Individual Responsibility for Failing to Fulfill the Collective Duty of Beneficence
As can be expected, one’s answer to who is responsible for failing to fulfill a collective duty of beneficence will depend on one’s conception of collectives and the particular type of collective involved.
Corporations and other such highly structured group agents are the most straightforward. The group itself, like any other agent, is held responsible for failures to fulfill their duties. I mentioned earlier that one feature of corporate agents is that responsibility does not always distribute to its members. But this does not mean that individuals do not hold any responsibility at the individual level. The group’s formal decision-making procedures and various other structures distribute responsibility to members relative to their role in the organization. Consider again BP’s reckless and negligent actions leading to a deadly explosion and a massive marine oil spill that killed 11 workers and countless marine wildlife, and caused significant and ongoing environmental damage. The corporation, a collective agent, was held morally and legally (including criminally) responsible for the harms it caused. This moral and legal liability did not translate to the individual liability of its individual members.5 That’s not to say that certain corporate leaders and decision-makers and others in relevant roles were not morally responsible, but certainly, the responsibility of the collective did not distribute automatically or equally to all members and perhaps not at all to some (take, for instance, an intern whose job it was to answer the phones).A parallel point can be made for positive duties of beneficence. When the collective agent is a corporation, the corporation is responsible, as a group, for failing to fulfill the duty of beneficence, and some of its members will be held individually responsible, while others will not, depending on their role. Consider an employee who developed a community outreach proposal in which her corporation would engage in numerous activities to address poverty in her community and also make an impact on environmental issues, but the management team refused to fund the initiative.
If the corporation has a duty to aid in this situation and they haven’t taken any other steps to fulfill it, there is a case to be made for holding the corporation collectively responsible and (some) members of the management team individually responsible for some share, while not attributing responsibility or blame to the conscientious employee.But when the collective is less structured and not (or at least not yet) a collective agent, questions about individual responsibility and blame for failures to fulfill duties are even more difficult, because there aren’t tightly prescribed roles and procedures for allocating shares to members. So work needs to be done to determine individual fair shares based on the individual’s capacity, responsibility, and role within the group, and for the group to communicate this to its members. The responsibility of individual members is a function of what a particular person’s share was and to what extent they fulfilled or attempted to fulfill it. Notice also that a more determinate answer to this question will depend on one’s views on the next question I will discuss; namely, under conditions of partial compliance, do individual shares increase, so that those who have already complied with their share of the collective burden are required to do more? This is relevant because, if they are required to do more, we might ask if they are blameworthy if they don’t pick up the slack.
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