Part III of the Handbook focuses on the domains in which issues pertaining to collective responsibility arise, such as: collective responsibility in health care, in scientific communities, of the state, and of corporations.

Stephanie Collins, though, begins this discussion in Chapter 23 with an investigation of collective responsibility as it pertains to international relations. She points out that the international arena is comprised of a network of overlapping collectives, including states, multinational corporations, non-government organizations — but also non- institutional and non-corporate ad hoc collectives, such as “the rich” or “the educated.” Collins aims to determine which of these groups harbors moral responsibility.

In discussing collective responsibility in the context of health care, Robert Downie, in Chapter 24, takes an even more metaphysically conservative approach. He maintains that only individual persons can be morally responsible. Nonetheless, the aims and values of the collectives in which such persons operate influence the decisions these individuals make. This phenomenon is especially pertinent in the context of health care in which doctors, patients, and bureaucrats operate or receive care under the aegis of a vast and highly regimented insti­tution.

Turning from health care to the scientific community, Bryce Huebner and Liam Kofi Bright investigate, in Chapter 25, collective responsibility for instances of fraud among scientists. They begin with a review of an established explanation of this problem according to which scientific fraud is largely a consequence of the norms, rewards, and punishments, by which the “scientific credit economy” operates. Huebner and Bright seek to update this explanation by applying more recent and metaphysically sophisticated accounts of collective responsibility. Focusing on fraud within large-scale collaborative research and within ghost-written and ghost-managed research, Huebner and Bright argue that the scientific community as a whole is prospectively responsible for addressing scientific fraud by adopting norms and practices that diminish the incentives for perpetrating such fraud and which diminish the harmful effects of such fraud. In light of this, they suggest particular steps the scientific community might take.

The legal doctrines of complicity and conspiracy in the criminal law virtually cry out for accounts of collective responsibility. Christopher Kutz answers that call in Chapter 26 where he notes that the core of criminal law is individualistic in that the bearer of culpability is typically an individual, and the basis for that culpability is typically an individual action.

Moving away from complicity and institutional responsibility, Avia Pasternak considers in Chapter 27 whether and to what extent citizens are responsible for what their state does. She notes that it is common practice to hold a state responsible for what it does. Does this mean that the state is blameworthy? If so, what about its citizens? We usually demand apology and compensation from blameworthy parties, and sometimes subject them to punishment. But the claim that the citizen of a state can be “on the hook” in this way for what her government does seems to violate an individualist doctrine according to which each individual is responsible solely for his or her own conduct and not for what the members of her group do. Pasternak reviews the existing literature on these issues, after which she carves out her own view by splitting the difference between blameworthiness and remedial responsibility. She argues that only those citizens who wrongly contributed or failed to prevent their state’s wrongdoing are blameworthy for what their state does, and even then, only in proportion to the importance of those contributions.

No account of collective responsibility would be complete without a discussion of corporate responsibility, which is Amy J. Sepinwall’s focus in Chapter 28 as well as Jeffery Smith’s and Wim Dubbink’s focus in Chapter 29. Corporations, on occasion, commit dreadfully harmful wrongs. Yet, as Sepinwall notes, it remains a point of contention whether it is apt to blame corporations qua corporations for such wrongs. Her goal is to help resolve this debate, in part by attending (as Pasternak does in the previous chapter) to the distinction between moral agency and blameworthiness. Specifically, Sepinwall argues that moral agency does not entail liability to blame. To be blameworthy, an agent must be capable of experiencing guilt. As a result, even if a corporation is a moral agent, it nonetheless lacks the capacities required for blameworthiness in that it lacks the ability to affectively feel guilt. Though corporations qua corporations are not blameworthy, Sepinwall argues that we might still be permitted to treat some of their constitu­tive members — such as the executives — as blameworthy for what the corporation does, even if they are not to blame for having done anything wrong qua individuals. In Chapter 29, Smith and Dubbink also investigate whether corporations qua corporations bear the sort of agency required for moral blame. But unlike Sepinwall, they focus not on the capacity to experience guilt, but on whether corporations possess the autonomy required for moral agency. In doing so, they distinguish between two kinds of autonomy: (1) functional autonomy by which we deliberately constrain actions in accordance with moral principles, and (2) a deeper autonomy by which we self-reflectively endorse those moral principles. Corporations, they argue, possess the first kind of autonomy but not the second. By making this distinction, Smith and Dubbink attempt to show that there is a sense in which both sides of the debate are right — and wrong — when it comes to whether corporations are moral agents.