Shared Action in War

Let us return now to shared action. I argued in section 30.2 that when we undertake a shared action, each participant takes herself to have a claim against every other participant that she does her part in the shared action, where these claims yield what the participants take to be protected reasons to so act.

If this account is correct, then causal over-determination (whether concurrent or pre­emptive) in the context of shared activity is no impediment to responsibility. Suppose many individuals together agree to assist one another in furtherance of some shared action ô which each of them hopes to promote. Though each participant’s contribution to ô is negligible, together they achieve φ, which, we can suppose, constitutes a substantial harm. On a standard, causal account of moral responsibility, any given participant is responsible at most for her con­tribution to what she causes, which by hypothesis is negligible. But given the authority-based argument for moral responsibility, any given participant will be potentially responsible for up to the sum total of what all the participants together do, provided that they are participants in shared action.

We have an argument, then, for the view that an individual acting cooperatively with others can be responsible for more than her contribution to what she causes. For example, Haque writes:

when individuals indirectly or jointly threaten to kill they are directly liable [...] In these cases, we do not kill one person to prevent another from killing; instead, we kill one person to prevent her from killing through or with others.

(Haque, 2017, p. 66)

The authority-based argument for moral responsibility can ground this view. Each soldier engaged in shared activity will end up responsible for what the other soldiers do, in virtue of the claim that each has against every other soldier that they act in ways conducive to the shared actions of which they are a part (as discussed in sections 30.2 and 30.3). This means any given soldier is morally responsible for what other soldiers do in conformity with the claims she has against them; likewise, every other soldier is morally responsible for what she does in conformity with the putative claims that they have against her.¹⁶

This authority-based argument for moral responsibility, though, might seem to prove too much when applied to the context of war. It seems to have as a consequence that each soldier is responsible not only for what she does but for what every other soldier on her side does as well. This is because each soldier might be described as participating in the shared activity in which the war itself consists. This would suggest, for example, that a private manning a traffic-control checkpoint, who personally kills no one, is responsible for all the deaths that her side causes in that war. Surely this is implausible. Indeed, Haque briefly pauses to consider the possibility that “combatants involved in a collective war effort, irrespective of their function, engage in ‘mas­sively shared agency,’ coordinated not through mutual responsiveness to each other’s intentions and actions but instead through a mutually accepted authority structure that assigns roles and integrates tasks.” Accordingly, “[t]hese combatants may be said to collectively pursue unjust war aims.” But Haque ultimately rejects this view; “only those combatants who pursue unjust war aims by directly, indirectly, or jointly posing unjust threats are morally liable to defensive killing” (Haque, 2017, p.

The authority-based argument for moral responsibility, however, does not have the absurd consequence that each soldier is responsible for the entirety of what her side does. This is because protected reasons can vary in their strength. For example, soldiers in a squad on a recon­naissance mission have authoritative claims against one another in virtue of the shared activity in which they are participating. They also have authoritative claims against other soldiers in other squads, which together compose the platoon of which they are a part, where that platoon in combination with other platoons composes a company, which together with other com­panies form a battalion, then a brigade, a division, and finally an army. And a soldier in an army has authoritative claims against other combatants in other branches of the military.

But as we telescope outward in this way, the claims the combatants have against others will typically weaken, in that the protected reasons they yield will weaken.¹⁷ Recall that a protected reason to do ô is comprised of both a first-order reason to do φ, and a second order reason to exclude from deliberation certain reasons against doing φ. The constitutive first-order reasons obviously admit of degrees; but the exclusionary reasons do so as well. They admit of degrees by way of the size of the exclusionary zone the second-order reasons set. Depending on how we specify the scalarity of the reasons the authoritative claims yield, there is room for the view that a typical soldier bears little responsibility for what the vast majority of the other combatants fighting in the war do — and yet is responsible, e.g., for what her platoon does on a mission in which she is participating.

There is another way in which the authority-based responsibility avoids the consequence that each combatant is responsible for what every other combatant does. In a hierarchically organized collective command structure, subordinates have the function of following the orders issued by their superiors, but not vice versa.

Given the account I have developed, superiors will be morally responsible for what their subordinates do in conformity with the orders they issue. This isn’t to say, though, that subordinates cannot be responsible for what their superiors do. Though subordinates lack the standing to issue specific commands to their superiors, the subordinates still have a general claim against them that they fulfill their most basic roles as superiors. That is, superiors owe it to their subordinates that they function as superiors. For example, suppose a captain, apropos of nothing, ceases acting as such; his subordinates have the standing to complain. There is, then, a kind of authority that subordinates have over their superiors, albeit quite attenuated in comparison to the authority that the superiors have over them. The upshot is that responsibility will (as we might expect) accrue at the higher echelons of command.

