Linking and Transmission

We are imagining in the makes no difference cases that it’s the individual who doesn’t make a difference, so it’s unclear what reason he or she has for doing something about the matter.

I hope enough now has been said to motivate making sense of the idea of an individual acting on collective reasons in makes no difference cases. It’s quite another thing, however, to show how one can act for collective reasons in makes no difference cases. Although I won’t be able to provide an adequate defense of that claim here, I will gesture towards the view that I think has some promise.

We should note, first, that there must be collective reasons if it’s going to be possible for an individual to act on them. I took their existence for granted earlier, when discussing Wringe’s case of the collective (A and B) reporting the damage to the roof. Wringe introduces the example as part of his effort to establish that there are collective reasons.²³ And some might want to resist that there really is a collective reason here, insisting that fundamentally each of A and B has an individual reason to contribute to a collective effort that has a good outcome. And, if that’s the case, then all we have to say is that each is individually responsible for making a con­tribution.

For example, take an over-determination case due to Parfit — that of the firing squad (Parfit 1984), or take Humiliation described above. The contribution of each member of the squad makes no difference for the bad outcome, given what the others do. So no one has a reason not to shoot and, given Look-back-look-ahead, no one is responsible for execution. But, assuming that the execution should not take place, there seems to be reason for the squad not to shoot. It’s not just that it would be nice for the squad not to. There is a reason for action, albeit not one that is to be understood individually, independent of what other individuals have reason to do.

Reflection on such cases and others suggests that we cannot make do simply with individual reasons/obligation. I will be taking for granted that there are collective obligations or reasons in what follows.²⁵

I turn to the normative significance of collective reasons for the individual — specifically, the question of whether it’s possible for an individual to act on collective reasons in makes no diffe­rence cases. It seems that we would need something like the following:

Linking Principle: If I am (or could be) acting with others, and we have a collective reason to Φ, I am entitled to our reason for Φ-ing; and when I do my part in our Φ-ing, I am acting for that collective reason.

A couple of provisos would help to make this principle more compelling, one addressing cases where the collective effort is hopeless, and another where one’s contribution would be super­fluous. When the situation is hopeless, there is no collective reason to address the problematic S because there is simply nothing to be done.

There may be other sticking points with the Linking Principle, even when supplemented with the provisos concerning the superfluous and the hopeless. One source of reluctance has to do with making sense of an individual’s part or contribution in a collective act in the makes no difference cases. What counts as doing one’s part, given how miniscule one’s contribution is in some very large collective endeavors, or given that it makes no difference whether one performs the relevant act? In reply, I should say that I am not attempting to give an account of the metaphysics of aggregates; so I concede that I am taking for granted that we can make sense of what it would be to contribute to or be a part of some collective effort even in cases of over-determination or other forms of makes no difference. So, for example, we can make sense of the idea that one is doing one’s part in the collective act of getting someone elected by, say, casting a vote (or canvassing, or making a campaign contribution, etc). Whereas, one is not (at least not in normal circumstances) doing one’s part in that collective electoral effort if one is sitting on the couch twiddling one’s thumbs or buying beer at the convenience store — even if in the makes no difference scenarios these latter acts arguably have as much of a chance of making a difference on the electoral outcome as the former. Still, supposing we take for granted the notion of contribution here, we can go on to ask about its normative or moral significance.

A fundamental issue with the Linking Principle concerns the nature of the practical cognition involved in the cases it describes, where one is entitled to collective reasons and can act on them, even in the makes no difference circumstances. That is, even where it seems that the justificatory force of the reasons would seem not to be immediately accessible to the individual. A promising approach to explaining how this might be possible invokes the reason preserving function of intention (Roth 2017).²⁷ Intentions play a role in preserving the reasons that figure in delib­eration and decision-making, so that when the agent subsequently acts on the intention that issues from the decision, the agent acts for the reasons that went into that decision. For example, I might for various reasons decide and thereby intend to go to a party on the weekend. When it comes time to attend, I do not consider whether to attend. After all, I have already decided to go. I don’t have to reconsider the reasons; nothing has come up to warrant revisiting the deci­sion. I just straightaway act on the intention and head over (or perhaps think about how to get there, not whether to go). Nevertheless, when I go to the party, the reasons for which I go are the ones that went into my original decision and which I didn’t reconsider (or need not have reconsidered) at the time of action.

