Shared Responsibility for Failing to Protect
I turn now to two case studies of potential failures to protect, one involving shared responsibility among individuals, and one involving a more complicated assessment of various sorts of entities that could be found to share responsibility.
Both situations involve familiar harms that would invoke the need for collective action to prevent future harm. Given that I have argued for a forward-looking version of May’s view that focuses on guilt rather than shame, each situation involves an ongoing harm which could potentially be stopped through collective action.Flooded Community: A natural disaster has endangered and stranded nearly all of the inhabitants of a particular waterfront community. Those who have survived thus far are trapped in areas of rising water and will not survive without a swift, coordinated rescue effort. A neighboring community survived relatively unscathed, and individual members of the neighboring community have the boats and other resources necessary to rescue their trapped neighbors. However, many individual members of the community would have to work together in order to prevent the imminent loss of life in the flooded community.
Flooded Community is somewhat similar to the Famine example explained in section 15.1. There is an ongoing crisis, during which harm has already occurred. The bystanders have no preexisting, special obligation toward the persons who are suffering, although they appear to be uniquely situated to help. There may or may not be time for the bystanders to organize themselves into a collective, make decisions, and prevent future harm, but it seems likely that at least some of the trapped neighbors could survive until the bystanders were able to collectively organize. Notable differences include the fact that the entities implicated by the potential responsibility for collective inaction are individual persons, not nation-states or large aid organizations, and the fact that the crisis is occurring in the community rather than on the other side of the world.
The latter difference should not matter under May’s account, since the relevant question of responsibility is about whether future harm could be prevented and does not rely on geographic proximity, other than that proximity might make one uniquely situated to assist. The former difference might matter, since on May’s account a group can be responsible for omissions if it has indicated in the past a willingness to help in similar instances, and we can assume that international aid organizations would be expected to act in the face of famine, if not other nations. But May would likely argue that even if the community does not constitute a group already, if the individual members of the community could organize themselves in order to prevent harm to the trapped persons, they would share some responsibility if they failed to do so.Thus, May would argue that the community’s failure to organize to prevent harm to the flooded community should constitute collective inaction for which the individual members of the community would share responsibility, based on their personal abilities, and the appropriate reactive attitude for this failure would be shame. The result of this collective inaction would be that suffering was not prevented, and the individuals would be blamed for being the “kinds of people” who do not intervene to prevent suffering. The community and its individual members might take this opportunity to self-reflect, and change their attitudes so that they would be the kinds of people who would make different choices should a similar situation arise in the future.
On the revised version of May’s account, the standard for what is morally required is not significantly changed, but the motivation for each individual to meet her obligation is reshaped. The individual community members would be focused on their actions, rather than their character, and on their obligation to ensure that a certain state of affairs materializes, if that is possible. In this case, it would be the state of affairs in which the greatest number of individuals are rescued from the rising water and survive.
Individual community members would not be focused on what a backwards-looking assessment of their actions says about them; rather, they would see the flooded community as imposing a collective obligation on their own community, and derivative individual obligations on each member of the community. The prospect of guilt would be more likely to motivate each individual to act, rather than permitting certain individuals to eschew their responsibilities to the flooded community and leave the collective obligation to prevent harm on a smaller number of their fellow community members. The potential for shame might be an extra motivator for some individuals, but it would not be sufficient to obligate the individual community members to participate in the rescue effort. Thus, it seems more likely under the revised version that an outcome with fewer deaths is achieved for the flooded community.Now, let’s look at one final case with several alternative variables to see how they are impacted by the revised account of shared responsibility:
War-Plagued Nation: A small nation is being unjustifiably attacked by a neighboring, much larger nation. The nation cannot stop the assault and it has already sustained numerous casualties. No one nation’s army can stop the aggression, but presumably, the joint efforts of several nations and/or international organizations could cause the aggressive nation to cease its military operations in the small nation.
War-Plagued Nation is also similar to Famine in several respects. There is an ongoing crisis, during which significant harm has already occurred. Because the harm is ongoing, there is time for the putative group members to organize themselves into a collective, make decisions, and prevent future harm. The putative group members are themselves entities made up of individuals, thus each entity has its own organizational and decision-making structure. The putative group members may also be a part of an international organization that has some measures in place for decision-making with respect to similar crises, but these structures are notoriously ineffective.
