Structured and Unstructured Collectives and Collective Duties

Corporations and other highly structured organizations are moral agents due to their collective intentional structures that are expressed through their policies, decision-making procedures, and actions (Erskine 2003; French 1979; 1984; Isaacs 2011; Pettit 2007; Tollefsen 2015).

Philosophers such as Margaret Gilbert (1990), Michael Bratman (1999), Christopher Kutz (2000), Seumas Miller (2001), and Raimo Tuomela (2007), among many significant others, have further expanded the class of collective agents beyond highly structured corporate agents, each in their own way, to include collectivities considered to be agents in virtue of their members’ commitments to a joint goal, or their shared, collective or participatory intentions toward a joint or shared goal aimed at a collective act.

Collective or group agents are subject to moral duties just as individuals are. But not all col­lectivities will meet the criteria necessary for the group to be deemed sufficiently organized or to hold the necessary attitudes and capacities to be considered an agent. Consider again a group of bystanders witnessing a car accident where a victim remains trapped; a group of states that have unwillingly received an influx of refugees at their borders; and all of humanity who has the capacity to bring an end to extreme global poverty. None of these collectivities is a collective agent, and claiming that these unstructured groups have moral obligations seems to run afoul of the agency condition. Nonetheless, it is common to think that these collectivities—what some consider to only be random groups—have certain obligations towards the accident victim, the refugees, and the impoverished, respectively; and that accordingly, they ought to get together, develop a plan to respond, and act on it.

The question is how we should understand the claim that these unstructured (non-agent) groups and their individual members have a collective duty. Is the collective duty not really a duty of a collective, but merely an aggregate of the duties of the individuals, and thus fully reducible to individual obligation? Is it a duty of the individuals jointly, such that the duty is not entirely reducible to the individual obligations of the individual members? Or is it the duty of a collective entity or group, distinct in a significant way from the duties of the individual members? I will consider each of these ways of understanding collective duties (and their duty­bearers) in unstructured group contexts, highlighting some of the more prominent challenges and criticisms that have been raised against each (Schwenkenbecher 2018).

The first view is a reductive individualistic view (hereafter, simply the individualistic view) of collective duty, because it views the duty of a collectivity simply as the duties of the individual members to do something (individually) themselves (Collins 2013; Lawford-Smith 2012). So, in the case of the car accident, if we say the bystanders have a duty to rescue the trapped victim, what we are saying is that each of the bystanders has a duty to do their part in the action required for the rescue. This may entail helping to organize the group so they can act effect­ively together and participate in the rescue effort by each doing one’s part. In the case of global poverty, it may entail working with others to form effective group agents and make individual contributions toward the collective goal of ending poverty.

One strength of the individualistic view is that it isn’t vulnerable to the agency objection. Even though the collectivity is unstructured and isn’t a collective agent, there is no denying that each of the individual bystanders is an agent. Given that the individualist does not posit the existence of any group entity, the demands are placed solely on the individuals and the ana­lysis is kept at the level of individual duties. However, the individualist is left to explain what is demanded of each individual bystander and how these individual obligations come about.

Assuming that no individual bystander has the capacity to rescue the person trapped in the car, while also respecting the capacity condition, it would follow that no individual has a duty to rescue the victim. But this leads to an apparent weakness of the individualistic view: namely, contrary to what we might expect, there is no entity that has a duty to rescue the victim, even if the group of bystanders can easily do so by working together. The only candidate for the duty to rescue is an agent that has the capacity to carry it out, but here, there is no such agent. The individualist will only say that there are a number of individual agents that have individual duties to contribute their parts.

Another problem for the individualistic view arises out of the conditional nature of the individual obligations. That is, if we assume that coordinated or collective action is required to effect the rescue and that an individual’s action in isolation won’t have any effect, individuals would only have duties to do their parts in the rescue if the other bystanders do their parts. I can hold up one end of a heavy crowbar to try to pry open the doors of the car, but unless someone else picks up the other end, there is no compelling reason for me to do so. The indi­vidualist could not say that the two of us are still obligated to act together to rescue. Thus, when the collective duty is fully reducible to a series of conditional individual duties, we are unable to capture the idea that the bystanders have a duty to aid, and that their resulting duty remains even when some do not participate. It may very well turn out that there is nothing effective that the remaining individuals can do, and so, after communicating their readiness and trying to pursue other potentially effective avenues, there is nothing they can do that will help.

The next two views I consider are both non-reductive, and so each, in its own way, aims to capture the idea that there is more to a collective obligation than an aggregation of individual duties. I’ll first consider the view that understands the collective duty as a joint duty that the individuals have to perform together. Then, I’ll turn to the view that understands the collective duty as a collective duty of a group qua group. On these views, the individual duty to contribute to the collective goal arises from and is explained by the joint or collective obligation (Cripps 2013; Erskine 2003; Igneski 2018; Schwenkenbecher 2014; Wringe 2005).