The proposal is that something like this might apply to the collective case. Imagine, first, that one undertakes to decide whether to act on a collective intention to Φ. One would have to consider the reasons that support Φ-ing. But notice that in the makes no difference cases many of relevant reasons are not the individual’s own; only the collective really has those reasons — pre­cisely because what the individual would do doesn’t make a difference.

So, Kutz is right that intention matters, as was suggested earlier. But it matters not because it directly secures accountability/responsibility in a way that circumvents Look- back- look-ahead. Intention matters, rather, because it’s a way of showing how Look-back-look-ahead applies in this case — by securing entitlement to forward-looking reasons that are otherwise not available for the individual to act upon.

The picture is one where what I am doing is just a part of what we’re doing. In executing the collective intention, the relevant reasons for so acting are the collective reasons; one is entitled to and relies on the collective reasons. And what one is doing makes sense in those terms — the terms that we had thought were proprietary to the entire collective, and not the individual.

One’s access to the collective reason is by way of acting directly on the intention. What happens when one considers oneself as an individual agent, acting on one’s own? Then the force of the collective reason might be counteracted, and the makes no difference considerations could very well have a role to play in this undermining (but see below). But part of the idea of intention, be it collective or diachronic within an individual, is that of a rational stability that can resist revision. Sometimes, a proffered intention should be resisted — such as when the deliber­ation or values that led to it are confused or misguided, or the assumptions that were in place are no longer relevant, or conditions of communal trust sufficiently eroded. But these sorts of concerns hold for intentions generally, and are not peculiar to the intentions that serve to pro­vide access to collective reasons.

Again, my remarks here are meant only as a gesture at how we might think about what it would be for an individual to act on collective reasons in the makes no difference cases. A fuller account would have to defend further the proposal about intentions playing a reason preserving function, not to mention the idea that this sort of reason preservation and entitlement can work not only diachronically within an individual, but between collective and individual levels.²⁸

Also needed is a story about who or what issues the collective intentions for one to act on. We can imagine that in the case of structured collectives — institutions etc. — there might be conventional procedures by which decisions are made on the basis of collective reasons, and the corresponding intentions issued. But I think that even when there is no structured collective it is possible for an individual to form the relevant intention. The intention would not be (just) for the intender to act up, but for a collective. No doubt there will be externalist conditions on whether one succeeds in issuing such an intention. It might depend, for example, on whether sufficiently many others are like-minded so as to take up or issue the intention as well. Just when it might be possible to issue such an intention is something that demands further investigation.

I want to turn, finally, to an argument that suggests that the collective reason in the makes no difference cases, if there is one, cannot be a reason for the individual to act because it has no nor­mative force for the individual in the first place. We need to identify where this argument goes wrong if we’re to make sense of the idea of an individual acting for a collective reason. I think that the following captures how the argument is supposed to proceed:

(1) Suppose that there is a collective reason to Φ. E.g. someone’s life will be saved if adequate funds are raised from numerous individuals for the purchase of some very expensive medication.

(2) The person is saved whether or not some one individual joins the collective effort. In par­ticular, it makes no difference whether I am a part of the collective effort.

(3) So, there is no point for my being a part of the collective effort.

(4) Thus, I am not subject to the collective reason. The collective reason puts no normative pressure on me or any particular individual to make a contribution.²⁹

I think that the proper response to the argument is to resist the step from 2 to 3. That is, from the fact that for any individual it makes no difference whether they participate, it does not follow that one person in particular — such as I, myself — can be excluded from the collective and not be subject to the normative force of the collective reason.

