Collective Responsibility When Harm is Intended

With this as background we can turn to the question of collection responsibility. I focus on cases of backwards-looking collective responsibility for a harm. In this case, (a) a group has done something that results in a harm; and (b) it is the group that is the causal locus of the harm in the sense that the group is causally responsible; but (c) while all of its members make contributions, none of them are individually causally responsible for the harm.

I begin with cases of a group sharing an intention to cause harm that provide grounds for rejecting the DILUTION PRINCIPLE.

EQUAL BLOWS: A 10-man gang intentionally beats another man to death. They share an intention to do so and they kill him intentionally as a result of executing their shared intention. They each land an equal number of equally powerful blows on their victim, which contribute equally to his death. The contributions of each are necessary and jointly sufficient.

The gang is collectively morally responsible for the victim’s death, but none alone is causally responsible for it. What is the extent of the blame for each? The DILUTION PRINCIPLE divides the responsibility evenly among them. Suppose that we can make sense of being mor­ally responsible for 1/ 10^th of a death. According to the DILUTION PRINCIPLE, each of them is morally responsible only for the equivalent of 1∕10^th of a death.

To say that they are each fully responsible for the death is one thing; to explain it is another. Here are two possible explanations.

PRAGMATIC NEED: There is no deep explanation for this grounded in the struc­ture of agency or the logic of responsibility; it is just that if we let people off for this reason it would be a license for collective murder and mayhem. So as a practical matter we don’t dilute responsibility.

However, if there is no ground for it in the logic of responsibility and the structure of shared agency, then none of them is in fact fully responsible. This fails to explain how we can legitimately hold each of them fully responsible.

INDIVISIBLE HARM: The harm, the death, is indivisible. There is no group agent per se to blame. Therefore, on pain of it being assigned to no one, it must be assigned to all equally.

There is something to the idea that the harm is indivisible. How can the death be apportioned among them? The death is not the sum of their individual contributions, like contributing grains of sand to a heap. Even so, why isn’t it an injustice to assign the whole harm to each, so that what we have is instead simply a moral paradox? Moreover, it is not clear that we would reach a different verdict in a case in which the harm is divisible as in MONEY HEIST.

MONEY HEIST: Suppose that 10 thieves working together steal $100,000,000 from the Denver mint, each contributing equally to the theft, which they carry out intentionally

Do we want to say that each is responsible for only a tenth of the theft? If so, then if we increase the number of thieves, eventually none of them will be guilty of more than the moral equivalent of a misdemeanor. Do they all get a slap on the wrist for stealing 100 million dollars? The fact that they are working together in carrying out the theft is morally significant.

We have been thinking about harms caused, causal contributions, and numbers of agents. We have not been thinking about the structure of their intentions when they act. It becomes clear why we should hold each of them equally responsible when we consider the structure of their intentions. Thus, we arrive at an explanation in terms of logic of responsibility and the structure of shared agency

On the SHARED PLAN ACCOUNT, to share an intention to kill their victim, each gang member must have a we-intention of the form:

I intend to bring it about (in accordance with a plan I have at the time of acting) that there is a plan in accordance with which we bring it about that X dies.

Each has an intention whose successful execution requires that X die. Thus, their intentions are not relevantly different from someone whose intention is of the form:

I intend to bring it about (in accordance with a plan I have at the time of acting) that X dies.

The difference lies only in what the content of the plan is. In the first case, it goes by way of our several contributions. In the second case, it may but need not involve cooperation with others. One intends to do something that leads to another’s death either way. Consequently, each indi­vidual in EQUAL BLOWS is just as liable for blame as he would be if he were the sole agent of the death.⁷

This explanation works for any account of shared intention which resolves it into an inten­tion (or commitment) of an individual to contribute to a group doing something.

One might object: when one intends oneself to kill someone, one thinks it is in one’s power alone. But when cooperating with others, one does not typically think it lies in one’s power alone. If it does not lie in one’s power alone to do it, the case of individual intentions and we- intentions is not parallel.⁸

Everything we do requires the cooperation of the world. If I shoot someone, I rely on the operation of the gun, the absence of obstacles intervening at the last second, enough sunlight to see by, and so on. As Davidson wrote, “We never do more than move our bodies: the rest is up to nature” (2001: 59). Sometimes the conditions required for our contributions to bring about the end involve others acting in certain ways. This can be so even for an assassination attempt: I rely on my victim’s regular habits while I lie in wait. In the case ofjoint intentional action involving the cooperation of others, their contributions are, relative to my intention, parts of what I expect to happen, given my contribution, which sets the stage for the victim’s death. So there is not after all any relevant difference between the case of killing someone with others or by oneself.

