Responsibility for Ultimate Actions in Organizations

By contrast, the characteristic collective action of organizations, what some call “irreducibly corporate actions,” do not scale down to the individual contributory actions retaining the moral character of the macro action (Isaacs 2011; Erskine 2003; Runciman 2003; Fain 1972; Pettit 2003; French 1991; Copp 2006; Cooper 1972).

For example, we can see Baker’s control over, knowledge of, and intentions with respect to the helicopters’ operations are negligible. While his helping to fix the engines is materially necessary for the airstrikes to happen, the repairs do not directly contribute to the airstrikes. He performs daily maintenance on the helicopters whether they are conducting airstrikes, performing patrols, rescuing shipwreck survivors, engaging in training missions, or sitting below deck. Baker does not know anything in particular about the airstrikes. He forms an intention to tighten certain bolts; lube certain valves; and perform computer diagnostics, merely because he was ordered to do so. Absent the actions of thousands of other people, his engine maintenance would have absolutely nothing to do with an airstrike.

One might suspect Baker’s intention to fix the engines offers grounds for responsibility for the collective action, which the engine repairs make possible. Individual intentions offer grounds for responsibility for collective action in the case of goal-oriented collectives like the militia. In goal-oriented collectives, the actor forms the intention to perform a contributory act as a conscious contribution to a collective action he joined the collective to see occur. The group may have assigned him a specific task but he joined wanting to do whatever he could to contribute to the collective end. As argued in the previous section, this participatory intention is inculpating. In the case of military action and other irreducibly corporate actions though, the service member’s intention to perform a contributory action is usually not a self-generated intention but a person-sized segment of the group’s corporate intention impressed by others for actions contributing to still other agents’ broader ends.

Why can we not claim that Baker is fixing the engine purely of his own volition like a typical member of a goal-oriented collective? Military actions are definitionally those actions consequent to orders passed down through the chain of command (e.g. a Marine playing a video game after returning from patrol is not performing a military action). Baker makes his commanding officer’s interpretation and application of the corporate intention of winning the war his own insofar as he is acting as a professional (Isaacs 2011: 29). When people act qua professionals, they act according to their institutional procedures, which in the military context means following the lawful orders of superior officers in one’s chain of command. A civilian who snuck aboard the ship and started repairing the helicopter engine simply because he enjoyed tinkering with engines would not be acting as a professional and would not be performing a military action. Thus, the corporate intention of fighting the war does not scale down to a par­ticipating service member’s individual intention because Baker does not and cannot intend his contributing action as a military professional absent the larger chain of command compelling him to adopt its intention.

This argument about transference of intentions requires further elaboration. How exactly does the corporate intention to win a war get translated into service members’ individual intentions to perform specific actions? Given this broad corporate end of winning a particular war set by the president, subsidiary corporate intentions to accomplish subsidiary collective actions like neutralizing the country’s air defenses are determined through joint mechanisms in planning cells, wherein a staff of flag officers and their advisers determine the war plans. These decisions are then imposed and communicated throughout the organization according to a par­ticular procedure, at which point group members are institutionally obliged to act according to these directives, which is to say, to act as if the corporate intention was their own. Seumas Miller introduces some technical vocabulary regarding intentions that is helpful here (Miller 2001: 64). Type a) intentions are for the actor’s own actions while type c) intentions are for someone other than the intending agent to do something, as when a teacher tells a student to complete an assignment. So the president has a type c) intention that the military defeat the enemy regime. In response, an admiral develops a type a) intention to give an order to move the carrier strike group into position; he also has a type c) intention that the rear admiral in charge of the relevant carrier strike group obeys his command. The rear admiral derives a type a) intention to give orders about particular headings and speeds of the strike group’s ships to his subordinates based on his boss’s type c) intention. Far down the chain of command, Petty Officer Baker derives a type a) intention to fix an engine consequent to his Senior Chief’s type c) intention that he do so.

Not only are the agents’ intentions the vicarious vestige of their superiors’ intentions, rather than their own, the vector of transmission of these intentions and ends is “pushed” rather than “pulled.” It is characterized by compulsion rather than voluntary choice. This vector means that the theorist has no grounds for assuming service members would have intentions for their contributory actions absent the institutional framework of the chain of command. The theorist cannot assume the service member natively has the intention to perform the action causally linking him to the collective action. Shortly, I will address atypical situations where the service member really does have the relevant intention.

A debate between individualist and collectivist philosophers on the subject of social ontology is relevant to this point regarding collective responsibility.² Collectivists look to some centralized, top-down structure like a corporate intention to give form and direction to a group whereas individualists see only individuals as having intentions and so whatever “thing” binds together and animates a group must be an abstraction, an aggregate of individual intentions, ideas, or actions. Individualists, in short, see all groups as animated in the manner of goal-oriented collectives, even if some collectives have more formal structures, hierarchies, and longevity. The morally interesting elements of a group’s knowledge, intention, motive, and actions can always be reduced down, without remainder, to the contributing actions of the group’s members.

