An Easy Non-Case: The Affluent
My conception of collective agency is permissive, but it’s not as permissive as some might hope. In particular, it doesn’t include groups such as “the international community,” “the affluent” or “humanity.” To settle ideas, I’ll focus on “the affluent,” but my remarks apply equally to the international community, humanity, carbon emitters, and so on.
Each of these groups lacks a group-level decision-making procedure; however, we still might try to attribute responsibility to them, by pointing out that they are potential moral agents. The argument would be roughly: (1) the affluent have the potential to become a moral agent, and (2) if the affluent were a moral agent, then they would bear moral responsibility; therefore, (3) the affluent bear (perhaps putative) responsibility for making themselves into a moral agent.10 One way to understand this is that the affluents’ becoming an agent is the means towards the affluents’ discharging their moral responsibility. Since the affluent have the ability to take this means (i.e., they have the ability to become an agent), the affluent have responsibility to take the means. The responsibility to take the means (become a moral agent) derives from their responsibility over the end (alleviating global poverty, for example).The problem with this argument is that becoming a moral agent is either an action, or it is not. If it is an action—and if only agents can perform actions—then the affluent would need to be an agent before it could become an agent. However, this is impossible, because no entity is an agent before it has become an agent. But in that case, the affluent cannot have a responsibility to perform the action of becoming an agent as a means to discharging its responsibilities. Alternatively, perhaps becoming an agent is not an action. Then, becoming an agent is indeed something that can happen to the affluent.
But it is not an action, so it doesn’t look like something the affluent can have responsibility over.A different way to argue that the affluent can have responsibility is to say that each affluent individual is retrospectively responsible for her individual actions that causally interacted with certain actions of other affluent people (leading to poverty, or climate change, or so on), and/ or that each affluent individual has prospective responsibilities that require her to consider, and interact with, other affluent individuals (in order to alleviate poverty, or climate change, or so on). That is, we might point out that individuals’ responsibilities have inter-related content or similar explanatory origins. This might be thought to suggest that the responsibilities are held by the collective as such.11
However, inter-related content of individual responsibilities does not suggest that the responsibility is held by the group per se. After all, almost all prospective responsibilities of all agents require their bearers to react to other agents, and almost all retrospective responsibility of all agents are responsibilities for actions that were linked with others’ actions. For example, if I am retrospectively responsible for breaking my promise to you, then I have performed an action of promise-making, where that action is linked to your action of promise-accepting. Or if I am prospectively responsible for giving you $10, then fulfilling that responsibility will require that I interact with you (or at least your bank account). If we said that all responsibilities-that- are-linked-with-other-agents’-responsibilities were responsibilities of a group that included those other agents, then the results would be bizarre: plainly, my retrospective responsibility for breaking my promise to you is not held by me-and-you; likewise, my prospective responsibility to give you $10 is not held by me-and-you. By the same token, my responsibility to contribute to poverty relief might require that I interact with other affluent people, but this does not mean the responsibility is held by the affluent as such. Such a group cannot bear responsibility for international political problems.
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