Narrative and Group Responsibility

Returning to French’s distinction between conglomerates and aggregates, it appears that social groups are closer to the former. Social groups, like conglomerates, survive varying membership and have an identity “not exhausted by the conjunction of the identities of the persons in the organization” (1984: 13).

Conglomerates possess rules of conduct for members and prescribe a hierarchy of roles for members. When one is a member of a particular social group there are prescribed norms as well, though perhaps there is not a set hierarchy as in conglomerates. In contrast, aggregates do not survive varying membership, do not have prescribed norms, rules, or roles, and do have reductive identities. Clearly, narratively constructed social groups are closer to conglomerates than aggregates; however, they differ in one very important way—they lack “decision procedures.”

As a concrete example, we can think of decision procedures on the model of Robert’s Rules of Order for deliberative assemblies. Narratively constructed social groups do not possess such decision procedures. For many in the debate, including myself, this means that social groups cannot form collective intentions and achieve collective agency. Feinberg (1991) and May (1992) have proposed that solidarity might enable collective agency, but one would be hard pressed to maintain that large social groups, such as races and genders, genuinely possess solidarity. While I am arguing that identity groups approximate conglomerates, I do not hold that narratives generate a unified or collective intention to perform particular actions the way a decision procedure or true solidarity might, so ultimately mine is not a collectivist claim. What I am arguing is that narratives provide irreducible structure to social groups in a way that is important to questions of group responsibility.

Taking a narrative approach to individuals and groups meets the spirit of the reductive objection by demonstrating that even if the group does not qualify as an agent, not everything morally significant about the group is reducible to individual members.

The group is reducible in terms of the physical bodies that constitute it, but the group narrative is not. The irreducible group narrative and the norms it contains might function as a kind of causal artifact, linking many members (who contribute to the norms) to perpetrators (who then act on the norms). This is key because if the reductive objection cannot be met, if groups really are fully reducible, then the other objections do not even arise. All moral responsibility would simply be the result of individual, intentional, direct, and proximal action, case closed. However, once the reductive objection has been met, the narrative approach suggests additional possibilities for meeting the normative and practical objections. Moreover, as I outline below, it gives us new ways of interpreting collective punishment, collective apology, and collective akrasia.

While I do not have space to provide and defend all the particulars, I can offer a rough sketch of where an emphasis on narrative can lead.⁹ Recall that according to the normative objection, ascribing “shared” or “distributed” responsibility necessarily implies that every group member is equally responsible for harm regardless of contribution.¹⁰ This is an indefensible result, of course. On my view, shared responsibility is proportional to one’s contribution. This idea is largely uncontroversial; corporate and criminal conspirators can share responsibility for harm, with those who intend and order the actions often having more responsibility than those who carry out the actions. In such cases, the link between conspirators and the harm is direct and proximal; however, when considering hate crime and shared responsibility among members of large social groups, the link is much less obvious. By focusing on narrative, I believe we can reveal the link. On a narrative account, individuals and groups are importantly constituted by their narratives. The content of those narratives, especially the norms embedded within, inform the moral deliberations of individuals.

The norms reside or are archived in the narrative and are partly formulated through narrative. Members of social groups contribute to group norms as they live their everyday lives; they cannot avoid it.¹¹ When members of social groups contribute to a norm that promotes violence, and another member relies on that norm when formulating intentions and committing violence, then those contributing members share responsibility with direct perpetrators. Those with more influence on group norms, like public figures with public platforms, would bear a greater share of responsibility than “average” members.

For example, in the hate crime case I described at the start, perpetrators likely reasoned that they were operating according to a norm endorsed by most members, a norm which says roughly that “whites should resist residential integration with violence if necessary.” The norm was a necessary aspect of the commission of violence but the perpetrator is not individually responsible for the norm. The faulty norm is the product of many member contributions over time and causally links many members to the harm. Additionally, the faulty norm has an historical force that must be actively dislodged; doing nothing functions as a contribution to maintaining the status quo norm and to maintaining ones’ link to that norm. Thus, on a narrative account, if members do not want to share responsibility, they must live and speak in ways that displace faulty historical norms, that sever themselves from such norms, and that thereby complicate the group narrative.¹²

Note that on this account one can share responsibility without deliberately intending to support the faulty norm; instead, one’s small share of responsibility can result from a kind of recklessness or negligence.¹³ But, as Hannah Arendt reports in The Life of the Mind, “the sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good” (180).

Although it goes against common perceptions, recklessness and negligence may account for more harm than does intentional action. In any event, this admittedly attenuated link to harm revealed by the narrative account may be insufficient to motivate individuals to behave differently. Nonetheless, the account does show that there can be a causal connection between many members of large social groups and harm caused by a few direct perpetrators, making it sometimes appropriate to say things like “many whites share responsibility for hate crime.”

