Collective Responsibility as Explanatory Ineliminability
As a conceptual matter, there are certain events that can only be plausibly characterized by invoking groups or collectives. One person cannot storm the Bastille, but through the interdependent actions of many it was stormed.
One person cannot (typically) change a community’s attitude of acceptance toward an immigrant community. Yet even without judicial or legislative action that change may take place. One person may make changes to their own emissions behavior, but the effects relevant for global emission levels are found at the level of communities, nations, or humanity writ large. Even if they contribute to it individual actions and attitudes differ in kind from collective actions and attitudes (Gilbert, 2013; Tuomela, 2006, 2013; Pettit, 1993, 2003; but see Chant et al., 2014). Some phenomena require appeal to collectives and groups to explain their occurrence, even as we recognize the ontological dependence of those phenomena on individual agents. Whether we think of the masses storming the Bastille, a culture’s changing attitude toward certain forms of social behavior, or the pollution of nearby streams and rivers, there are some phenomena, and some harms, that can only be described by appealing to groups. The cases of environmental injustice described above are such phenomena. One cannot explain the injustice of Love Canal, the nightmare of e-waste, or the systemic pattern of climate-based vulnerability without reference to group-based vulnerabilities, group- based harms, and the structural features that enable those harms. But what is the connection between individual actors and those structural features that constitute the institutional environment? It seems implausible that, at least generally, individual actors alone can directly effect change on the structures that generate injustice (Eckersley, 2016, p. 353). When there is no group-level agent involved, the connection between moral responsibility and group-level phenomena is not always obvious.Traditionally, accounts of moral responsibility are based on what agents voluntarily choose to bring about. In the language introduced above, these are typically backward directed accounts.1 Building off this more traditional treatment of moral responsibility, accounts of collective moral responsibility typically start by developing analogous requirements on either agency or the capacity of a collective to choose.2 These accounts often make collective responsibility parasitic on notions of collective agency, whether by appeal to collective intentionality (Bratman, 1999, 2013; Tuomela, 1989, 2013), a unified plural subject (Gilbert, 2000, Velleman, 1997), or the deliberative and representational capacities of groups (Pettit, 2004; List and Pettit, 2011). Generally, these accounts focus on a causal connection between the occurrence of a harm and the actions of an agent. While this approach is helpful in those cases where the focus of inquiry is on assigning blame, it requires collective responsibility to be dependent on collective agency. It has little to say about cases of collective phenomena without collective agency. Such accounts may not help us address cases where the individual actions of large numbers of seemingly nonculpable agents aggregate to form great, even catastrophic harm. After all, as Jamieson (2012, p. 196) puts it, we are now in an era where through the aggregate effects of climate change we might destroy the world without any individual agent bearing morally responsibility for that destruction. Responsibility might well be shared across more than one individual in ways that do not require a robust collective intention, capacity, or agent.
Whereas collective responsibility is responsibility of a collective, shared responsibility is responsibility of individual members of a group for something done in concert with other members of that group. As Larry May puts it,
When a group of people shares responsibility for a harm, responsibility distributes to each member of the group.
When a group is collectively responsible for a harm, the group as such is responsible...Shared responsibility does not depend on the existence of a cohesive group since it concerns only aggregated personal responsibility.(May, 1992, p. 38)
We will see below that while shared responsibility is responsibility of individuals, the ability of individuals in concert to make changes in their institutional environment provides an avenue for connecting individual responsibility, in this shared sense, with structural and environmental injustice. However, the form of shared responsibility that May advocates is focused on the attribution of blame, a backward directed approach to responsibility (see Young, 2013, p. 111). As those who point to the connection between collective responsibility and environmental justice more generally are interested in what collectives are responsible for in a less distributed, and less backward directed sense, we will need to look further.
A different way of thinking about collective responsibility, one that shifts the emphasis to the contribution of individuals and the avoidance of future harms, would be to focus on explaining the causal role groups have in bringing about states of affairs through the actions of constituent members. One such account, the programming account of collective responsibility, relies on the explanatory ineliminability of collective entities for making sense of harms (or goods) that result from the actions or behaviors of those entities (Shockley, 2007).3 In such cases we say the collective programs for the production of the state of affairs even when the collective is not an agent. For example, we might understand a mob to be collectively responsible for burning down a city without thinking that the mob constituted an agent. The harm, burning down the city, could not have taken place without the mob. More importantly, individual acts of arson in isolation wouldn’t explain the burning down of the city.
Only by framing individual actions in aggregate, conceptualizing these complementary actions as collective phenomena, can we speak of the kind of event that is the burning down of the city. While individuals might be responsible for acts of arson, they are not, qua individuals, responsible for burning down the city. That responsibility falls, collectively, on the mob. Explanatory ineliminability — the sense in which we cannot reasonably talk about the harm without appealing to the mob — provides a means of attributing collective responsibility when the actions of constituents together lead to a consequence that cannot be attributed to them other than as a whole. In the same way the best explanation for a square peg not fitting into a round hole is not by appeal to the molecules that collide but by the incompatibility of squareness and roundness, the best explanation for burning down the city is by appeal to the mob, not to individual persons (Pettit, 1993; Pettit and Jackson, 1992). The aggregate actions of individual actors (arson, etc.) constituted a collective phenomenon that “programmed” for the distinctively collective harm (the burning down of the city). This account still leaves open the possibility that individuals may be morally responsible for actions that contribute to that collective harm. While without collective agency there may be no backward directed moral responsibility on the part of the mob itself, there may well be for individual members of the mob in virtue of their shared participation in the act (May, 1987).The programming account provides a helpful way of characterizing the connections between seemingly innocuous individual actions and environmental justice, and does so in a way that, as we will see below, connects individual moral responsibilities to collective responsibility. Collective responsibility is framed in terms of the way collectives control for the production of collective or group phenomena. This is expressed through the explanatory ineliminability of those collectives in characterizing the harm or injustice. Crucially, this control does not require collective agency, and so is particularly well suited for cases where the harms and injustices to be addressed are structural rather than agentive. Given the importance of structural considerations to matters of environmental justice this is a vital question to be addressed. For the citizens of Love Canal, the exploited populations suffering from e-waste, and the vulnerable populations facing climate change, all suffering from structural vulnerabilities and recognitional injustice, the question is more than merely theoretical. But precisely how do we connect individual moral responsibilities to environmental injustice? The answer, we shall see, lies in the role played by institutions in addressing structural injustice, and thereby environmental injustice.
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