It might seem that when soldiers obey orders, they are not engaging in shared action, prop­erly speaking, with their superiors. After all, the soldier might be wholly unaware of the purpose of the orders she has been given, and as such cannot be described as ‘sharing an end’ with her superior. These cases seem more akin to proxy agency than shared agency, insofar as the subor­dinate is implementing the will of the superior rather than implementing what they together will. But a subordinate obeying the orders of a superior might still be described as participating in a shared action in the following sense: the soldier knows that the only way to achieve certain ends — such as accomplishing a mission, or winning a war, or protecting the country — is to defer to her superiors. Under this description, she does indeed share an end with her superiors; it so happens that the best way to help achieve that end is by deferring to them.

What about soldiers, though, who are largely alienated from those aims? They might not care whether the mission is achieved, the war is won, or the country protected. In this case, the soldier’s superior is still inculpated in what the soldier does qua soldier, given the authority­based argument for responsibility. Likewise, the soldier will still be inculpated in what her comrades do when they act their part by virtue of the claim she has — whether she exercises it or not — that they do their part accordingly.

This is, of course, just the beginning of developing an account of cooperative responsibility in war. The armed forces of technologically advanced countries are immensely complicated institutions; that complexity is imported into how warfare is organized, administrated, and executed. I have here only scratched the surface of how authority-based moral responsibility might apply to responsibility in the context of warfare. But I hope to have shown that this principle can provide war ethicists operating within a revisionist account of the morality of war with the resources for showing that an individual soldier in a war can be responsible for more than what she causes or the difference she makes. The result is that even those soldiers who contribute little or nothing to an unjust aim of which she is a part can be morally liable to be targeted. This helps dissolve the pragmatic difficulty with which we began: that of determining who is and isn’t morally liable given the revisionist account of war.

Notes

1 But see Lazar (2010).

2 See Lepora and Goodin (2013, p. 8), and Miller (2006, pp. 177—178, 181), who adopt versions of this view.

3 One might try to causally ground the claim that each soldier is responsible for what they together do in the following way. Any given soldier participates because other soldiers participate. In this respect, each soldier exerts a small, aggregable causal influence on every other soldier. (This is assuming we can make sense of degrees of causation.

4 For helpful discussion, see Shapiro (2002), Owens (2008), and Westlund (2011).

5 For helpful discussion, see Shapiro (2002, pp. 406-407) and Owens (2008).

6 See (Owens 2008, 2012) for an extended discussion of promise-making as conferring authority.

7 Gilbert uses the mutual obligation condition to criticize accounts that analyze shared activity in terms of “personal intentions” (Gilbert, 2008), such as that defended by Bratman (see below).

8 For more on the ‘bipolar normativity’ characteristic of directed obligations, see Darwall (2004). See also Roth (2004) who characterizes the obligations characteristic of shared activity in terms of “contralat­eral commitments.”

9 Of course, as a matter of morality, more deliberation would be required if the shared activity or my role in it is morally wrongful. But there would be nothing practically problematic in treating the matter as settled given that I have already made myself party to the joint commitment.

10 On Gilbert’s view, hierarchically organized shared activity would itself be established by further shared activity (Gilbert, 2008, p. 180).

11 Of course, we need a way to determine what exactly counts as ‘your part’ in the shared activity. For more on this, see the discussion of Bratman in the next section.

12 For example, if my subplan is to bake the cake with frosting, and your subplan is to bake a chocolate- flavored cake, and I have no preference about the cake’s flavor and you have no preference about frosting, then our subplans mesh. The result is the following account of shared intention. We intend to J if and only if:

1. (a) I intend that we J and (b) you intend that we J.

2. I intend that we J in accordance with and because of 1a, 1b, and the meshing subplans of 1a and 1b; you intend the same.

3. 1 and 2 are common knowledge.

13 See Scanlon (1998, p. 304). For discussion of Scanlon's principle as it relates to shared activity, see Shiffrin (2008). For discussion of mutual obligation in the context of shared action, see Roth (2004).

14 Some, in addition to Gilbert, have criticized Bratman's account on this point. See for example Roth (2004).

15 There is space for views between Gilbert's account (in which shared mutual obligations are constitutive of shared activity) and Bratman's view (in which shared activity only contingently results in mutual obligations). For example, Facundo Alonso (2009) argues that we can accommodate the normative significance of shared intention without having to claim that interpersonal obligations are constitutive of shared intention; instead, on his view, shared intentions necessarily present a basis for interpersonal obligations.

16 The authority implicit in shared action has an important feature in common with a Razian service­conception of authority: both yield protected reasons. See Raz (1979). But there are important differences. According to the service conception, soldiers are morally required to defer to their superiors only if by doing so they are more likely to do what's right than they would be if they acted on their own judgment. The deference characteristic of normative agentive functions, on the other hand, is established by the decision to participate in shared action.

17 This depends on much more than how the military is organized; for example, a particular battalion in the army might happen to work more closely with a particular Air Force wing than they do with other battalions — the strength of the authoritative claims that the involved combatants have against one another will reflect that fact. For more analysis see Bazargan (2012).

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