Introduction
None of us individually is causally responsible for anthropogenic global warming. None of us can do anything alone to slow it or to stop it. It is only collectively that we are causally responsible for global warming.
It is only collectively that we can reverse the processes contributing to it or ameliorate the harm it brings. Since we are only collectively and not individually causally responsible—and none of us can do anything about it alone—there is a strong prima facie case for saying that it is, in the first instance, we together who are collectively morally responsible for global warming. And it is we who are together collectively morally responsible for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and ameliorating the effects of greenhouse gases already released. Anthropogenic climate change is a salient real-world example in which a group or collection of individual agents seems to be, in the first instance, the locus of both causal and moral responsibility. Other examples are stonings, riots, whisper campaigns, racketeering, acid rain, human trafficking, corporate crime and negligence, and the ocean plastic pollution crisis.When we hold the group or collective responsible in the first instance, what does this entail about individual responsibilities? What degree of blame does each member of the group share when we hold the group collectively responsible for a harm? What obligations do members of the group have? It is not obvious that collective responsibility entails anything about individual responsibility. If the result is massively overdetermined, why should I be blamed for contributing to a harm or be required to stop? If there is nothing that I can do alone, then why should I have any obligation?1 Yet if there is no route back from collective moral responsibility to individual moral responsibility, collective moral responsibility becomes detached from pressure to alter collective behavior.
If its members are not morally required to change their individual behaviors in response to a finding that a collective is morally responsible for something, there is no normative mechanism by which holding collectives morally responsible can induce relevant change. Attributions of collective moral responsibility become idle.2 We are led to the idea of collective moral responsibility by harms of agency that cannot be attributed solely to any one individual. But we must find our way back to individual moral responsibility if holding a collective morally responsible is to have any moral force in changing its behavior.Some theorists argue that collectives are, in some cases, to some degree, morally autonomous from the individuals who constitute them, in the sense that they may be blamed or be responsible for things they do, though none of their realizers are, at least in the same way or to the same degree (Copp 2006; 2007; 2012; French 1979; 1984; 1995; List and Pettit 2011; Pettit 2007; 2009). I call this the AUTONOMY THESIS.
AUTONOMY THESIS: Groups may be morally responsible for harms (or benefits) without their members being morally responsible, either at all, or in the same way or to the same degree as the group.
Beyond this, many who write about collective responsibility think that it requires a group- level agent to be the bearer of the responsibility that attaches to the outcome that none of the members could bring about alone.
I reject this picture. Collective action and collective moral responsibility should be understood in terms of individual agency, on the one hand, and individual moral responsibility in the context of group action, on the other. I argue that all collective action is a matter of individual agents contributing to bringing about some event or state. I have criticized arguments for AUTONOMY THESIS. I will not repeat those arguments here (Ludwig 2007; 2016; 2017). If I am right, we have no need for group agents in our understanding of ordinary discourse about collective actions, either in the case of informal groups or in the case of organizations.
If groups, in the contexts in which we attribute moral responsibility to them, are not themselves agents, they cannot be moral agents. If they are not moral agents, they cannot be the ultimate locus of moral responsibility. Given this, and that we cannot let moral responsibility become detached from a mechanism by which the behavior on the basis of which it is attributed can be changed, I advocate the FACTOR MODEL of collective moral responsibility (Ludwig 2007).3FACTOR MODEL: Any claim that a group is morally responsible for something must be resolved into a distribution of moral responsibility to its members, with none left over for the group per se.
This leaves us with the question of the distribution of moral responsibility to members of a group judged to be collectively morally responsible for something.
DISTRIBUTION QUESTION: How is the collective moral responsibility of a group for a harm (or benefit) to be distributed across its members?
My focus in this chapter will be on the DISTRIBUTION QUESTION. My brief direct argument for the FACTOR MODEL was that otherwise moral responsibility of collectives becomes detached from any normative mechanism for changing its behavior. My indirect argument consists in showing how to distribute moral responsibility in a range of cases based on principles we apply to individuals and our understanding of the structure of collective action and shared intention.
The account that follows is incomplete in two respects (due to limitations of space). First, I focus on backwards-looking moral responsibility, specifically for harm, rather than forwardlooking moral responsibility. Second, despite its importance, I cannot explore the significance of institutional structures, role responsibilities, authority, organizational hierarchies, and task delegation in assigning responsibility to individuals acting in organizations.4 Nonetheless, we will reach some conclusions which seem both surprising and ineluctable, when the principles upon which they are based are followed to their logical conclusions.
A natural view is that the degree of moral responsibility in collective action is proportional to one’s causal contribution to a harm or benefit. This is the DILUTION PRINCIPLE.
DILUTION PRINCIPLE: The moral responsibility of a member of a group that is collectively morally responsible for the harms (or benefits) it brings about is proportional to the causal contribution of that member to the harms (or benefits).
If the DILUTION PRINCIPLE were true, however, then in the case of harms whose etiology involves millions of people, very little moral responsibility would attach to any individual—so little, in fact, that it would have no weight against other responsibilities that each of us has. The responsibility gets diluted when it is distributed down to individuals, until there is hardly anything of significance left. In fact, in cases in which the harm is overdetermined, one might plausibly argue that since nothing one could do alone would make any difference, no responsibility attaches to any individual at all. This leads to an additional principle, which I will call the Absolution principle:
ABSOLUTION PRINCIPLE: A member of a group is not responsible to any degree for the harm (or benefit) for which the group is collectively responsible if that member’s contribution is not necessary to bring it about.
It is clear what the relevance of the DILUTION PRINCIPLE and the ABSOLUTION PRINCIPLE are to climate change and many other examples of harms brought about by large- scale collective activity. If we are collective morally responsible, but the causal contribution that each of us makes is insignificant, and even unnecessary, then these principles would have the consequence that none of us was individually to any significant extent morally responsible for human induced climate change or morally responsible for doing something about it. This, I argue, is an important and perilous mistake.
Here is the program for the chapter. In section 6.2, I sketch the theory of collective action that I work with.
In section 6.3, I sketch the corresponding theory of shared intention. In section 6.4, I argue against the DILUTION PRINCIPLE and the ABSOLUTION PRINCIPLE in the case of collective action intentionally directed at harm. In section 6.5, I extend the argument to collective action in which a harm is foreseen but not intended. Section 6.6 summarizes. The method is to work through a series of cases, starting with a case that challenges the DILUTION PRINCIPLE, and explain why responsibility for the collective harm is in that case not diluted at all. Then I argue from that case, using the NO RELEVANT DIFFERENCE PRINCIPLE, that other similar cases likewise do not involve dilution, and then that overdetermination cannot make a difference.NO RELEVANT DIFFERENCE PRINCIPLE: If in two cases we can identify no relevant differences, and in one of them a certain distribution of responsibility to members of a group which is collectively responsible for something is called for, the same distribution is called for in the other case.5
This leads to the view that when we are collectively morally responsible for a harm or for doing something about a potential harm, each of us is morally responsible to the degree that he would be if he were the sole agent concerned.
6.2