Concluding Remarks
Attributions of collective obligations and collective responsibility or blameworthiness to non- agential groups form an important part of moral cognition. But they raise difficult problems of interpretation.
What I have hoped to do in this chapter is to make clear what the central problems are, outline some of the phenomena that need to be accounted for, and point to problems and prospects for some existing proposals. In my view, the most promising accounts understand collective obligations and blameworthiness as involving the very same relations as their individual counterparts and ground both in demands on individual agents to care about morally important matters. But whether or not such accounts are ultimately successful, I hope that they help to further clarify both the phenomena and the problems they raise.Acknowledgments
The chapter has greatly benefited from comments on earlier versions at the Moral and Practical Philosophy Seminar at UCSD, the Seminar in Practical Philosophy and Political Theory at the University of Gothenburg, and the Higher Seminar in Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, as well as from comments by Dick Arneson, Bill Wringe, Anne Schwenkenbecher, Benjamin Matheson, Stephanie Collins, Frank Hindriks, Niels de Haan, David Copp, Olle Blomberg, Saba Bazargan-Forward, and Deborah Tollefsen.
Notes
1 This claim might seem problematic for what we might call “institutional” groups, such as committees or task forces created to fill a particular role in an organization or in society (cf. Copp 2007). But insofar as it is plausible that these are under moral obligations proper rather than merely subject to morally grounded institutional norms, I take this to be because they come close to satisfying standard requirements of moral agency.
2 I’m ignoring a complication of Collins' view here. Though she suggests that people can be charitably interpreted as conveying the sort of fact listed here when they attribute obligations to non-agential groups, she also denies that the group is, strictly speaking, an obligation bearer.
3 Strictly speaking, Schwenkenbecher talks of non-overridden reasons to we-reason, rather than obligations to do so, and restricts her account to cases where the problem cannot be solved by a single individual.
4 In a footnote, Aas (2015: 6, n. 13) says that the preparedness might come to nothing more than good character. So understood, the individual obligations he appeals to strongly resemble the caring proposal of Bjornsson 2014. But in other places (pp. 13; 16; 19; 21), Aas spells out the preparedness in terms of conditional intentions. Moreover, it is central to his argument that if each individual is prepared to do their part in φ-ing if others do theirs, this counts as the group’s trying to φ (p. 16), and this looks very implausible on a merely dispositional understanding of “preparedness.”
5 Strictly speaking, the proposal is that group obligations as well as individual obligations are grounded in moral demands that individuals care. Whether these demands are best thought of as obligations is a further question.
6 While allowing for a variety of normative views, the concept captured by obligation is not the only one that we might be concerned with. It is not a concept of objective, information-independent obligations of the sort that concern at least some normative theorists, but rather a concept of what we are required to do in light of available evidence. More generally, it makes agents' morally substandard caring the only thing that can prevent them from discharging their obligations, and is thus not the one we have in mind when thinking that a failure to discharge an obligation is morally innocent, due to excusing factors. I focus on this particular concept because I take it to be both central to everyday thinking about obligations and relatively simple. For its relation to some other notions of obligation, see Bjornsson Forthcoming.
7 Aas (2015: 17—19) provides a structurally similar account, but in terms of the group's “trying” to discharge its obligation, without any normality requirement, and only requiring that such trying should make the outcome sufficiently likely.
Lawford-Smith 2015 and Hindriks 2019 deny that non-agential groups can have abilities required for irreducible group obligations, but they don't consider the sort of proposal offered here. For another discussion of group abilities, see Pinkert 2014.8 Just as circumstances might be such that the appropriate caring of all three adults ensures that all children are saved, they can be such that the appropriate caring of all moral agents in the world ensures the outcome, because it ensures that the three adults on the beach care. But, intuitively, the group of every moral agent in the world does not plausibly have an obligation to save all the children. Why is that? According to obligation, something can be a group's obligation only if it is something that the group would do if caring appropriately. In this case, saving the children is not something that the group of every moral agent in the world would have done if all had cared appropriately. Only the people on the beach would have been involved.
What constrains attributions of φ-ing to groups? A rough rule seems to be that acceptable attributions pick out groups whose members would be relevantly involved in producing or allowing for the activity or outcome constitutive of φ-ing if they all cared appropriately. (Doing actual work might not be required if one is relevantly intentionally related to the φ-ing: in Plenitude, it might make sense to say that the adults saved all the children even if one of them stands by, letting the other two do the actual work. This is not to deny that differences in kind or degree of participation can matter. It will make sense to say of the two adults who did the actual work that they saved the children, but would be at least misleading to say of a pair consisting of one of those two and the adult standing by that they did.) Moreover, attributions might be more coarse-grained if a precise identification of this group is inconvenient. For example, if the saving effort involved a large number of people on the beach, it might be natural to say that “the people on the beach” saved those adrift even if a few individuals on the beach did not participate due to bad motives or lack of capacity.