Some notable differences include the fact that the entities may have indicated a willingness (or even obligation) to assist with similar harms in the past, thus creating a special obligation to intervene. Depending on the other potential interveners, they may also be uniquely situated to assist. However, the entities implicated by the potential responsibility for collective inaction would likely risk the lives of individual persons in order to prevent future harm in the small nation. Given this risk, and absent a special obligation, May would likely argue that the entities should not be responsible for collective inaction. His account of shared responsibility is premised on the idea that intervention risks little or no harm to the individual actor. But if there is a special obligation, May’s account of shared responsibility could be used to blame the entities that make up a putative group for failing to intervene in the small nation.3If War-Plagued Nation constitutes an instance of collective inaction, May’s account would blame the group for failing to intervene (especially if the group had a special obligation toward the small nation), or the putative group members for failing to organize to intervene in the small nation. Each entity would be partially blamed, based on its ability to contribute to the collective effort. The blame would manifest as a version of shame in which each entity was identified as a failure, or defective entity, for not intervening to prevent harm when the harm could have been prevented. The result of this collective inaction would be that suffering was not prevented, and the various entities might establish different values or policies to ensure that this sort of inaction did not happen in the future, or it might not be affected at all by the same character criticism that would impact an individual.
Instances of potential collective inaction that involve coordination between groups are an even clearer indicator of the need for a forward-looking view of shared responsibility.
Again, to the extent that we are concerned with generating better states of affairs, we should be concerned with shared responsibility in the forward-looking sense, and assuming that the larger nation can be stopped from its aggression, a better state of affairs will be achieved by collective action (even if, to recognize the real life complexity of the situation, the group makes a decision to “act” but in a way other than through military intervention). Backward-looking responsibility for failures to intervene incentivizes waiting to see what happens, and provides an opportunity to rely on epistemic gaps to justify the reasons for inaction. Forward-looking responsibility encourages thoughtful weighing of information and options, as a collaborative inquiry among putative group members, but generates an obligation to avoid the worst outcomes, which in this case seem to be the continuation of the unwarranted violence.Entities like international organizations and nation states are perhaps even less likely than individual persons to have their behavior changed by something akin to shame. These sorts of entities do not possess character traits, even if we find it possible to label organizations as “selfish” or “generous.” International organizations are aimed at achieving certain goals and are likely only concerned with perception insofar as negative perception prevents them from achieving their goals. Nation states may be slightly more influenced by external (or even internal) criticism of the nature of national identity, but also only insofar as it prevents the nation state from achieving its domestic and international goals. Given the breadth and scope of international engagement, is unlikely that any one foreign policy decision would cause the rest of the global community to cease interactions with a particular nation state due to its “poor character.” The potential for guilt, as a part of the forward-looking obligation to prevent worse states of affairs in a certain community and in the world overall, should encourage collective action at the outset.
We have seen how collective responsibility is limited to holding a collective responsible as a unit, when there are situations in which we want to hold individuals each partially responsible for harm caused, at least in part, by a collective action or failure to act. Larry May’s influential account of shared responsibility provides many tools to do so, but as I have shown, it needs to be revised in order to properly obligate and motivate individuals and entities alike. There are plenty of cases in which collective action can prevent harm on a small scale, but it seems that a theory of shared responsibility should also be able to address some of the largest-scale problems we face today, such as inter-state violence, climate change, and famine. These are issues that have thus far proven intractable, in part because they require such large-scale coordination between states and between individuals, and in part because we don’t necessarily know how to achieve the best solutions to these problems, but also because there are not positive, individualized obligations to intervene to prevent harm. I have argued that we need a forward-looking view of shared responsibility that directs each of us to act so as to avoid certain bad states of affairs, if not pursue certain good states of affairs.
Notes
1 Assuming collective responsibility is a possibility, corporations seem to be clear examples of the kinds of entities that could be held collectively responsible for harm.
2 In this example, I assume that there were voluntary, intentional actions taken on the part of the individuals in the mob. I do not give an overall assessment of the morality of protesting police brutality, even to the point of property destruction.
3 I only claim that May’s account could be used to make this argument, although I do not think he himself would use it this way, given what he has written elsewhere about war and its potential to ever achieve a “certain state of affairs” i.e. a state of affairs that we know will contain less preventable harm than the alternatives.
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