Criticisms of May's View
As I argued in the previous section, May’s view is important because it provides a mechanism for holding individuals responsible for inaction in situations where they could have prevented harm by coordinating with other, similarly situated individuals.
He acknowledges that this creates a high standard for moral agents, but also argues that it should be inspirational, “calling attention to the need for people to look beyond their individual lives, to consider what they could accomplish in their communities through joint action” (May 1992: 118). I agree with May that any account of shared responsibility for collective inaction should be motivating, but I argue that his account needs to be modified if it is to meet this goal. In this section, I argue that May’s view lacks the resources needed to be as motivating as he wants it to be, because it relies too heavily on a backward-looking assessment of responsibility and adopts the wrong reactive attitude. Accordingly, May’s account should be revised if it is to address the sorts of pressing issues of harm and collective inaction I discuss in section 15.3.Like May’s accounts, most other accounts of collective responsibility and shared responsibility for collective inaction are retrospective, in that they take a particular harm and attempt to identify who (or what) can be held responsible for the harm (see, e.g., Copp 1991; Held 1970; Petersson 2008; Tannsjo 2007). It is easy to see why this is appealing: it allows us to create the kinds of counterfactuals that are necessary in order to generate responsibility for inaction. While we are not in an epistemic position to know exactly what was possible, we can know certain features of the individuals who failed to act, and we know the extent of the harm that occurred; and this can allow us to work backwards to create various counterfactuals. It is also a helpful way to think about responsibility if we want it to translate to the realm of legal responsibility.
A criminal court can only assess the liability for a failure to prevent harm by looking backward at the mental state and actions of a defendant, establishing whether the defendant contributed causally to the harm, attributing an appropriate level of culpability, and delivering a correspondingly appropriate punishment. Even though it seems that in situations of collective inaction, a “repeat scenario” may be unlikely, a criminal verdict and punishment may have a deterrent effect on an individual in the future (insofar as one can be “deterred” from inaction). Regardless, judgments assessing criminal responsibility can allow communities that have suffered grievous harm to gain some closure and begin to move on.Yet this retrospective look at collective inaction does not provide the same benefits as a forward-looking view of shared responsibility. Forward-looking responsibility establishes what individuals or other entities should be doing, not what they should have done in the past. Thomas Hill explains the difference between forward-looking responsibility and backwardlooking responsibility as the difference between asking who is to blame and asking who is in a position, now, to do something (Hill 2010: 29). Robert Goodin has argued that a forwardlooking view of responsibility requires us to see to it that a certain state of affairs obtains (Goodin 1985; 1995). The content of a state of affairs that is both desirable and possible also presents an epistemic challenge, and it cannot be outlined in detail. As Michael Doan argues, we don’t necessarily know the collective action solution (and corresponding state of affairs) for many of the collective action problems we face, and thus our responsibilities should involve both collaborative inquiry and action (Doan 2016). Yet I contend that through this inquiry we can usually at least identify the relative desirability of certain states of affairs, and when we can do so, we can identify an obligation to act so as to avoid certain states of affairs with significant preventable harm.
Particularly when we think about ongoing crises like the one in Famine, there is good reason to think that there are many situations in which we have enough information to reasonably act to prevent future harm, and focusing on past collective inaction does not generate the same demand for action to mitigate the ongoing harm. Forward-looking responsibility can’t get us to the same sort of analysis we do when we try to create a counterfactual to establish if a collective of individuals should have been expected to organize themselves into a group to prevent harm. However, it can give normative force to the moral responsibilities that are determined by the forward-looking analysis of future states of affairs, and demand that those states of affairs involve a world/nation/community with less suffering.
Tracy Isaacs offers such a forward-looking view of collective inaction, which she refers to as “collective obligation” to distinguish from backward-looking “collective responsibility” (Isaacs 2011; 2014). She gives her own example of a case in which several individual bystanders should work together to prevent harm to some children rafting nearby, and she goes on to argue that we should be focusing on our current and future “obligations” to perform particular acts. This part of her view, which frames responsibility as a prescriptive rather than an evaluative concept, is helpful for thinking about the right way to revise May’s view of shared responsibility for collective inaction. Yet Isaacs is limited in her own ability to be prescriptive as well, because she is focused on collective obligations, rather than individual obligations as parts of a shared collective obligation. She claims that individual responsibility in collective contexts can only be understood in terms of collective responsibility, and she sees “no necessary connection between collective blameworthiness and individual blameworthiness” (Isaacs 2014: 43). Isaacs does see collective obligation as providing a useful framework for understanding individual failures to act, especially in terms of what role an individual might take in a potential response to harm.
