Collective Responsibility
Collectives, as this term will be used here, are groups of human beings including formal organizations, various associations, and random assemblages of people. Responsibilitycollectivism is the view that the moral1 responsibility of at least some such collectives is something over and above the aggregate moral responsibility of individual group members.
The phrase “over and above” can be made more precise in the following way. According to responsibility-collectivists it can be true that you have allocated all responsibility there is to be allocated for an action or an outcome to all individuals involved in that action or in bringing about that outcome, and still you have not allocated all the responsibility there is to be allocated for that action or outcome. Responsibility-individualism is the view that this is not possible.The term “collective responsibility” will be used in this sense throughout this chapter. Such responsibility, if it exists, is moral responsibility ascribed to collectives in a non-distributive and non-summative sense. It is moral responsibility the group has qua group and it is not reducible to the moral responsibilities of its members.2
Furthermore, this concept of responsibility is robust, desert-based, backward-looking moral responsibility. In other words, collective responsibility discussed in this chapter is to be distinguished from collective responsibility understood as a (distributive or non-distributive) obligation incurred by the collective.3 It is also to be distinguished from responsibility, which is ascribed to the collective just because there is some uncertainty about precisely which members of the group are responsible. A teacher may tell off the entire graffiti gang for defacing the faςade of the school because she does not know which member(s) were the actual culprits.
In addition, the kind of responsibility in question is commonly thought to be necessary for the justifiability of a distinct range of reactive attitudes (e.g., guilt, resentment, blame, etc.) and normative consequences (e.g., sanctions, reparation, perhaps even punishment) (see Pettit 2007a: 174; Tollefsen 2003). If a group is collectively responsible in this sense, then as a group it can be blameworthy and praiseworthy and can be held responsible overtly. So collective responsibility of this kind is not merely causal responsibility, nor is it merely liability to answer for and redress harm (see Petersson 2007; Pettit 2007a; Petersson 2008). In short, responsibilitycollectivists claim that at least some groups are morally responsible in the same sense as individual agents.4
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