Collective Moral Responsibility
We now consider whether and if so when it makes sense to talk of collective moral responsibility Recall our rough working account of moral responsibility as such, with a focus on blame: one is morally to blame for performing an action if and only if it was morally wrong, all else being equal; there were no mitigating circumstances—in particular, one was not coerced into performing it, and one knew, or was in a position to know, that these things were so.
We assume that two or more people can collectively perform an action, understanding this along Gilbertian lines. In what follows we refer to actions collectively performed as collective actions, and those who perform them as constituting collectives.24
We have yet to consider the following questions. First, can collective actions, as such, be morally wrong? Second, is there such a thing as a coerced collective action, so that the requirement that a culpable action be at least voluntary in the sense of “not coerced” has some teeth in the context of collective as well as individual human action? Third, can we collectively know that what we were doing was wrong, so that it makes sense to say, at least, that we were in a position to know that it was wrong?
As to the first question, people talk easily of the wrongness of actions people perform together. For example, someone might say “Jill and Jane should not have robbed the bank”, intending the “should” in question to apply toJill and Jane, considered as one, rather than to Jane, on the one hand, and Jill, on the other. Further, there seems to be no reason to deny that a moral requirement can fall on two or more people as one. Certainly, if we allow that Gilbertian joint commitments are possible, we should be comfortable with the idea that normative constraints generally can fall on two or more people as one. In the case of a Gilbertian joint commitment, the constraint is the result of the parties appropriately exercising their wills.
We need not think of moral requirements in this way. For present purposes it suffices to allow that whatever the source or sources of moral requirements generally, such requirements can fall on two or more people as one, as when it is morally required of Jane and Jill, as one, not collectively to rob a bank.25We turn now to the question of voluntary versus coerced collective action. Are there conditions under which one can appropriately say that the action of a collective, as such, was coerced? It seems that there are.26 Here we describe a situation in which one might say that Jill and Jane, collectively, were coerced into robbing a bank.
Suppose that one day Jack, an acquaintance of Jill’s, confronts Jane and Jill and threatens to harm their parents unless they rob a bank and give him the money. Jill says they will talk it over, and when they are alone she asks Jill “What shall we do? We swore we’d not rob any more banks, but Jack means what he says. The last thing we want is to have him hurt our parents!” They discuss the matter back and forth and finally agree to rob the Philosophers’ Bank. Shortly after, they carry out the robbery. It seems reasonable to say that their robbing of the bank—an action ascribable to them, collectively—was performed under duress. In that case their robbing the bank would not count as blameworthy given our general conditions on blameworthiness.
Clearly, in many cases of collective action there will be no antecedents that will allow the parties to say “We had no choice.” To that extent, then, they—collectively—acted freely. 27
We come, finally, to the question whether we, collectively, can know or be in a position to know that what we are doing together is morally wrong. We shall assume, with Gilbert, that the core of an account of collective knowledge generally will be an account of collective belief.28
On Gilbert’s account, for us collectively to believe that it is morally wrong to rob banks, for instance, is for us to be jointly committed to espouse as a body the belief that it is morally wrong to rob banks.
This formulation is to be understood as indicated earlier. We shall not try fully to explore the conditions under which people who collectively believe some proposition collectively know that it is true. One relevant consideration, though, is this. People can collectively believe a proposition on the basis of good reasons, and this can happen with moral beliefs also, as in the following dialogue. Jane to Jill, who has proposed that they rob a bank: “It’s wrong to rob banks!” Jill, in reply: “Why? We need the money!” Jane, “Yes, but it’s someone else’s money!” Jill, “True.” Some such discussion may suffice for us properly to ascribe to Jill and Jane, collectively, the knowledge that robbing banks is morally wrong.29From Gilbert’s plural subject perspective, then, it is possible for collectives as such to fulfill the conditions necessary for them to be morally responsible for what they do, though in some cases a given collective may not be so responsible. For instance, its moral perspective may be warped, or it may have no such perspective, or it may have been coerced into doing what it did.
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