aim is to give an overview of the current debates on collective duties of beneficence with a particular focus on unstructured collectives or groups as duty-bearers. In doing so, I set out three different ways of conceiving of the collective duties of unstructured collectives: as the duties of a group entity, as the duties of individuals taken jointly, or as an aggregate of individual duties. After surveying these various views, I defend the idea that even when the collectivities we are concerned with are not group agents, when there is evidence that the group of individuals has the necessary capacity to prevent a harm or wrong and the individuals are aware (or should be aware) of this, they have a duty, as a group, to prevent that harm or wrong. And it is this duty of the group qua group that explains and grounds the duties of its individual members. My third and final aim is to consider a few important questions that arise for individual agents concerned about what their individual obligations are given their part in various collectivities.
To start, I will unpack the concept of collective duties of beneficence: they are duties of beneficence; and they are held by collectives.
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