The diagnosis of what goes wrong with this step of the argument is that it mistakenly introduces a distinct, individual element in order to resist a collective line of practical thought. Thus, reasoning from one’s own point of view, one might think: there is no point for me to make a contribution, since I don’t make a difference; I may as well do something else, like go off and have a beer with a friend, or take a pleasant drive in my SUV, etc. I don’t deny that one’s interests (be they egoistic, altruistic or whatever) can come into conflict with some collective goal. But the argument was meant to show that there was no normative force to the collective reason in the first place, not that there was some distinct point of view from which one might resist the normative force of the collective reason. If we start with the collective reason, then the recognition that not everyone will need to make a contribution entails not that I will not have to but rather that some individuals or some one of us will not have to. It takes more than the thought that I don’t make a difference to get to the conclusion that I am amongst those who have no reason to contribute.

The thought is that there is a collective reason, and for all that’s been said, it is a reason for which I can act by acting directly on the relevant intention. My earlier objection to Kutz was that he wanted to secure responsibility while, in effect, conceding that the responsible agent has no reason. He was thereby ditching Look-back-look-ahead. I think that Kutz is too concessive to the makes no difference worry. Although the agent doesn’t have the relevant individual reason for contributing, I am suggesting that there is a collective reason to which she’s entitled, and for which she may act.

In this chapter I have investigated the Look-back-look-ahead principle that draws a connection between responsibility and reasons for action. If we are to apply this principle to cases of col­lective responsibility in which an individual might be implicated, it would help to make sense of the idea of an individual acting for a collective reason. My very preliminary suggestion as to how this might work draws on the thought that intentions might preserve and transmit reasons of a collective so that an individual acting on the intention is entitled to the collective reasons and acts for those reasons. The idea is modeled on how intentions function within an individual over time. In acting directly on a previously acquired intention, one acts for the reasons that went into so deciding. If this provides a suitable model for the collective case, then we might be able to preserve the connection between responsibility and reasons for action in those collective cases where makes no difference considerations make it hard to see what individual reason one has for doing one’s part.

Notes

1 Some material in this chapter benefited from presentation to audiences in the philosophy departments at Davidson College, Ohio State University, Bowling Green University, and at the ENSO conference in Lund, Sweden. Thanks also to the editors for their comments.

2 We might wonder why someone is unable to Φ. Presumably we should add that the incapacity was non-culpable. This suggests that spelling out conditions for this sort of excuse will not yield a reductive account of responsibility, for the concept of non-culpability presupposes that of responsibility.

3 The importance in the collective context of forward-looking notions of reason, duty, or obliga­tion, has been emphasized more recently for example in Isaacs (2014: 40); Wringe (2014: 474—5); Schwenkenbecher (2013: 2); Dietz (2016: 958). Important earlier discussion includes Parfit (1984); Jackson (1987).

4 Although Kant would say that the S-ing has no moral worth.

5 Sometimes Φ won’t preclude S. But if Φ is really all one could have reasonably expected to do about S, then even if S comes about because of bad luck, it seems that one should not be blamed for S. And I would add that one is not to be blamed even if the Φ-ing one did do was not done to avert S, but for some other reason.

6 Culpable ignorance might pose a worry. Due to the ignorance, the agent was never in a position rea­sonably to do something about S. We might nevertheless want to blame him.

7 I am assuming that this is not due to some morally culpable ignorance or insensitivity on his part.

8 Does this make selfishness an excuse? The worry, I take it, is that the selfish individual might think they have no reason to act in light of S-related considerations if those considerations don’t bear on his own interests. But this by itself doesn’t mean that the individual is incapable of acting for such reasons — unless the selfishness is pathological.

9 These remarks should be qualified in light of important considerations stemming from phenomena of moral luck and agent regret (Nagel 1979; Williams 1981). See Kutz (2002) for a discussion that is sensi­tive to and accommodating of these considerations (perhaps overaccommodating to my taste). Nelkin (2019) also provides a very helpful overview.

10 Look-back-look-ahead is related to a reasons-responsive picture of moral responsibility. But it is more minimal as a thesis. First, the suggestion is only intended as a condition on responsibility; not as the makings of a complete compatibilist account of responsibility. Second, reasons-responsiveness is often thought of as involving a counterfactual condition (regarding what reasons the agent would be respon­sive to) that has a bearing on what actually prompts the action in question (e.g. McKenna (2013: 154) discussing Fischer and Ravizza (1998). But I’m not taking a position on what sort of counterfactual reasons-responsiveness has to be true for someone to count as acting for a reason. Indeed, Frankfurt style cases (Frankfurt 1969) suggest that one can act for a reason (arguably even do so responsibly) while lacking reasons-responsiveness, as McKenna notes. It is a substantive question whether one could act for a reason even if one lacked a counterfactual sensitivity.