It often makes sense to attribute obligations to groups that include only some of those that would be involved if everyone cared appropriately. In a version of OffshoreWind where one of the adults refuses to help save all, it might make good sense to say not only that the three adults have an obligation to save all, but also that the two willing adults have such an obligation: they would do so if they cared appropriately. For Plenitude, such a restriction would at least be misleading, as one of the two might end up standing idly by while the other does all the work together with the third adult. (I thank Saba Bazargan-Forward and Deborah Tollefsen for pressing me on these issues.)
References
Aas, S. (2015) “Distributing Collective Obligation,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 9(3):1-23.
Benjamin, M. (1976) “Can Moral Responsibility Be Collective and Nondistributive?,” Social Theory and Practice,4(1):93-106.
Bjornsson, G. (2011) “Joint Responsibility without Individual Control: Applying the Explanation Hypothesis,” in N.A. Vincent, I. van de Poel, and J. van den Hoven (eds) Moral Responsibility: Beyond Free Will and Determinism, Dordrecht: Springer, 181-99.
Bjornsson, G. (2014) “Essentially Shared Obligations,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 38(1):103-20.
Bjornsson, G. (2017) “Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility,” in P. Robichaud and J.W Wieland (eds) Responsibility: The Epistemic Condition, New York: Oxford University Press, 146-62.
Bjornsson, G. (Forthcoming) “Individual and Shared Obligations: In Defense of the Activist's Perspective,” in M. Budolfson, T. McPherson, and T. Plunkett (eds) Philosophy and Climate Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bjornsson, G. and Brulde, B. (2017) “Normative Responsibilities: Structure and Sources,” in K. Hens, D. Cutas and D. Horstkotter (eds) Parental Responsibility in the Context of Neuroscience and Genetics, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 13—33.
Bjornsson, G.
and Hess, K. (2017) “Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 94(2):273-98.Collins, S. (2013) “Collectives’ Duties and Collectivization Duties,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 91(2):231-48.
Copp, D. (2007) “The Collective Moral Autonomy Thesis,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 38(3):369-88. Dietz, A. (2016) “What We Together Ought to Do,” Ethics, 126:955-82.
Driver, J. (1992) “The Suberogatory,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy,70:286-95.
Feinberg, J. (1968) “Collective Responsibility,” The Journal of Philosophy,65:674-88.
French, PA. (1984) Collective and Corporate Responsibility, New York: Columbia University Press.
Held, V (1970) “Can a Random Collection of Individuals Be Morally Responsible?,” The Journal of Philosophy, 67:471-81.
Hess, K.M. (2014) “The Free Will of Corporations (and Other Collectives),” Philosophical Studies, 168(1):241-60.
Hindriks, Frank (2019) “The Duty to Join Forces: When Individuals Lack Control,” The Monist, 102: 204-20.
Isaacs, T. (2011) Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kutz, C. (2000) Complicity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawford-Smith, H. (2015) “What ‘We’?,” Journal of Social Ontology, 1(2):225-49.
List, C. and Pettit, P. (2011) Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
May, L. (1992) Sharing Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, S. (2006) “Collective Moral Responsibility: An Individualist Account,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 30(1):176-93.
Pinkert, F. (2014) “What We Together Can (Be Required to) Do,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 38(1):187-202.
Sadler, BJ. (2006) “Shared Intentions and Shared Responsibility,’ , Midwest Studies in Philosophy,30(1): 115-44. Sartorio, C. (2004) “How to Be Responsible for Something without Causing It,” Philosophical Perspectives, 18(1):315-36.
Schwenkenbecher, A. (2014) “Joint Moral Duties,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 38(1):58-74.
Schwenkenbecher, A. (2018) “Making Sense of Collective Moral Obligations: A Comparison of Existing Approaches,” in K. Hess, V. Igneski, and T. Isaacs (eds) Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 109-32.
Schwenkenbecher, A. (2019) “Collective Moral Obligations: We-Reasoning' and the Perspective of the Deliberating Agent,” The Monist, 102(2).
Shockley, K. (2007) “Programming Collective Control,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 38(3):442-55.
Silver, D. (2002) “Collective Responsibility and the Ownership of Actions,” Public Affairs Quarterly, 16(3):287-304.
Strawson, PF (1962) “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 48:187-211.
Sverdlik, S. (1987) “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies, 51(1):61-76.
Tollefsen, D.P. (2015) Groups as Agents, Cambridge, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Wringe, B. (2010) “Global Obligations and the Agency Objection,” Ratio, 23(2):217-31.
Wringe, B. (2016) “Collective Obligations: Their Existence, Their Explanatory Power, and Their Supervenience on the Obligations of Individuals,” European Journal of Philosophy,24(2):472-97.