Conclusion
Qua collective self-determination, radical collective responsibility is not the idea that we, together, could be just anything we arbitrarily choose to be. Rather, it is the sort of plural pre- reflective self-awareness in which who we are and what we intend, as the teams, groups, and larger collectives we are, is determined by the attitudes we share, and not determined by anything else.
In this sense, who we are is up to us — and though this does not support the illusion that we could be just anything, regardless of any facts about the world, knowing ourselves to be self-determined prevents us from making some mistakes about ourselves that cover up ways in which we could actually change. For example, a popular conception of group agency in the current literature holds that group agents consist of a plurality of people and an aggregation procedure through which they transform a plurality of individual views into a group view (e.g., List/Pettit 2011). Where there is no such organization, it is claimed, there is no collective or group agency. This view is accepted even where it is recognized that lack of organization does not prevent us from being collectively responsible, resulting in the claim that there can be collective responsibility without a collective agent (e.g., Chant 2015).From the perspective ofthe radical collective responsibility ofplural subjects, as reconstructed above, any such view is easily recognizable as an expression of “collective bad faith,” as it were — a collective version of the cheap excuse of which Sartre was so weary. “We,” as plural subjects, are not constituted by our organization. Our organization does not determine who we, together, are and what we, together, want. Rather, we organize ourselves, and where we fail to organize appropriately, we are collectively responsible for that failure, as its subject, or as the agency who failed to put its act together by self-organizing appropriately.
The way in which we organize what we are doing together (and that is, first and foremost, living together by sharing, to some extent, our lives) is by setting up norms, procedures and institutions; an infrastructure in which we — each of us — find our individual roles. Identifying with our individual roles is irresponsible only under certain circumstances. It is irresponsible where we cannot fully participate in constituting the role structure. The constitution of the role structure is the process through which we, as the collective we are, organize ourselves in the way that assigns us, severally, our individual roles. Where we cannot participate in the process of what makes us who we are, in our roles, we, together, are collectively irresponsible, for in this case, we let the question of who we are and how we live together be determined by other factors than ourselves, jointly.Radical singular responsibility of the early existentialist kind is thus not the answer to collective irresponsibility. As individuals, we can only stick to the norms or depart from them — go along, deviate, or kill ourselves (the exit option on which Sartre insists so much). It is only as the plural subject we are that we can actually change our norms, procedures, and institutions and adapt them so as to fit our shared goal of living well together. This, however, presupposes first that we be aware of ourselves, jointly, in the right pre-reflective first-person plural way. Collective self-determination is no guarantee that it is being used well. But it is radically irresponsible not to take the question of who we are collectively as being up to us, as the random collections, groups, and societies we are. It is radically irresponsible to take the question of who we are to be determined by culture, power systems, organization, institutional design, etc. rather than by us ourselves. For culture, power systems, organizations, institutional designs etc. are features of our living together for which we, jointly or collectively, are radically responsible.
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