Even if one’s share of responsibility is small and the direct perpetrator’s share is large, making the distribution fair and acceptable, a narrative account of shared responsibility must still overcome practical objections. In general, the practical objections coalesce around the idea that ascribing shared responsibility to large social groups can only make intergroup relations worse, not better. Indeed, it is easy to observe that people are quick to assign group responsibility (although they are loath to accept it themselves)¹⁴ and that they often seek retribution against any member of the “guilty” group. Moreover, we frequently direct anger at groups and occasionally admit to feeling group-related guilt.¹⁵ There is clearly a need to address how individuals interpret group responsibility so that intergroup hostility is diminished rather than increased.

A narrative account of shared responsibility encourages us to recognize the different contributions made by different members, rather than equalizing contributions the way other notions of group responsibility might. We would have to acknowledge that some members are wholly innocent (e.g., those who act to dislodge the norm), that others are unintentional contributors, that some are quiet endorsers of faulty norms, and that a few are aggressors. Consciously noting these differences in contribution should curb the impulse to impose indiscriminate “punishment” on all members.

It can also help us determine what sort of “shared punishment” would be appropriate. Direct perpetrators would face criminal charges, of course, but indirect contributors would also be punished by facing changes to their individual and group narratives. Their narratives would no longer characterize most individual members as innocent bystanders or the group itself as unblemished. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, for example, truth commissions sought to give both survivors and perpetrators a platform for sharing thorough and accurate narratives.¹⁶ In this way, survivors were able to tell their stories and demonstrate that they were worthy of respect and protection, while perpetrators honestly described and took responsibility for their actions. Here in the United States, at historical sites like colonial Williamsburg and Monticello, the full stories of slaves and their daily lives, along with the truth about slaveholding among the founding fathers, is now emphasized and demonstrates a desire for honest, and in that way healing, narratives. These kinds of “transitional justice” efforts merge nicely with a narrative account of shared responsibility because they prioritize getting the narratives right, in all their complexity. This is now recognized as a necessary step toward intergroup reconciliation.

An additional practice that can impact intergroup reconciliation is “collective apology.” This occurs when a representative of a group publicly apologizes for a harmful act committed by the group or its members. Organized groups, like governments or corporations, might engage in collective apology. The city of Charleston, South Carolina, very recently issued an apology for its role in the slave trade (Gomez 2018). The apology rang hollow with some black residents; they felt the apology was not accompanied by a substantial change in government treatment of black residents. While my narrative account does not rule out collective apology on the part of organized groups, it does speak to why some black residents may be dissatisfied.

Although the apology begins to alter the narrative for the city of Charleston, the norms involving how black residents are treated need to show substantial change. The lack of substantial change in treatment continues to be part of the city’s narrative.

There are situations where collective apology might be welcome when done correctly; however, “shared apology” is not a practice that the narrative account can endorse. Because large social groups like races and genders do not have organized hierarchies and decision-making procedures, there is no appropriate representative who can make the broad public apology. An apology can be shared in the sense that members at the same level of contribution have the same content to their apologies, but each can only apologize for her own contribution. Ultimately, individual members, even very influential ones, do not have the power to unilaterally or instantaneously alter group norms. Like the narrative itself, change can only unfold in time. Our shared task is to direct that change.

Finally, a major reason individuals may not be motivated by this account to take on the task is not that their share of responsibility is so small, but rather that their efforts would not seem to make appreciable change. Group members might believe that all things considered it would be better to speak and act against faulty group norms, yet they fail to do so. This kind of akrasia might be labeled “shared akrasia” and it differs from standard examples of individual or collective akrasia. Philip Pettit has defended the possibility of “collective akrasia” for organized “self-unifying cooperatives” that are subject to Bayesian improvements in decision making (78); however, this form of akrasia would not cover large social groups. “Shared akrasia” emerges, I propose, when many members of a group achieve the same better judgment in relation to the same necessarily group-related issue, but each fails to act in accordance with that better judgment. Our registered voters who fail to vote, although they believe voting to be best all things considered, would display shared akrasia, for example. One explanation for such akrasia might involve what psychologists call “competence motivation,” the desire to produce appreciable change in the world (White 1959: 329). Akrasia may result when we feel we cannot produce change and are demotivated to act. Voters often feel that their individual vote does not matter and members of large social groups may similarly feel that their protesting of faulty norms will not change the group norm. Taking a narrative perspective can help us curb shared akrasia by emphasizing that although the group norm is not going to change substantially in the short term, one’s own narrative will. One’s individual narrative will evidence that one acted against faulty norms and that one does not share responsibility in a particular instance, placing one on the “right side of history” and perhaps alleviating feelings of group related guilt. Thoreau and Gandhi talked about this in terms of preserving one’s conscience, but we can also think of it as crafting one’s narrative in a way that avoids shared akrasia. The more individual members who do this, the more quickly the group narrative and the group norms will change.

To summarize, taking a narrative approach opens up strategies for addressing many objections and issues surrounding group responsibility. In the end, narrative may link each of us to harms we would prefer to see as none of our business; however, if the account above is right, we do have the ability to avoid sharing responsibility when we recognize the influence we each have on our individual and shared narratives.

20.4

<< | >>

↑

Source: Bazargan-Forward Saba, Tollefsen Deborah (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility. Routledge,2020. — 538 p.. 2020

Narrative and Group Responsibility

More on the topic Narrative and Group Responsibility: