A Harder Non-Case: The West
The final group that I’ll consider is the West. Unlike the affluent, the West is united by a substantive common cause that’s not held by all agents—roughly, the promotion of individual rights and free trade.
“The West” is what Isaacs (2011) calls a “goal-oriented collective.” To give my own gloss on this notion: each member of the group (1) holds the same goal, where it’s out in the open between them that the goal is held by each (though it might be held only tacitly or implicitly); and (2) is disposed to act responsively to one another (insofar as they encounter one another) to realize the goal; however, the group (3) lacks group-level procedures for forming decisions, intentions, beliefs, and desires that are attributable to the group as such. Other examples of groups that meet (1), (2), and (3) include capitalists, environmentalists, human rights campaigners, and the oil lobby—all key players in international politics. To be clear, the members of these goal-oriented collectives each contribute to relevant collective agents—but there is no one collective agent to which they all contribute, so the group as a whole does not constitute a collective agent.Other international relations theorists have similarly delineated this category of collective. “The West” is what Stephen Krasner seminally defined as a “regime,” that is, a group united by “implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations” (Krasner 1983: 2). Crucially, the “decision-making procedures” that Krasner references here are decision-making procedures held severally by each of the members—the procedures “converge” in that they have similar structures and goals, but there is one procedure for each member, rather than one overriding procedure that subsumes all members.
Likewise, Mervyn Frost (2003: 94—8) analyzes groups whose members are engaged in a “dispersed practice.” Within this category, Frost includes collectives bound together along religious, political, or linguistic lines—within which he includes “global civil society,” “the West,” and “capitalism” (2003: 99). I will take the West as a paradigm example of a goal-orientated collective (Isaacs), regime (Krasner), or dispersed practice group (Frost).What are we to say about the moral responsibility of such entities? It is tempting to attribute moral agency (and, therefore, moral responsibility) to them, because of their common goal, shared dispositions, and shared ability to deliberate about morally good considerations. We might naturally say the oil lobby frustrates climate legislation reform or the environmental movement should take more radical action, meaning to attribute retrospective and prospective responsibility, respectively. International relations scholars do the same: Frost points out that his “dispersed practice” groups are in fact treated as responsible, and sometimes treat themselves as responsible (2003). Frost views such treatment as sufficient to construct or establish the moral agency of such entities. From a normative perspective, however, we should be wary of uncritically accepting the way entities happen to be treated. Our treatment of these entities as agents might be inappropriate. Instead, the question I want to address is: should we treat the West as a responsible entity?
From some theoretical perspectives, such treatment might make sense. For example, suppose “the West” includes all and only those states that favor individual rights and free trade (rather than also including the individual members of those states). One might then think the West meets the conditions Michael Bratman gives for a “shared intention”: “[w]e each have intentions that we J, and we each intend that we J by way of each of our intentions that we J and by way of subplans that mesh” (Bratman 2014: 103).
This will be the case where J is, for example, “slow China’s economic rise.” We might grant that the West can, in this way, have intentions. (Though it’s worth noting that Bratman himself eschews such applications of his framework (Bratman 2014: 7).)Still, I suggest, we should not grant agency—and, therefore, not responsibility—to the West per se. This is because the collective (or joint, or shared) intention was not formed by the group. That is, the West does not have a central core of agency—a procedure by which it can make official group-level decisions—at which it is possible for the group to produce that collective intention. Instead, the collective intention was formed simply via each agent (that is, each Western state) holding a certain intention, and intending to exercise it in ways that mesh with the others’ like intentions. The West cannot intend anything that its state-members don’t intend. That is to say: to be an agent (and, a fortiori, a moral agent), it’s not enough that one has an intention, or acts intentionally. In addition, one’s intentions must have a certain kind of causal history: one’s deliberation, consideration, or reflection must be what produces the intention. But in a group like the West—considered distinctly from NATO or the European Union, both of which have the kind of agency discussed in section 23.4—there is no group- level capacity for such deliberation, consideration, or reflection. Such processes require that the entity act on its own reasons, not the conjunction of the reasons held by each of the members of the group. But a group can come to its own reasons only if it has its own distinctive goals and beliefs. This means that the West, per se, cannot bear prospective or retrospective responsibility—though its individual members can, as can collective moral agents that include those members as members (such as NATO or the EU).
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