Individual Duties to Collectivize and to Contribute to the Collective Goal

All the views I have surveyed, even those that reject the idea that non-agent groups can have duties, will agree that individuals can have duties with respect to collective goals like rescuing accident victims.

Given that the collectives are unstructured and that, practically, the members must act to sufficiently organize themselves to achieve their collective goal and discharge their duties, there is both a practical and moral imperative to do so. Held was willing to hold a random collection of individuals responsible for failing to act when the called-for action was obvious and the out­come was clearly favorable; however, she also argued that when

the action called for is not obvious to the reasonable person, a random collection may not be held responsible for not performing the act in question, but, in some cases, may be held responsible for not forming itself into an organized group capable of deciding which action to take.

(1970: 476)

Stephanie Collins (2013) calls these “collectivization duties”: they are duties individuals have, to take steps toward forming a collective that can achieve the collective goal. This is a duty the individuals have to transform the group so they are immediately capable of achieving their moral goal. This might entail forming a goal-oriented collective agent or, in some cases, a more highly structured organization. And, in addition to the individual duty to collectivize, and while the collectivity is in the process of collectivizing, we can further add that, when indi­vidual members are capable of making a contribution, they also have duties to contribute to the collective goal “in the meantime” (Igneski 2018). For example, a UN member state such as Canada, who has the necessary resources, will have an obligation to do its part to contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goal of providing clean drinking water to all persons, while it is waiting for the international community to sufficiently organize and develop the necessary infrastructure and institutions to meet it together in its entirety.

The discussion thus far has engaged with some of the main theoretical debates surrounding collective duties of beneficence. Beyond these more foundational questions, there are many unresolved issues and questions that remain. In the final section of this chapter, I will address two sets of pressing questions pertaining to collective duties of beneficence that arise from the perspective of individual members. The first set asks how responsibility for the failure to fulfill a collective duty of beneficence distributes to individual members: is the collective responsible; the individual members; or both? What are they responsible for? And to what extent can they be blamed for their failures? The second set asks if the failure of some members to fulfill their share of the collective duty increases the shares of complying members who have already done their fair shares, such that they are morally required to do more. And relatedly, are individual obligations conditional upon the participation of others?

31.5