Imagine a situation where an African American family moves into an historically all white neighborhood.
Their home is vandalized, racial slurs are painted in motor oil on their lawn, and they are sent threatening letters until they finally relent and move away. We would classify what happened as a hate crime.
Who is morally responsible for this hate crime? Is it simply those who actively vandalized the home and threatened the family, or does responsibility extend further? Is it possible that “white people,” as a group, bear some responsibility for the actions of those few active perpetrators? Is it even possible for a large social group, like “white people,” to be morally responsible? Or, perhaps many members of a large social group can share responsibility, with each member bearing some portion of the burden? One place to begin looking for answers to such questions is within the philosophical debate over collective responsibility. In what follows, I delve into the debate to show that focusing on narrative might help us better understand responsibility for things like hate crime.1 I further note how taking a narrative approach affects the issues of collective punishment, collective apology, and collective akrasia.One common denominator in the debate is this: most participants assume that if groups are to be morally responsible they must mimic individuals in particular ways. Accordingly, how the individual is characterized is crucial as it can impact our understanding of the nature and moral significance of groups. Of course, there are various ways of defining individuals. One promising way, particularly when thinking about issues of moral responsibility, relies on narrative. The basic contours of narrative are very familiar. Narratives are stories that have a protagonist and a plot; these stories are typically divided into fiction (literature) and nonfiction (biography, autobiography, history, etc.). In the current context, our focus is on narrative as the autobiographical stories we create about our experiences that make our actions intelligible. They explain, to others and ourselves, why we do what we do. Such narratives are connected to questions of personal identity and ethics, which can in turn bear on questions of both individual and collective responsibility. In this chapter I provide a brief description of narrative in its connection to these questions, ultimately showing that a narrative understanding of individuals and groups might provide justification for ascriptions of certain kinds of collective responsibility, particularly for shared responsibility among members of large social groups.
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