Conclusion

Organizations are irreducibly responsible for their collective actions. Within an organization, each actor in the chain of command is individually responsible for his unique interpretation of the collective intention and unique contribution to collective action(s).

A member of a goal-oriented collective is fully morally responsible along with all other members of his group for the collective action, regardless of the extent of his causal contribu­tion or his knowledge of the specific action so long as it is consistent with the general purpose for which he joined the group. It follows that there is a heavier burden on entrants into goal- oriented collectives than into organizations to understand the scope of the group’s actions.

Notes

1 Bratman (1999), Toumela (1984), and Gilbert (1989) discuss how group members’ intentions mesh in an interdependent manner since one person forms an intention for a component of the collective action only because she knows her comrades are forming intentions to perform other components of the col­lective action.

2 Individualists describe collective action in terms of individual contributory actions, so that a tango, for example, is understood to consist of the lead dancer doing X and his partner doing Y At its root, a tango can be fully described using sentences describing one dancer at a time.

3 A goal-oriented collective might have a hierarchy though it is established by its like-minded members in order to accomplish a particular goal. In country C, tribe members who had come to see a neighboring tribe as an existential threat perhaps decided to “do what had to be done” and nominated some among them, military veterans, to lead the attacks.

4 Jeff McMahan argues that putatively collective actions can be reduced to individual actions with this reasoning, personal communication.

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