Conclusion
My thinking about collectives travelled a far piece from my discussions with H.D. Lewis and my poring over a stolen geology book. Admittedly, I learned a few things about and from rocks—how they form, disintegrate, bond, and shatter.
Certain sorts of rocks, aggregates and conglomerates, evoked for me basic structural and functional aspects that distinguish distinctly different types of human collectives and organizations.Most humans populate, are members of, a spectrum of collectives throughout their lives. As Shakespeare said, in our time we play many parts or, as I would add, become parts of many different clods, peds, conglomerates, and corporations. We are organizational animals, associative, tribal, and often accidental elements of clods and inadvertent clodhoppers in planes, trains, buses, classes, street corners, etc. Hardly any human’s life is hermetical. Aristotle told those who listened to him that we are social animals. As far as we know, he didn’t expound upon how, consequently, morality should not only synchronically and diachronically assess our intentional behavior as individual joiners, but evaluate our concerted activities qua collectives—the actions of the organizations, clusters, assemblies, crowds, bands, alliances, consortia, and cliques in which we function as voluntary and involuntary members and that, in large measure, shape our thoughts, provoke our actions, form our communities, and define our identities—the companies we keep. What we do within the numerous social configurations into which we intentionally fit ourselves or are thrust by forces beyond our control for brief moments or even as long as lifetimes, more often than not, are focal occasions in which deciding justifiable moral responsibility attributions matters with respect to how we as individuals and collectives endure.
Justifiably affixing blame and awarding credit or praise with respect to collective activity is seldom a simple or a tidy task.
Collective responsibility, often ignored in the history of ethics where the focus generally was on the single atomic particle and not the clod or the conglomerate or the corporation, is essential to an effective ethics that relates to the complexities of human life far more, I came to believe, than plotting ways for an individual to nurture a good will and achieve a personal summum bonum. Put simply, despite its messiness, collective responsibility matters and requires considerable serious attention in the field of philosophy in which criteria of moral assessment of human conduct and events is of primary concern.A few years before he died in 1992, H.D. Lewis informed me that although he was impressed with my work on collective and corporate responsibility, he would remain steadfast in insisting that moral responsibility could only be ascribed to individual humans. He suggested that collective and corporate responsibility may well be a kind of responsibility, perhaps in the way we also talk of legal responsibility, but they are not moral. He also reminded me of his book Clarity is Not Enough (Lewis 1963) that was the text of his course I attended back in the 1960s. He didn’t explain the relevance of that reference. I guess he figured he didn’t have to.
Notes
1 Methodological Individualism (MI) is the theory that social phenomena, collective actions, can only be explained as resulting from and reducible to the motivations and actions of individual persons.
2 I have offered arguments for this position in a number of articles and books, most recently in French 2017.
3 See Silver 2002.
4 See French 2008.
5 This distinction is owed to Andrew Khoury (Khoury 2013).
6 Of course, synchronic responsibility ascriptions should be modified if at a later date it is learned they were false, biased, based on insufficient information, etc. Such modifications are not diachronic responsibility ascriptions as I am using the term. They were simply false or unjustified responsibility ascriptions when made and morally require alteration.
Diachronic responsibility ascriptions do not alter synchronic responsibility ascriptions.7 For more on psychological connectedness see Khoury (2013).
8 Think of Ortega y Gasset’s comment: “Man is the novelist of himself” (Ortega y Gasset 1939).
9 I have no idea how many of the traits of a racist one must have in order to be a racist. I suspect people could argue for hours on end about whether someone is a racist if they hold racist beliefs but do not express them in public or overtly act on them. In general, I think a person does not actually believe things that make no difference in the person’s life, the way the person lives his or her life. But, people have told me that a person can be a latent racist (a closet racist), though racism never overtly surfaces during the person’s life. I will make no attempt here to pursue the issue, but that idea brings to mind the Red Queen believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
10 The term is owed to Andrew Khoury.
11 My account of power in a group is based on Alvin Goldman's discussion (Goldman 1972).
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