Collective Responsibility: Against Monolithic Agency
Sometimes one is responsible and blamed for something, alongside others. Consider the following case due to Bjornsson.
Humiliation: After the last class of the day, a group of high-school kids grabs the classmate lowest in the pecking order, successfully preventing him from catching the bus, leaving him with a long and humiliating walk home.11
Responsibility and blame here seem to be collective.
The bullies are responsible for the student’s humiliating walk. But how should this be understood?One suggestion is to take seriously the idea of the group as itself an individual agent, albeit a monolithic one comprising a number of lesser individual agents. The group is something that acts for reasons, is responsible for what it does, and is subject to blame. Applied to the example, the bullies constitute an agent, and it is responsible for the kid’s long and humiliating walk home. There is something it can do about this — viz., refrain from grabbing the kid, or stop individuals from doing so. The group could act on considerations related to (preventing) the humiliation of someone. But it doesn’t do so, and thus is to blame.12
Seeing the group as an agent and a locus of responsibility in this way has the benefit of ensuring a straightforward version of Look- back-look-ahead — the connection between responsibility and reason for action noted above. The group’s responsibility for the child’s humiliating walk is linked to the possibility that it could have done something about it — namely, acted so as to prevent this from happening, i.e. for that reason.
Furthermore, there is the suggestion that it’s only by thinking of the group as an agent that we can make sense of the sorts of considerations that matter in important cases of collective responsibility — such as our responsibility for large-scale environmental damage.
Averting environmental disaster is not something about which any ordinary individual agent normally can make a difference. So it’s not clear that this sort of consideration can count as a reason for an ordinary individual. Only something very big and quite extraordinary will be up for this challenge — something in the realm of the monolithic. At the same time, we might hold an agent constraint on reasons: a consideration is a reason for action only for something that is an agent.13 If averting some large-scale disaster is a reason for action, it is only a reason for a monolithic agent. If that’s right, and we also want to maintain Look-back-look-ahead, then collective responsibility must, in turn, be understood in terms of the reasons of this monolithic agent.But invoking monolithic agency has its drawbacks. First, many find implausible the thought that the group itself really is an agent.14 It might be thought an ontological extravagance to think of groups as agents, over and above the constituent individuals. There is the temptation to try to understand action ascribed to the group reductively, in terms of the agency of the constituent individuals. Whether or not such a reductive project can succeed, there is a further worry that many groups seem not — at least not stably — to satisfy the conditions that are often thought necessary for group agency, such as some sort of decision procedure, or an executive/ authority structure. Even when a collective is not structured in this way, we might nevertheless want to assign collective responsibility. For example, a collection of passersby might be collectively blameworthy if they didn’t get their act together to move heavy debris to aid an accident victim. But on the current proposal, since the passersby do not constitute an agent, there is no possibility of acting on a reason, and thus no collective responsibility (Held 1970).
Another concern with the monolithic agent view is that it is not clear how we are to connect the responsibility of the monolithic agent with that of the constituent individuals in such a way that each of the latter is implicated in what the collective does (Collins 2017: 578— 9). For example, one might be employed as a low-level administrator in a gigantic corporation or educational institution, with little sense of the actual purpose of the institution.
Such a nine to fiver might not share the aims of the collective, and is only involved so as to make a living and maybe pay for his children’s education. And yet, he might be performing actions that are important for the functioning of the larger institution. His duties (maybe it involves security, or low-level administration, classroom instruction, or publicity) could be executed in ignorance of the real purposes of the institution. Indeed, it might be part of his selection and training that he not be in a position to understand the higher-level aspects of the organization and its function.This case suggests that there is a sense in which one might be a part of a group in that one serves merely as a human resource for the group or organization’s pursuit of its ends, without genuinely and wittingly participating in what the group does. I’m not suggesting that individuals who play a role in the functioning of some monolithic agency are generally exonerated when it comes to the blameworthy actions of the monolith.15 However, the fact that such monolithic agency is compatible with constituent individual agents whose tasks are so narrow and regimented, and who are so ill equipped to understand what the larger entity is up to, suggests that locating an individual as a constituent in some larger agency is not yet to give an account for how he or she is subject to a form of collective responsibility and blame. This is to say that for cases of collective responsibility that can implicate a constituent individual, we need to secure some form of Look-back-look-ahead at the level of the constituent individual.
Indeed, the worry might be pressed further with the suggestion that the robustness of the agency attributed to the monolith or group points toward a dampening of the responsibility of the individuals; that is, it might be that robustness of agency at the group level might preclude a form of Look-back-look-ahead at the level of the individual. It is partly the lack of responsibility at the individual level that is a central component of Copp’s case for taking seriously the idea that some group of individuals is an agent.16
In general, it seems possible that a group agent might have individuals who are human resource components — even components that are vital for its functioning as an agent — which (or who) do not figure as intentional or full-blown participants in the group’s action.
Thus, it’s unclear what implication we are to draw about the responsibility of constituent individuals from the proposition that the group or collective is an agent in its own right. It could very well be that the individuals do not, or even cannot, exercise agency in a way that implicates them with respect to whatever it is that the group or monolithic agent might be responsible for. For all we know, when a monolithic individual is responsible for some S, the constituent individuals are exonerated with respect to it. That would be quite the opposite of what we were looking for.It would seem advisable for our purposes, then, to set aside monolithic individual agency. I do not mean to suggest that monolithic agency has no role to play in any case of collective responsibility. Sometimes there will be a story about how constituent individuals are implicated in what the monolith does. But in many cases there is no monolith. And even if there is a monolith, an important part of the story of how individuals are implicated is left out. I think that to get a handle on collective responsibility, we need to ensure not merely the constituency of the relevant individuals, but the possibility of their participation as well. To that end, we need to look to collective action and shared agency.
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