Responsibility for Ultimate Collective Actions in Goal-Oriented Collectives
Having discussed the difference between organizations and goal-oriented collectives, the next task is to ask if members of these groups can be individually responsible for their collective action and if the different structures of the group make a difference for member responsibility.
For example, is Archer responsible for genocide, for the murders perpetrated by the genocidaires ferried on the particular trucks he fixed, or merely for fixing some truck engines? Is Baker responsible for fixing engines (his individual action), for airstrikes (a proximate collective action), or for the war (the ultimate collective action)?We need to consider if the collective actions of organizations and goal-oriented collectives can be scaled down in such a way that the full moral weight of the collective action is present in the contributory action. I will discuss goal-oriented collectives first. The assassination of Julius Caesar is a familiar and easily imagined example of a goal-oriented collective action. I will use it as a reference for what follows. The collective action of a group of senators stabbing Caesar can be scaled down for the purpose of moral consideration to a single contributing action of one senator stabbing Caesar. We have no problem assessing each member’s culpability for the collective action when we can scale down a collective action like this one that is the aggregate of largely identical actions. A culpability standard for individual action looks at the actor’s power, knowledge, intention, and motive. Specifically, a culpability standard considers the actor’s power to plan, commit, and complete an action; his knowledge (or awareness) of his action and its likely outcome; his personal intention to commit the action; and his motive to bring about the associated end. Such a standard finds sufficient material to analyze in the person of each senator to deem him culpable for the assassination.
We come to the same conclusion of culpability for assassination whether we analyze a senator acting in concert with others or a senator assassinating Caesar on his own. Each Roman senator voluntarily performs a physical action in concert with others’ identical performances—an individual action sufficient on its own to kill Caesar—fully aware that stabbing can lead to death; intending to stab him; and hoping he dies as a result.It is important to note for what follows, that it is not the case that each senator would be culpable for assassination only in the event that each senator’s contributory action was a lethal blow. Due to the nature of the collective action, each conspiring senator is culpable for murder even if his contributory was a non-lethal action, either for it being a non-lethal stabbing or it not being an act of violence at all. Had one of the conspirators acted alone in these cases, he would be culpable for assault, attempted assassination, or no crime at all. Yet operating as part of a cabal, he is culpable for assassination even if his sword thrust only grazed the dictator or if he only smuggled the swords into the Senate since he knowingly and intentionally joined a group that intended to kill Caesar and which did kill Caesar. While the case is intuitively clearer when the constituent physical behaviors are identical, culpability is equally shared even when members contribute diverse physical behaviors to the collective end.1 When a person who wishes to achieve an outcome that is only possible through group cooperation knowingly joins a group expressly dedicated to the singular achievement of that end, he is using that group as a kind of instrument to achieve an end he values. Other group members act with him and in his name even when he is not directly contributing to a joint project since they would not be acting but for the existence of the group and the contributions of all its members. He should thereby be held responsible for everything the group does that is in line with the features that commended themselves to his membership—even if he did not know about the specific joint action in question (Kutz 2000: 122, 144, 155, 157; Bazargan 2013: 124; Narveson 2002: 191-2; Feinberg 1991: 62; Mellema 2006: 171; Runciman 2003: 47; Sadler 2006: 139; Fain 1972: 80).
Let us return to our thought experiment involving the mechanics.
Archer wants to destroy the hated ethnic group; joins a militia he knows is bent on that end; and intends to fix engines as a contributory action furthering genocide. He does not necessarily know where the truck he fixes will go tomorrow, but knows it will serve the militia’s purpose. To anticipate the argument to follow, Archer cannot claim to be ignorant of his group’s actions in the way that someone in a large organization can reasonably claim ignorance of his group’s action. Whereas an organization like a corporation or military may be engaged in activities broadly characterized as “generating profits” or “serving the state,” the size, complexity, and compartmentalization of organizations blind most participants to the specific collective actions the organization performs. The breadth of the organization’s general mission also prevents the theorist from assuming that participants’ motives for contributing their work product is morally dubious since the broad corporate mission does not have the obvious negative moral status like that of a more narrowly-tailored group like a genocidal militia. It thus seems important to follow Isaacs in limiting a charge of complicity to entrants/recruits to goal-oriented collectives, excluding entrants/recruits to organizations (cf Kutz 2000: 157; Bazargan 2013: 187).Is Archer more or less responsible for genocide than the other members of the militia? It may be descriptively helpful to categorize different types of complicity within a group (e.g. recruiter, facilitator, encourager, etc.) (Mellema 2006). Yet I think it is appropriate to assign equal moral responsibility to all causal contributors rather than identify different levels of responsibility with different job descriptions in a goal-oriented collective. Responsibility for the collective action of a goal-oriented collective can be assigned in this way because all the traditional markers of culpability for individual immoral action are met on the part of each group member.
While the behavioral aspect of their contributory action may be morally trivial unto itself, the participant’s motive to bring about the unjust collective action and participatory intention to do anything to support the group’s characteristic activity makes the participant “the inclusive author of the group’s actions” (Bazargan, quoting Kutz 2013: 186). Thus, his motive and participatory intention change how we should identify Archer’s action, from “fixing the engine” to “participating in genocide.” Not only does the collective action depend on Archer’s material contribution, but Archer is only fixing engines, rather than doing something more obviously problematic, because he volunteered to do whatever he was best suited to do in order to contribute to the end he shared with others. He joined the militia because he wanted to contribute to its characteristic work of genocide. Had there been enough mechanics, he might have been handed a machete and told to get after it. Archer is equally morally responsible for genocide and can be punished with an equal sentence alongside those who directly killed people.An exception to this argument about equal responsibility would occur in a scenario where a goal-oriented collective lost some of the transparency that gives it the moral character highlighted here. Imagine a group is formed to support a political candidate: they hand out flyers, make phone calls in his support, etc. A faction within that group begins to engage in violent actions on behalf of the candidate. A member of the group who, reasonably, really had no idea what some of the members were doing would not be responsible for the political violence. It is conceivable that a goal-oriented collective might take on more of the aspects of an organization in this way.
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