She agrees with May that with respect to collective action, “certain individuals are in a better position than others to direct the actions of the collective and to see that the collective’s intention actions are consistent with its obligations as a collective” (Isaacs 2011: 134). This all seems right, since we can’t understand collective inaction from a purely individualistic perspective, and individuals should be expected to engage in collective action based on their own abilities.One concern we might have is that her focus on the collective is too attenuated to be properly motivating. While the moral obligation to act is distinct from the motivation to act, a case of collective inaction can sometimes be tied to the fact that no individual member felt the requisite motivation to act. On Isaacs’ view, it looks like any given individual might be able to eschew her obligations, and the collective would have the same obligation to prevent future harm, only the roles would have to be redistributed among the group members. The individual could ostensibly avoid her individual obligation by removing herself from the putative group prior to an assessment of the collective obligation, and this may be more likely if she does not have properly motivating reasons to act. Again, the motivation is distinct from the obligation, but we should prefer a view that is motivating to one that is not. The benefit of May’s view, revised to be forward-looking, is that the obligation is shared between the individuals, and each would be blameworthy for failing to fulfill her obligation.
My other main concern with May’s view is that it relies on shame, rather than guilt, as the appropriate reactive attitude for individuals who share responsibility for harm. On a forwardlooking view of shared responsibility, the aim is to motivate one to act so as to avoid both guilt and shame, and perhaps even to garner praise. We can distinguish between guilt, which is a feeling associated with an act or failure to act, from shame, which focuses on feelings about one’s character.
Bernard Williams distinguishes between guilt and shame as follows:What arouses guilt in an agent is an act or omission of a sort that typically elicits from other people anger, resentment, or indignation. What the agent may offer in order to turn this away is reparation; he may also fear punishment or may inflict it on himself.
What arouses shame, on the other hand, is something that typically elicits from others contempt or derision or avoidance. This may equally be an act or omission, but it need not be: it may be some failing or defect. It will lower the agent’s self-respect and diminish him in his own eyes.
(Williams 2008: 90)
So while guilt is tied to something done (or not done), shame attaches to an assessment of one’s identity. As Williams notes, guilt can be tied to reparation, or some other accounting for one’s behavior. Shame, it seems, looks inwardly and is not tied to making changes outside of oneself.
With respect to the most controversial aspect of May’s account, that individuals be held partially responsible for choosing to maintain particular attitudes that increase the risk of harmful behavior on the part of others, shame may be an appropriate reactive attitude. May argues that individuals who maintain racist attitudes, even though they do not engage in racist acts, might share responsibility with members of their racial identity group which do engage in racist acts, because their choice to maintain such attitudes increases the risk of these harms (May 1992: 46—54). When considering individual responsibility for this sort of collective inaction, which is tied to one’s identity, it makes sense to look inwardly and see racist attitudes as character defects. This is accurate, regardless of whether or not such self-awareness is motivating enough to encourage change. But it is not sufficient, and to rely on this internal self-assessment is to deny the power of accountability, and deny the moral weight of making a choice not to intervene to prevent harm.
Guilt is a powerful backward-looking tool for acknowledging that one should have acted differently. But it can also be a powerful forward-looking tool for demanding that one meet a moral obligation to contribute to a certain future state of affairs. It encourages us to look at how the choices we make affect other people, and how we might be obligated to prevent harm at some point. Returning to Isaacs’ term “collective obligation,” it seems that we should look at our responsibilities to prevent harm as obligations in the first place, rather than failed responsibilities after-the-fact, and the prospect of guilt is better suited to encourage us to avoid collective inaction. Whether or not shame generates the motivation to become a less defective person, it does not obligate us to create certain states of affairs, namely states of affairs without suffering that could be prevented through collective action, and this should be a necessary feature of accountability. In the final section, we will look at two situations that illustrate why.
15.3