11 Bjornsson, “Shared Responsibility Refined,” delivered at Society for Agency and Responsibility, Pacific APA, 2017. See also the firing squad example from Parfit (1984: §26).

12 Collins (2017: 578) describes such a view, though doesn’t endorse it.

13 For discussion in favor of the agent condition, see Collins (2017: 584); Lawford-Smith (2015); Isaacs (2011:23—70). Against: Schwenkenbecher (2013: 8; 2018: 111); Wringe (2014: 484ff; see his 2010).

14 But see Copp (2006); Pettit (2003); Rovane (1997); French (1979).

15 For a view that holds that such individuals are not exonerated, see Kutz (2000b: 156ff).

16 Copp (2006: §5). Copp imagines cases where individuals playing their roles act in morally unproblem­atic ways, and yet because of how their decisions are aggregated, the group behaves in a critcizable way. And this commits us to the group's responsibility — precisely because there is no responsibility to be assigned to the individuals.

17 See Schwenkenbecher's (2018: 117) discussion of Erskine (2014):

if there is a duty to rescue the child and the passersby can come together to do so, then they each have an obligation to contribute to establishing the kind of group needed for res­cuing it... this view requires a certain kind of group to be formed — not a group agent but a goal-oriented collective. Erskine thinks that all that is required of the individuals here is to act jointly. They need not form a — structured — group agent. This difference is reflected, for example, in the different way in which the coalition of the willing can be held respon­sible: responsibility ultimately distributes between the members of the group but does not sit at the level of the group as such.

18 Schwenkenbecher (2013: 9, 11) says something similar discussing Held's case of bystanders lending aid at the scene of a car accident, and attributes this view to Collins (2013). The bystanders have a duty to engage in joint action to prevent some assault, and this duty can hold for each individually (Held 1970: 479).

19 Schwenkenbecher (2013: 17) notes this, but doesn't address it.

20 See Nefsky (2015); also Parfit (1984); Glover (1975).

21 Collins (2017: 580) objects to Kutz, saying,

If each of A,..., N intends to ‘w together,' then there are N intentions, each held by a different individual. Nothing is implied about any of the individuals having any significant relation to any of the others or their intentions, such as a relation of control or influence or emulation between the intentions. So authorship for what the others do—if this is understood as implying individual remedial duties for what the others do— receives insufficient justification.

For Kutz, a participatory intention is an instance of the familiar notion of an intention had by an indi­vidual. But he does impose conditions on it: it has a distinctive content, and is had only when individ­uals in question are strategically responsive to each other, mutually open about their interaction, and committed to shared goals (Kutz 2000a: 7). So it's probably not fair for Collins to say that on Kutz' view there are no significant relations between the respective intentions of the individuals.

22 Again, I'm bracketing complications arising from moral luck. See note 9 above.

23 Wringe (2014: 79) suggests that collective obligations explain the corresponding individual obligations.

24 Although Schwenkenbecher has her doubts (2018: 114—15) and favors the idea that the individuals are jointly obligated.

25 Another case that has generated substantial discussion is that of Hi-Lo. See Bacharach (2006); Gold and Sugden (2007); Hurley (1989). For useful related discussion of sympathetic to collective reasons, see Parfit (1984: §26); Jackson (1987); Wringe (2014); Dietz (2016); Schwenkenbecher (2018).

26 See Nefsky (2015) on superfluity, and Bjornsson forthcoming for discussion.

27 Compare Burge 1993 on how working memory might preserve the warranted status of beliefs throughout an episode of reasoning.

28 I see the project here as related in interesting ways to certain non-reductive treatments of epistemic warrant in cases of testimony. See also the discussion of identification in Anderson (2001: 31ff).

29 Related arguments are rehearsed by Nefsky (2015: 249); Dietz (2016: 979).

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