Collective Obligations: Agency Worries

The central problem with the idea of collective obligations is that groups of the sort we have looked at rarely qualify as moral agents in any strict sense. This is a problem if we assume that:

agency requirement: Only moral agents have obligations.

For an individual to be subject to moral obligations, it seems, it needs to have some amount of self-control—including some control over its goals and some basic capacity for moral cognition—and to be guided by its beliefs towards achieving its goals. Many think that some suitably organized groups—such as institutional groups, corporations, and states—satisfy this requirement (see, e.g., Bjornsson and Hess 2017; Copp 2007; French 1984; Hess 2014; List and Pettit 2011; cf. Tollefsen 2015). But the trio of adults on the beach, the divorced couple, the group of eligible voters, and the group of people aware of the risk of climate catastrophe seem to lack the relevant sort of organization. Though their members have beliefs, goals, self-control, and capacities for moral cognition, it is not clear how the groups themselves can be said to have any of these. (For an early statement of this problem, see Benjamin 1976; see also Collins 2013; Isaacs 2011; Lawford-Smith 2015.)

It is true, of course, that the groups that we have looked at are capable of the relevant states, or at least capable of acting together. Their members are moral agents who can act together with other agents in ways that involve shared goals, perspectives, and decision procedures, all possibly informed by the moral cognition of the members. For example, if the three adults in OffshoreWind want to, they will quickly organize to save all the children based on coordinated assumptions about the situation and a shared plan. For some groups, such as the group of people alive today and currently aware of the risk of climate catastrophe, such organization might seem farfetched. In principle, however, each member of that group could operate on the assumption that other members take the risk to be real and morally very significant, take ways of mitigating the risk to carry substantial weight in deliberation, and act on this while seeing themselves as part of a global effort to minimize that risk, even if that effort would be widely distributed.

That groups have these capacities suggests two possible ways of responding to the agency requirement, each represented in the literature. The first argues that the capacity is enough to make a group subject to moral obligations. The second instead understands collective obligations to φ as grounded in members’ individual obligations, obligations the discharging of which would (likely) lead the group to φ. I discuss these responses in turn.

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