The individualist picture is correct in the case of goal-oriented collectives like the geno­cidal militia in country C; the members create and drive the group. We have a sufficient picture of what is animating the collective action if we add up all the sentences describing the indi­vidual actions of those within the groups. There is no pre-existing executive command structure shaping and directing the members.³ In the case of organizational action however, the individu­alist account does not account for the fact that the military, say, is oriented toward certain ends, and collective decision-making and communication structures like planning cells and chains of command are embedded in the organization before any recruits fill the barracks. Further, a popular political and social theory has inculcated recruits with values that lead them to privilege military role-based reasons over their personal intuitions.

So now having clarified that the full moral weight of the collective action is not neces­sarily present in the organization member’s contributory actions, we need to determine how far someone like Baker’s responsibilities do extend. Differences between organizational and goal-oriented collective action set what I will call “the horizon of responsibility” at the con­tributory action for an irreducibly corporate action and at the collective action for a goal-oriented collective action for the same physical behavior. The horizon of responsibility is the demarca­tion of what action the actor might be culpable for. We have already discussed how Archer is equally morally responsible for genocide with the rest of the militia members because of his individual action. Yet Baker’s contributory action on its own is insufficient to deem him culp­able for an unjustified collective action if he is in an unjust war. His contributory action has to be referred to the collective action in order to discern if his material involvement with the unjust war makes him responsible for an unjustified action. For the purpose of assessing culp­ability, a service member is not committing an individual unjustified action but contributing to an unjust collective action. Baker is not performing an “unjust repair” (which would be possible if he deliberately neglected some crucial task out of animus towards the pilot), but “fixing a helicopter’s engine in an unjust war.” Such an individual contributory action may be morally trivial on its own since the full moral gravity of an irreducibly corporate action is not present in its contributory actions.

Again, this reference to the collective action contrasts with an individual or goal-oriented collective action in which the individual or contributory action is unjustified by itself. Archer and Baker are performing the same physical behavior but Archer’s is richly morally capitalized from the start as “participation in genocide”—and his charge sheet in a court might state as much. Baker is only performing a discrete action of engine repair. The theorist is precluded from making a summary judgment about the culpability of an organizational actor like Baker but instead needs to consider his power, knowledge, and intentionality with respect to the unjust irreducibly corporate action in order to assign culpability for a contributory action. One must ask questions like the following. Does Baker have the freedom to avoid contributing to the unjust war? What does he know about the collective action? Does he intend his contribution to advance the collective action because he wants to see its fruition? How does he interpret the corporate intention of his organization?

With respect to that final question, an organization member’s actions are typically more “the organization’s” instead of their own, but organization members still have to interpret their orders and exercise discretion in the execution of their role obligations. Therefore, when we look to the individual responsibility of organization members for their contributory actions, we may have occasion to magnify the moral importance of their individual actions beyond the immediate impact of their physical behaviors. We need to take into account both the member’s individual attributes and her role responsibilities in order to discern how she occupied the role and executed the task differently than other people in her position. In other words, we should not judge a general in the same way we would a civilian urging a group of people on to vio­lence, but compare her to other generals in similar situations in order to see how she personally interpreted the corporate intention of the army and what creativity and wisdom she brought to her role. Typically, the individual actions of low-ranking organization members will not be mor­ally rich because they are relatively banal unto themselves and because there is little room for the introduction of personal creativity. Higher ranking members’ personal actions may be mor­ally weightier because there is more room for the individual’s personal moral qualities to play a role interpreting the corporate intention. Giving orders is especially significant as order-givers often have a lot of discretion to convert broad corporate intentions into specific action-guiding directives that in turn create the conditions for subordinates to engage in morally upright or morally defective actions (Skerker 2014: 220). Immoral or negligent orders make the order­giver responsible for what subordinates do pursuant to those orders.

Finally, an organization member can be individually responsible for the specific joint projects to which she contributes and/or the broader collective actions of her organization if she atyp­ically knows about the specific unjust actions and contributes to them while motivated to see their fruition. All the requirements of culpability are here met, with participatory intention to be part of a group contributing to a specific collective outcome doing the inculpating work done by individual intention in fraught individual actions. So, for example, Baker can be equally jointly responsible with other knowing members of the crew of helicopter #602 for bombing a hospital if he knows about the effects of his contributory actions and is motivated to bring about the specific unjustified action. He is also equally jointly responsible with other similarly- motivated service members if he intends to contribute to bombing a hospital but does not know that his specific individual action is currently furthering that action. Baker is also equally responsible with other knowing or similarly-motivated personnel for the entire unjust war if he knows it is unjust and is motivated to bring about its unjust ends. In these cases, the organ­izational member effectively is using the organization like a goal-oriented collective, like an instrument for his personal unjust agenda, doing whatever he can to link his efforts with others to bring about unjust ends he favors.

In conclusion, our attention is drawn to the same potential components of culpability, like power, knowledge, intention, and motive in analysis of irreducibly corporate actions as in analysis of individual actions, but the different features of irreducibly corporate and individual actions or contributions to goal-oriented collective actions indicate different horizons for determining what the individual is responsible for. A close causal connection to the morally fraught action is less important for being deemed responsible for it in goal-oriented collective action than in individual action. We are also less likely to find the requisite levels of knowledge and intention­ality to deem someone responsible for irreducibly corporate actions than for individual actions expressed in superficially similar physical behaviors. The contributor to an unjust irreducibly corporate action is potentially responsible for a much greater harm than if he committed an unjustified individual action but is also less likely than an individual actor engaging in identical physical behavior to be liable for any unjustified action.

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