Collective Duties or Duties of Collectives
Before we go into the details of how to best conceive of collective duties of beneficence, we might ask what necessitates discussing collective duties at all that could not be fully expressed by discussing individual duties.
A great number of global problems such as extreme poverty, climate change, and the refugee crisis require collective solutions if they are ever to be solved. If we think that there is a moral imperative to solve these problems, the question arises, who is morally obligated to do something about it? When the harms or wrongs at issue are discrete instances that can be addressed by an individual, we may look to specific individuals to address them. In such instances, the attribution of an obligation to an individual agent is straightforward. But when the harms and wrongs are widespread and on a large scale, or when there simply are no individuals with the capacity to respond, addressing them requires a collective solution.The general idea that aiding the needy requires the coordination and collaboration of a great number of people, and so should be conceived of as a collective duty, is not a new idea, but it has not been subject to the same level of scrutiny in the past as it has in recent years. Liam Murphy, for one, has written about beneficence as a cooperative project rather than an individual aim (2003). On Murphy’s view, beneficence is a shared duty and its demands are distributed across all persons in fair shares, such that the compliance effects are distributed equally. Notice that even though Murphy is talking about a collective duty, he does not impute the existence of a group or collective agent that has a duty. The duty-bearers are individuals. The focus of Murphy’s analysis is to show that by conceiving of beneficence as a collective enterprise, the demands on individuals would (likely) turn out to be less onerous than on more traditional consequen- tialist accounts.
Though the collective duty of beneficence is at the center of his account, the duty-bearers are individuals and their duties of beneficence are duties to take on a share of the collective project.Garrett Cullity (2004) has also argued that in response to global poverty and great need we have collective duties of beneficence. The duties are collective on his view mainly because the problem is vast, and addressing it requires a collective solution such as building effective and efficient development agencies and supporting them financially. For CuIlity, the moral requirement of beneficence starts as an individual aim (that we have in common with others) and becomes a collective aim when we see we can achieve it more effectively together. Overall, Cullitys view that individuals have shares of a collective duty (that increase in conditions of partial compliance) seems to be individualistic in the sense that he does not impute the existence of a group that has a collective duty that is then distributed to individual members. But, unlike Murphy, he makes certain comments that gesture toward the possibility of a more collectivist interpretation: consider when he says there is a collective requirement for which “we together are the subject” (Cullity 2004: 60). That said, neither Cullity nor Murphy have much to say about the nature of collective duties or how to understand the subject of the envisioned collective duty.
A deeper analysis is important because not just any type or form of collective is a candidate for bearing duties. Do all the women in the world count as a relevant collective that can bear a moral duty? Perhaps not; but the corporation Microsoft does. What about the fans at a Blue Jays game? It is important to work out what features are necessary for groups to be considered appropriate candidates for duty-bearing. And even those collectivities that turn out to be appropriate candidates will likely differ in terms of whether and how their collective duties distribute to their members based on their structure.
31.3