Conclusions
With shared action comes collective responsibility And blameworthiness for shared intentional wrongdoing is normally greater than that of people who do the same wrong as a result of strategic interaction.
The reason for this is that, when several agents form, retain, and successfully execute a shared intention to do wrong, their ill wills become mutually implicated in each other in a distinct way. Each is implicated in the wrongdoing not only because his intention is directed at the bad outcome, but also because his intention is directed at the other participants’ intentions being effective. Our reactive attitudes and judgments of blameworthiness should be sensitive to this distinct kind of mutual implication of ill wills. Hence, other things being equal, agents who have a shared intention to do wrong are normally more blameworthy than agents who intentionally bring about the same wrong as the result of acting in parallel on merely strategic intentions.Acknowledgments
We are grateful for questions and comments from Saba Bazargan-Forward, Gunnar Bjornsson, Stephanie Collins, Mattias Gunnemyr, Niels de Haan, Marta Johansson, Benjamin Kiesewetter, Bjorn Petersson, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Paul Russell, Thomas Schmidt, Andras Szigeti, Matthew Talbert, Deborah Tollefsen, Caroline Touborg, and the participants at the workshop on collective responsibility that was held in Jyvaskyla, Finland, December 4—5, 2015. Olle Blomberg’s research was funded by project grant 421—2014—1025 from Vetenskapsradet (the Swedish Research Council).
Notes
1 Sometimes the label used is “joint intention” or “collective intention” and, correspondingly, “joint intentional action” or “collective intentional action.”
2 Surprisingly little has been written about the connection between shared intention and collective moral responsibility and collective blameworthiness.
The most relevant references are: Bratman (1997), Kutz (2000: chapters 4-5), Miller (2001: chapter 8), Sadler (2006), Tuomela (2007: chapter 10), Isaacs (2006, 2011: chapter 4), and Giubilini and Levy (2018).3 On forward-looking collective moral responsibility, see e.g. Bjornsson (2014) and Hindriks (2019).
4 Talk of moral responsibility for a morally neutral action such as raising one’s arm (in a context where this has no effect on any other agent) may sound odd and unusual. This is because, in everyday life, the issue of whether someone is responsible for an action will typically only arise when blame or praise is actually in the offing. Moral responsibility for morally neutral actions is not mere causal responsibility, as it requires that the agent is psychologically related to the action in the right way.
5 Why assume that being responsible is a threshold property? The primary question is whether or not an agent is a candidate for some kind of response, say, an appropriate target of our reactive attitudes. A vague or gradable property would not be of much help here. However, this does not exclude that components of moral responsibility such as voluntariness or reason-responsiveness can come in degrees. The degree to which these components are present can furthermore help determine an agent’s degree of blameworthiness once thresholds for moral responsibility have been passed.
6 This is one of Joel Feinberg’s (1968) uses of the term “collective responsibility” in his seminal paper on the topic. See also Steven Sverdlik (1987). Another term that is sometimes used is “shared responsibility” (Mellema 1985; Zimmerman 1985).
7 Kirk Ludwig's (2016) reductive account of shared intention includes a necessary condition that is similar to Bratman's Intention condition. According to Ludwig, each party to a shared intention must, roughly, intend to bring about that they are all agents of an event that they bring about in accordance with a shared plan.
8 Sverdlik later modifies the claim that it is only when a result is intended by several agents that responsibility for it is collective.
This is because there can be collective responsibility due to collective negligence, such as when “a team of surgeons negligently leaves a sponge in a patient” (Sverdlik 1987: 69). However, note that this is nevertheless plausibly interpreted as a case where several agents perform a shared intentional action. The other cases that Sverdlik discusses are similar in this respect.9 Tracy Isaacs (2011) argues that a reductive account of shared intention cannot make sense of the blameworthiness of shared intentional wrongdoing such as that in Shared robbery. A key premise of her argument is that participants can only intend their own contribution; only a group agent can intend the shared action (“that we J”) (Isaacs 2011: 39—40). Given that full blameworthiness of an agent for an action requires that the agent intended to perform the action, and that no participant can intend the shared action, “the collective act is not adequately accounted for by individual assessments of moral responsibility [blameworthiness]” (Isaacs 2011: 57). Since we think that individual intentions “that we J, are possible as well as commonplace (see Bratman 2014: 60—64; Ludwig 2016: 207—210), we do not accept this argument.
10 Larry May (1992: 112—114) defends a kind of “dilutionism” concerning blameworthiness in the context of collective omissions by appealing to the socio-psychological phenomenon of the Bystander Effect (see Fischer et al. 2011). However, this is not a defense of the view that the mere fact that other agents are involved itself leads to a dilution of blameworthiness.
11 The argument we put forward in section 10.4.2 relies on shared intention involving interlocking second-order intentions, or perhaps irreducibly joint or collective commitments. Not all accounts of shared intention involve or entail such elements though. Accounts lacking both these elements are given, for example, by Kutz (2000), Miller (2001), and Pacherie (2013).
12 Lepora and Goodin (2013) put the idea in terms of “counterfactual individual difference-making” and “centrality” rather than in terms of the insensitivity of the causal pathway.
13 Without endorsing it, Gregory Mellema characterizes what might be a similar idea according to which, “when the actions of the participants in a scheme of wrongdoing are well integrated, then they are more likely to contribute more effectively to an outcome and the participants deserve more blame” (2016: 114). To what extent it is similar depends on what Mellema means by “more effectively” here.
14 As Abraham Sesshu Roth (2016) remarks regarding an imagined paranoid conspiracy theorist: “[H]e does get right that it certainly would be awful, for example, if everyone were out to get him and were working together to do so. After all, the stability and impact of agency that's shared can be expected to be more serious than the effects of a mere collection of individual acts.”
15 This is not to deny that the insensitivity of causation must be above some minimal threshold in order for an agent's causing death to amount to killing (see Lewis 1986).
16 As we mentioned in section 10.3, Bratman argues that shared intention can play a “linking role” that makes each responsible for the shared intentional action and not only his own contribution to it. He takes this to be analogous to the way in which a larger plan can link a single agent's past, present, and future conduct. What we argue is that there is a further analogy between the individual and the shared case. For other discussions that draw on similar analogies between individual and shared cases, see Mellema (2016: chapter 9) and Scanlon (2008: 41-43).
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