Responsibility
There are at least three senses of responsibility-for-an-outcome: causal, retrospective, and prospective. Causal responsibility occurs when one thing impacts or influences another.
The causal responsibility of groups has been investigated extensively in the long-r unning social scientific debate between methodological individualists and holists. There, the primary question is whether groups are eliminable from our explanations about what causes what within the social world. I mention causal responsibility only because—as foreshadowed above—I will deny that certain collectives can bear retrospective or prospective responsibility. By denying that, I emphatically do not deny that they can bear irreducible causal responsibility. (In Collins, forthcoming B, I argue that ad hoc groups can bear group-level causal responsibility. See similarly List and Spiekermann 2013.) Causal responsibility does not entail any moral assessment, which contrasts with retrospective and prospective responsibility.Retrospective responsibility is at issue in debates about blame, answerability, and accountability. It is sometimes called the “basic desert” sense of responsibility (Pereboom 2001) and is often used interchangeably with “blameworthiness or praiseworthiness” (Smiley 2010). If an entity has retrospective responsibility, then it is an appropriate target of reactive attitudes such as indignation, resentment, or gratitude. Several philosophers have developed theories of groups’ retrospective responsibility (e.g., French 1984; Isaacs 2011: Pettit 2007).
Prospective responsibility is evoked when entities are attributed moral obligations or duties. I assume that obligations and duties are grounded in moral reasons that are presumptively decisive in decision-making: moral reasons that their bearer should, when deliberating about what to do, presume are not defeated, undermined, or outweighed by other reasons—even though this presumption will sometimes rightly be overridden. Again, there are several accounts of groups’ prospective responsibility (see, e.g., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 38(1)).
I will assume that all and only moral agents can bear retrospective and prospective responsibility. This assumption is based on three natural thoughts: responsibility attaches to actions; only agents can act (or refrain from acting); and all and only moral agents can consider moral reasons when choosing how to act. So, a collective can bear (retrospective and prospective) responsibility if and only if it is a moral agent. This assumption is disputed (Wringe 2016; cf., Collins, forthcoming A, chs. 2—3; Lawford-Smith 2015). I make the assumption so that I can focus on its implications for international relations.
My discussion will focus on whether a collective can itselfbear responsibility—that is, whether a collective can bear responsibility that is distinct from the responsibility of its members. I assume that if this is possible, then it’ll be possible for a collective to be responsible for some outcome without any of the members being responsible for it (as explained by, e.g., French 1984; List and Pettit 2001). This question differs from the question of whether individuals can together share responsibility for some outcome (on which, see, e.g., Bjornsson 2014; Schwenkenbecher 2013). If the latter is possible, this doesn’t entail that individuals can share responsibility for something for which none of them individually has responsibility. I take collective-level responsibility to be more contentious—and, therefore, more interesting. So, I put shared responsibility to one side.1
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