The explanation extends straightforwardly to variations on EQUAL BLOWS in which the contributions of the members differ causally, but are all still insufficient by themselves to bring about the harm for which the group is responsible, as in UNEQUAL BLOWS.

UNEQUAL BLOWS: As for EQUAL BLOWS except that the blows are not all equal. Some contribute more or harder blows than others, so that the distribution of causal responsibility is not equal. The contribution of each of them is necessary but none alone is sufficient.

When we keep in mind what it is that each intends we can see that the blows being unequal does not make a difference.

This shows that the DILUTION PRINCIPLE is false for joint intentional action directed at bringing about a harm. But in the cases considered so far, the contributions of each is at least necessary for the harm. What if the contributions overdetermine the result as in OVERDETERMINED BLOWS?

OVERDETERMINED BLOWS: A gang of 10 men intentionally beat another man to death. They share an intention to do so. They kill him intentionally as a result of executing their shared intention. They each land an equal number of equally powerful blows on their victim. The blows of any nine of them are sufficient to bring about the victim’s death.

In OVERDETERMINED BLOWS, none of the contributions of individual gang members is either necessary or sufficient. The ABSOLUTION PRINCIPLE says that none of them is responsible to any degree.

This can’t be right. It would let all of them off. Nobody would be responsible for the death, when if they had done less violence, they would all be equally responsible. But the death would have occurred even if any one of them had not contributed. How can I be responsible for some­thing that would have happened anyway?⁹

One might suggest that one intends to make one’s contribution even if one of the others drops out: so one both makes a contribution and is willing that it be a necessary contribution. This can’t be the explanation, because we wouldn’t let everyone off if each intended to make his contribution only if it weren’t necessary.

There are three justifications one might consider. First, when n many people intention­ally contribute to a harm, where any m < n contributing would have been sufficient, each is a necessary part of some sufficient condition for the death.

NECESSARY PART OF A SUFFICIENT CONDITION: If one participates in a joint action A intentionally to bring about harm H, then one is liable to full blame for H if one’s contribution is a necessary part of some sufficient condition for H.

Second, one’s intention represents one as doing something that brings about something suf­ficient for the death, namely, the whole group’s doing something more than sufficient for the death. Compare this with the case ofTWO-GUN PETE.

TWO-GUN PETE: Two-Gun Pete wears a holster on either hip. When he decides to kill someone, he draws both guns and shoots the victim through each eye simultaneously.

Two-Gun Pete intends something more than sufficient to bring about his victim’s death. But we do not let him off on that account: since the content of the we-intention in OVERDETERMINED BLOWS is that we all make our contributions so as to bring about the death, we each intend to contribute to a more than sufficient condition for the death. There is no relevant difference from the individual case. Two-Gun Pete intends to do something more than sufficient for the death of his victim. Hence, he intends to do something sufficient. Thus, one’s contribution might not be causally necessary in the sense that counterfactually holding the contributions of others fixed and removing yours, the victim would still have been killed, but since one intended to bring about a sufficient condition, one is liable for the blame just as if one had done it alone.

INTENDING SOMETHING SUFFICIENT: If one intends to bring about some­thing sufficient for a harm H in acting with others intentionally, then even if one’s contribution is not counterfactually necessary, one is fully to blame for H.

Third, one’s contribution was a necessary part of the actual cause of the death. A 10-man firing squad shoots their victim through the heart, and any shot, if the others’ guns jammed at that moment, would have been sufficient to kill the victim.¹⁰ Nonetheless, the actual cause was the totality of the forces exerted on his body by the impact of 10 bullets. In any counterfactual scenario in which one or more of the guns failed to fire, the cause of his death would have been different. Alternatively suppose 10 men decide to suffocate their victim by standing on his chest so that he cannot take a breath. Any four of them would have been sufficient, in the sense that the force exerted by four of them standing on his chest would be sufficient to prevent him from drawing a breath. Nonetheless, the total force is the force exerted by the 10 of them. So they each make necessary contributions to the actual cause of his death, which was a force 2.5 times that needed to suffocate him.

NECESSARY PART OF THE ACTUAL CAUSE: If one’s contribution to a harm H that a group brings about jointly intentionally is a necessary part of the actual cause of H, then one is fully to blame for H.

If any of these justifications is sufficient, the ABSOLUTION PRINCIPLE is false in application to joint intentional action. But it is not merely that one does not get off scot-free. No matter how large the group, no matter how overdetermined counterfactually, no matter whether one’s contribution is large or small, one is as responsible for the harm as if one had done it by oneself.

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