Part IV of this handbook applies theories and accounts of collective responsibility to real-world problems, including collective responsibility for: war, global poverty, climate change, conspiracy theories, environmental injustice, and institutional racism.

Part IV begins with a discussion in Chapter 30 of collective responsibility — or rather, complicity — in the context of warfare. Saba Bazargan-Forward points out that most combatants play highly subsidiary roles in the war they fight.

The harms of war, as egregious as they are, pale in comparison to the harms of poverty and famine. In Chapter 31, Violetta Igneski investigates the claim that we have collective duties of beneficence to the worst off. She begins by arguing that collective duties of beneficence should be taken seriously in moral and political theory. After summarizing current debates on whether unstructured collectives can have such duties, she turns to her own view. She defends the claim that even when the collectivities we are concerned with are not group agents, they can none­theless have a duty qua group to prevent a harm or wrong when there is evidence available that the group possesses the capacity to do so. On this view, the duty of the group qua group grounds the duties of its individual members.

No investigation of collective responsibility as it applies to the real world would be com­plete without a discussion of the most destructive collective action dilemma of our time: cli­mate change. In Chapter 32, Holly Lawford-Smith and Anton Eriksson note that to mitigate the harms of climate change, we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, given the magni­tude of the changes required, it seems that the duties to cut emissions do not fall on any given individual. It seems, then, that the duty to address climate change must fall irreducibly on collectives. Lawford-Smith and Eriksson accordingly argue as much. In particular, they maintain that the duty to mitigate climate change falls centrally on states. Lawford-Smith and Eriksson go further, however, by arguing that states possess collective moral agency and count as culpable emitters in their own right. That is, states do not merely have a duty to address the emissions that their citizens or privately owned corporations cause. In addition, states are themselves, qua states, morally responsible for the copious emissions they cause.

The proliferation of unfounded conspiracy theories is also an eminently salient topic these days — and one that often involves collective action. In Chapter 33, Juha Raikka investigates whether and how conspiracy theorists are collectively responsible for what they together do. In doing so, he distinguishes between (1) developers and publishers and (2) ordinary believers and disseminators of conspiracy theories. Raikka argues that the responsibility of developers and publishers is different from that of the ordinary believers and disseminators. Nonetheless, these groups are severally and jointly collectively responsible for what they together do, in three ways. First, the ordinary believers and disseminators share responsibility for diminished trust in major social institutions.

Returning to collective responsibility as it pertains to the environment, Kenneth Shockley notes in Chapter 34 that we often approach this issue by asking who is blameworthy, collectively or otherwise, for environmental injustice. This is, he points out, a backward-directed approach to responsibility. Shockley argues, however, that a focus on blame might not be the best way to address environmental injustice. He urges us to consider our forward-directed duties to alter the social practices and institutions that enable the institutional wrongdoing in the first place. Accordingly, Shockley argues that those capable of doing so harbor a ‘forward-directed shared responsibility’ to change the institutional environment in which environmental injustice occurs. Those individuals who fail to act appropriately can be held responsible, in the backward- directed sense, for that failure. We are, then, collectively responsible for environmental injustice in this sense: we share a duty to change our institutional environment.

Michael Hardiman closes Part IV with a much-needed discussion of collective and indi­vidual responsibly for institutional racism — i.e., racial oppression of the sort perpetrated by social institutions for which no individual is necessarily to blame. He raises the following question: does institutional racism let individuals off the hook? Hardiman argues that it does not. Racist individuals in racist, ‘colorblind’ racist institutions — i.e., institutions that promote racial inequality even in the absence of racist attitudes — can be held to account for the institution’s racism. Likewise, nonracist individuals in racist institutions who simply ‘do their jobs’ are still on the hook for enabling such institutions to promote its problematic goals. (Such individuals are likely to be guilty of ‘indifference racism’ in any case). So, according to Hardiman, the structure of institutional racism does not exonerate the individuals who work in such institutions, even if said individual are not themselves racist.