Responses To Some Comments

The working account of moral responsibility with which we began this chapter is just that. A Gilbertian approach to collective action, and so on, allows for the possibility of collective moral responsibility given at least some accounts that posit a different set of conditions.

Thus Marion Smiley (Smiley 2010: 183) suggests that in order to be morally responsible one must have a mind.³⁸ She does not say that only individual human beings (or other animals) have minds, or offer necessary and sufficient conditions for mindedness. She does, however, empha­size the unitary nature of any being that is minded in the relevant way, so we shall focus here on Smiley’s claim that moral responsibility can only be ascribed to something properly conceived of as a unity.

As we have discussed, on Gilbert’s joint commitment account of collective goals, and so on, these are attributable to the jointly committed persons as one. So Smiley’s unity condition does not rule out the moral responsibility of a plural subject in Gilbert’s sense.

Referring to Gilbert’s work as being unhelpful in this connection, Smiley characterizes her as invoking “shared” commitments (Smiley 2010: 182—3). If Smiley has in mind a set ofpersonal commitments of individual human beings, however, that is not the same as a joint commitment in Gilbert’s sense.

Here we understand personal commitments as Gilbert does. An example of the forma­tion of a personal commitment is the formation of a personal intention or the making of a personal decision, such as Jane’s decision to steal a watch. One with a personal commitment so formed is subject to a normative constraint of the type to which those who are jointly committed are subject, but makes, and can rescind, the commitment unilaterally.³⁹ Shared in the sense of identical personal commitments may not unify the parties but a single joint commitment surely does.

It may be worth emphasizing that Gilbert does not take a joint commitment to be constituted by a set of personal commitments, since she often introduces the concept of a joint commitment by starting with personal commitments, thinking that doing so will be helpful to readers.

In another discussion that doubts the possibility of collective moral responsibility, Michael McKenna (McKenna 2006: 20) prefers not to talk in terms of “irreducible collective agents (or plural subjects),” and doubts the plausibility of understanding “allegedly irreducible” collective agents as potentially morally responsible ones (McKenna 2006: 17). He doubts this in part because he assumes that the only agents that can be morally responsible are those whose actions exhibit a rich and stable pattern of responses to reasons.

This assumption may be overly strong. Suppose we accept it for the sake of argument. Collectives understood along Gilbertian lines can exhibit a rich and stable pattern of responses to reasons. For instance, in discussion of actions proposed for their organization members may regularly appeal to its moral code “We can’t do that—it conflicts with our moral code!” and “Our moral code demands that we do it!”

We have argued so far that Gilbert’s approach to collective actions and so on allows for col­lective moral responsibility given a variety of different conditions on moral responsibility in general, contrary to what the theorists in question suppose. We now turn to a different kind of concern with her approach.

Tracy Isaacs (Isaacs 2006) sees Gilbert’s account of collective actions as having important merits. She mentions in particular that “it makes sense to think about plural subjects as oper­ating on a different [i.e. collective] level of agency” (Isaacs 2006: 71).⁴⁰ That said, she does not adopt Gilbert’s account because of something she finds troubling: that someone who is a member of a plural subject intent on genocide, for instance, “is obligated to participate unless the others grant him permission to get out” (71—2).

This claim would indeed be troubling if the obligation in question is understood as a matter of all-things-considered moral requirement. As Gilbert understands it, however, the obligation in question is a directed obligation grounded in a joint commitment, an obligation each party has to each party that is equivalent to the other party’s standing to demand that he conform to the commitment. Importantly, such obligations are not a matter of moral requirement, let alone all-things-considered moral requirement.

Gilbert can easily agree, therefore, that if we are collectively perpetrating a genocide, I am not morally required to participate. Indeed, I may be morally required to thwart our action as best I can. The same applies to many less horrendous group goals.

That said, an account of collective action that includes directed obligations of the parties to one another accords with observations on the behavior of those engaged in joint action who take themselves and others to have the standing to demand behavior appropriate to the col­lective action at issue. The fact that I am not morally required to participate in our genocidal project does not mean that you don’t have the standing to demand that I participate. To say that you have that standing, however, is not to say that you would be morally justified in exercising it.

In sum, instead of the obligations ofjoint commitment speaking against Gilbert’s account of collective action and responsibility, that account squares well with a number of considerations, including moral considerations, that may otherwise be unexplained.

We now briefly mention one further concern, which affords us the opportunity to empha­size a central point about Gilbert’s approach to collective moral responsibility. Gilbert argues that a collective’s moral blameworthiness, as such, implies nothing about the personal blame­worthiness of its members—implying nothing, either, about their innocence. This means that even when a collective’s blameworthiness is established, a proposed punishment of the collective for its wrongdoing may not be morally justified overall, in that it may adversely affect the inno­cent, perhaps to disastrous effect.⁴¹

It may then be proposed that it is pointless to be concerned with collective blameworthi­ness, since it is never appropriate just to go ahead and punish the collective.

The charge of pointlessness should be resisted for several reasons of which we mention just one here. There are ways of punishing groups that may not affect their members adversely and may even strongly enhance their lives. For instance, a group may have developed a set of rules and practices that are highly undesirable from the point of view of individual members. Were the group to be disbanded, as punishment for its actions, the individual members may well benefit rather than suffer.

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