Collective Responsibility

The debate between those who favor collective responsibility and those who oppose it often can be described as follows. The opponents—Benjamin (1976), Lewis (1948), Miller (2006), Narveson (2002), Sverdlik (1987), and many others—emphasize that the only bearers of moral responsibility are individual moral agents and that it is unfair to judge that someone is respon­sible for a state of affairs that is due, in whole or in part, to the actions of others.

Those committed to an individualist approach sometimes acknowledge that several persons can bear moral responsibility for the same outcome, a circumstance in which we can say that they share responsibility (Lewis (1948; 1972) does not make this concession, but cf. Sverdlik 1987). Those committed to collective responsibility sometimes concede that individualist principles frequently suffice to make accurate ascriptions of moral responsibility (French 1984; Held 1976).

Here I propose an approach that aims to strike a balance between the “individualists” and the “collectivists,” as I will call them. The collectivists believe that not all instances of moral responsibility are reducible to the responsibility incurred by the various individuals who are involved, and this strikes me as correct.

I do not claim to have a knock-down refutation of either the individualists or the collectivists, but I will attempt to show that certain excesses of each view are corrected by the approach I describe in this section. It encourages the individualists to acknowledge the contributions of moral agents who fall short of incurring moral responsibility (as individuals) for the relevant outcome. In addition, it forces collectivists to exclude from membership in collectives those who have not made at least some minimal contribution to the relevant outcome.

A qualifying act, let us say, is an act that qualifies a person for membership in a collective responsible for an outcome, with the stipulation that it might be an act of omission.⁹ My pro­posal is that one does not qualify as a member of such a collective unless one has performed a qualifying act. The essential thought is that one must at a bare minimum contribute to the outcome in some suitably weak sense; otherwise, he or she does not qualify for membership. One must make a minimal contribution to the outcome through either action or inaction, thereby (through his/her actual or intended contribution) raising the antecedent probability of its occurrence.

It is not necessary for one to contribute causally to such an outcome for one’s actions to count as a qualifying act. Suppose a number of teenagers are throwing stones at the windows of an abandoned building, and one teenager, despite trying, does not break any of the windows.

How will the individualist and the collectivist react to my proposal? Let us begin with the individualist. When the actions of several persons produce harm, the individualist’s first impulse is to determine which of the persons are responsible for the harm, and this normally takes the form of determining which of them have contributed causally to the harm. I suggest that a more enlightened approach is to determine which of them have contributed to the harm, not just causally, but in any manner of contribution. Not all of them performing qualifying acts incur responsibility for the harm as individuals. But certainly, they bear responsibility for their qualifying acts as individuals. And certainly, they contribute to the outcome by performing their qualifying acts. To judge that they are not in any manner accountable for the harm strikes me as implausible.

More could be said to persuade the individualist that the approach I am suggesting is sensible, and a fleshed-out response can be found in the Appendix.

How will my account strike the collectivist? First, it will be found acceptable by collectivists who are sympathetic to the concept of qualifying acts which serve to determine membership in collectives. But unfortunately, there are collectivists who are drawn to theories of collective responsibility whose membership are far more expansive than what can be captured by the concept of qualifying actions.

One example is Karl Jaspers, who writes the following.

There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.

(1961: 36)

Although his term “co-responsible” may not capture exactly the same meaning as moral responsibility, Jaspers appears to be articulating an account of responsibility whose scope is universal. According to Larry May, Jaspers comes “dangerously close” in this passage to saying that all members of the human race share responsibility for all of the world’s harms (1992: 148). Jerzy Jedlicki is another ethicist who espouses an expansive account of collective responsi­bility: according to him, human moral agents often bear responsibility for their ancestors’ wrongdoing (1990: 53ff).

Presented with such extravagant ascriptions of responsibility, the individualist’s worst fears about collective responsibility are realized. However, I believe that turning one’s attention to the concept of moral taint can help address these fears, because moral taint supplies us with the resources for describing the moral status of persons connected to others who are guilty of wrongdoing. Recall that Appiah finds that one’s moral integrity is affected whenever one is tainted by the wrongdoing of others, and this is especially the case when one can distance one­self from whoever is committing the wrongdoing.

Moral taint is a weaker notion than moral responsibility, and, as such, it has the potential for enabling one to describe the moral status of persons who have no involvement whatsoever in the wrongdoing of others. And this particularly includes others who have committed wrong­doing in the distant past. Someone might be tainted by the wrongful actions of an ancestor, but he or she is not morally responsible for the wrongdoing.

Collectivists sometimes label harms that occur in the world as instances of moral responsi­bility, when they can more properly be identified as situations in which someone is tainted by the wrongful actions of others.

Escaping moral taint, of course, is an entirely separate matter. A moral agent contributing nothing to the occurrence of an outcome can still be tainted by the contributions of others. Earlier it was noted that persons tainted by the actions of others need not feel guilt for what they have done. But it is appropriate for them to feel a sense of shame if they are closely connected to the wrongdoers. People commonly feel shame in situations of this type, and there is nothing nonsensical in having such feelings. A sufficient condition for escaping moral taint is taking active steps to dissociate oneself from the wrongdoer. If I have severed the relationship between myself and my brother, I am no longer closely connected to him, and by Appiah’s cri­teria I am no longer in a position to be tainted by his criminal activities.

Individualists commonly charge that extravagant judgments of collective responsibility stretch the concept of responsibility to the point that it becomes nearly meaningless. Thus, H.D. Lewis (1972), in an article about the My Lai Massacre in the days of the Viet Nam War, commented that some found it easy to slide from acknowledging the individual responsibility of Lt. Calley, to talking about the collective responsibility of all Americans. But once we slide into this “tribal” mode of thinking, according to Lewis, we are well down the road to the pos­ition that collective responsibility is not real, or at least we are well down the road to finding it easy to ignore (Id.

This type of argument is undercut by my suggestion to limit membership in collectives that are responsible for states of affairs to persons performing qualifying acts. One cannot easily ignore or shrug off a qualifying act, because the individual performing it has made a real, though perhaps minimal, contribution to the outcome. There is no sliding down the slippery slope to the universal ascriptions of collective responsibility that Lewis fears when membership in the collectives is denied to those who fail to perform qualifying acts. The responsibility for the hor­rible racial situation in America, according to Stanley Bates, is not borne by ah Americans: he believes that his infant white daughter is not in any manner responsible (1971: 342—49). In making such a claim, Bates is effectively giving assurance to individualists that one can be a col­lectivist, and at the same time, be sensible enough to place restrictions upon the membership of collectives that bear responsibility for the outcomes in question.

In this section of the chapter, it has been my suggestion that restrictions be placed upon the membership of collectives. Only those performing a qualifying act, those making at least some contribution to the outcome, should be judged members of the collective. Whether this contri­bution consists in offering words of encouragement, or deliberately refraining from an oppor­tunity to prevent an outcome from occurring, a contribution has been made, and the agent making the contribution qualifies for membership in the collective in question. Collectivists are fond of blaming individualists for their insistence that the only bearers of moral responsi­bility are individual moral agents, and this blame is reasonable. Individualists are fond of blaming collectivists for ascribing responsibility to collectives that are universal or extravagant in scope, and this blame is also reasonable. When the excesses of each side have been clearly pointed out, the type of compromise I have described might strike one as appealing. Courts of law analyze what a defendant has done, or refrained from doing, while acting in the company of other per­sons, and I have suggested that it is reasonable to focus on parallel issues bearing upon questions concerning collective responsibility.

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