Conclusion

In this chapter, I argued that the received way of thinking about responsibility for collective inaction is unhelpfully constraining. Not only does it exclude from consideration a range of systemic problems and crises that clearly call for coordinated responses, but in so doing, it ignores and renders irrelevant the epistemic agency and creativity of ordinary people.

While exploring the work of Common Ground in post-Katrina New Orleans, I proposed an alternative approach to thinking about collective responsibility, expressed in summary form as three recommendations for future inquiry. When considering concrete cases of people acting together in response to seemingly intractable problems, I recommended that philosophers focus on how those who come to each other’s aid manage to generate new questions, ideas, and knowledge together, in and through collective struggle; on how these moments of collective creativity emerge in the first place; and on how to create the conditions for more such moments in the lives of more people. The upshot of my proposal is that philo­sophical analyses of collective responsibility need to do justice to the existence of systemic problems, many of which cannot be solved by way of a single collective act, utilizing the epi- stemic resources and skills already at our disposal.

Whether and when we ought to hold ourselves and others accountable for our collective failure to take up this responsibility is no simple matter, particularly where stories of collective struggle are not well known or well studied. Perhaps by shifting our approach to thinking about collective responsibility, though, we might better enable one another to seize upon more oppor­tunities for exhibiting collective brilliance in our everyday lives.

Notes

1 As Held explains, a “random collection” of individuals is a type of group distinguished by the fact that it has no decision-making procedure in place, and its members do not display much, if any, solidarity (Held 1970: 471).

2 The reasonable person standard is a legal fiction used to determine liability in criminal and tort cases. The term refers to a hypothetical person whose conduct exhibits average care, skill, and judgment. Thus, this person's conduct serves as a standard against which an actual person's conduct may appear negligent.

3 In an earlier paper (Doan 2016), I offer a critique of the epistemological assumptions undergirding this shared approach to thinking about collective inaction.

4 I understand epistemic agency in terms similar to Kristie Dotson, who focuses on “the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given community of knowers in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources” (Dotson 2014: 115).

5 I owe this formulation to Robin D. G. Kelley. As he points out, “Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression” (Kelley 2002: 8). With Kelley, I use the term collective struggle to refer to the collective efforts of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression and forcefully freeing themselves from systemic constraints.

6 I owe this formulation to Shea Howell.

7 I call it the knowledge condition because it implicitly references the cognitive states of the members of a random collection (Doan 2016: 6).

8 I draw inspiration here from Alexis Shotwell's thoughtful discussion of “constitutive impurity” (Shotwell 2016).

9 I understand climate change impacts in terms similar to Kyle Powys Whyte, who describes such effects as “arising based on the capacity of patterns of community relations to absorb local ecological alterations stemming from climate change,” which may be more or less disruptive insofar as they can be absorbed by existing structures of organization without those structures needing to change (Whyte 2014: 601).

10 While giving a speech, King had once said: “If we as people are going to exploit anything it should be our commonness” (crow 2014: 96). King was eventually found, alongside his dog, Kenya. He told his friends: “I knew y'all would come” (ibid.).

11 I focus on the story of Common Ground not because the groups work is beyond criticism, but because it provides an illustrative example of people creating new cultural and economic practices together, through thousands upon thousands of collective acts.

12 While blame may sometimes be appropriate, its helpfulness in addressing the underlying problems is easily overstated. Partly for this reason, my work attends more to political than moral responsibility (Doan 2016).

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