How is Shared Blameworthiness Possible?

The conclusion of the previous section was that group blameworthiness is irreducibly collective, but not in a way that requires substantive social relations. Even if this is correct, it remains unclear why the involvement of other blameworthy agents in an outcome should matter for how the individual is implicated.

My own explanation for this lies in the nature of blameworthiness, whether individual or collective. According to an influential understanding, often employed in the collective respon­sibility literature (e.g., Feinberg 1968; May 1992), blameworthiness for something bad does not require that one was in full control of it, but rather that it happened partly because of some of one’s faults. Faults are often understood as blameworthy or shameful actions or omissions, but a tradition from P. F Strawson (1962) understands basic faults as instances of substandard respon­siveness to values, or substandard caring. In line with this, I have defended the following account of the blameworthiness of both groups and individuals:

blameworthiness: For a group to be morally to blame forY is forY to (i) be mor­ally bad and (ii) be explained in a normal way by the group’s members’ not caring as can be morally demanded of them (Bjornsson 2011; 2017).

Like any account that takes collective blameworthiness to be grounded in demands on indi­vidual moral agents, blameworthiness explains why groups can be to blame even if they do not themselves satisfy standard requirements on moral agency.

But blameworthiness has a number of more specific explanatory virtues: it straight­forwardly explains three’s blameworthiness in Helplessness, as well as the trio’s lack of blameworthiness for not saving all the children in Uncertain Success and the racists’ lack of blame­worthiness for the outcome in Partly Excused Helplessness—only in Helplessness was the failure to save all due to the substandard caring of the members of the group.

Importantly, the claim that the failure was due to their substandard caring is not distribu­tive: it does not imply that it is true about each (or any one) of them that the failure was due to her substandard caring. The latter might seem implausible given that her substandard caring made no difference to the outcome. Nevertheless, blameworthiness explains how members are implicated in collective blameworthiness for something: the individual member’s substandard caring is part of why that thing happened. And it explains why failures to dis­charge obligations, understood in line with obligation, imply that at least some agent is thus implicated in blameworthiness for this failure: because obligations are morally important things that are ensured by appropriate caring, failures to discharge an obligation must be both morally bad and due to one or more instances of substandard caring.

In addition to this, blameworthiness is not designed specifically to handle collective blameworthiness: it applies equally to cases of individual blameworthiness, where bad things have happened because one agent failed to care enough on one or more occasions. Because it takes individual and collective blameworthiness to consist in the very same relation, it offers the same kind of benefit as obligations: it explains why collective blameworthiness is blameworthiness.

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