A plausible way of understanding the obligation of the bystanders or the UN member states is as a joint duty that they (i.e., the bystanders and the member states) have to perform an action (or actions) together. The idea is that when a group of individuals, jointly, has the capacity to perform a morally mandatory action (such as save an accident victim), they have a joint duty to do so. On this view, the collective duty isn’t fully reducible to a series of individual duties to do one’s part, but rather, the individuals jointly have a collective obligation; that is, the collective obligation is a joint obligation or, as it is sometimes put, a shared obligation (Bjornsson 2014; List and Pettit 2006; Pinkert 2014; Schwenkenbecher 2014). We can also refer to this view as a “non-reductive individualistic” view. “Non-reductive” because individuals don’t just act indi­vidually toward the shared goal, but “act with the belief that others contribute to that same goal and with the intention to jointly perform an action” (Schwenkenbecher 2014: 62); and “indi­vidualistic” because even though the duty is shared, it falls only onto individuals.

When a group of individuals acts jointly, there is something that they do together, apart from their individual actions, an action that they together perform (Pettit and Schweikard 2006: 21). And when a group of individuals has an obligation to act jointly, there is something that they have an obligation to do together, apart from their individual obligations—an action that they together are obligated to perform. This view is able to capture the common intuition that when there is a collective duty, it will typically target a collective action, an action beyond the reach of any individual agent.

In recent work, Anne Schwenkenbecher develops the joint duty view, giving the following proposal: a plurality of agents a, b, and c have a collective moral obligation if

(1) There exists a specific morally significant joint-necessity problem P, such that agents a, b, and c can collectively, but not individually, address P.

(2) Conscientious moral deliberation leads all of them (or a sufficiently large sub-set of them) to believe that some collectively available option O is morally optimal with regard to P.

(3) A, b, and c (or a sufficiently large sub-set of them) are in a position to determine individual (or joint) strategies to realize O and to achieve P.

(2018: 19)

One advantage of the joint duty account is that it gives us a more intuitively appealing way of conceiving of the content of the collective duty than did the individualistic account. Where the individualist was unable to say that, in the case of a failure to act, a duty to rescue was violated (instead only being able to say that individual persons failed to do their individual parts), on the joint duty account, the individuals jointly have a duty to rescue and if they fail to act jointly to rescue, they violate their collective duty. The “they” here are the individuals jointly.

Another advantage of the joint duty account is that it is not vulnerable to the agency objection because the individual participants are all agents. However, it is important to note that unlike the individualist who reduces the collective duty into a series of individual duties, on the joint duty view, the collective duty is not simply reducible to an aggregation of indi­vidual obligations, insofar as there is a collective duty in which the group of individuals shares. That said, there is no talk of the duty of groups as such, over and above the duty of the indi­vidual participants. As Schwenkenbecher puts it: “talking of ‘groups’ seems quite superfluous” (2018: 118).

The individualist will think that the joint duty account goes too far in the collectivist dir­ection when it resists reducing collective obligations to a collection of individual obligations. But the collectivist will question whether conceiving of responsibility or obligation as a joint duty of the individual participants is able to sufficiently explain how it is that the individuals have obligations without recognizing a distinct and prior collective obligation from which they are derived.

More robustly collectivist accounts take the duty-bearer of the collective obligation to be a collective entity.Virginia Held has argued that an unstructured group, or what she calls a “random collection,” can be held morally responsible for “its failure to act as a group” (1970: 477). Her central example is of a group of passengers on a train that fails to prevent a murder when they can easily have done so. For Held, a random collection of individuals is responsible for failing to act “when the action called for in a given situation is obvious to the reasonable person and when the expected outcome of the action is clearly favorable” (1970: 478). Though reasoning about backward-looking responsibility, if we extend her claims to forward-looking responsibility or obligation, we would say that an unstructured group can have an obligation to perform an act.

Bill Wringe, with his more expansive understanding of what unstructured collectivities can hold duties, has argued that humanity, as a whole, is a global collective with a collective obligation (2014). On his account, the obligations of individual human beings are derived by and explained by the prior obligations of the collective of which they are a part (Wringe 2010). Applying this interpretation to the scenario we have been considering: it is the group “bystanders witnessing the accident” that holds an obligation to rescue the trapped victim, and each bystander has a derivative individual obligation to do her part in the collective response.

Even if a collectivist were to consider humanity to be a global collective, this does not imply that she is taking the view that humanity is an agent (say, in light of its internal intentional structure or collective decision-procedure) as surely it is not (at least not before they commit to a collective goal and pursue it together). It is open to the collectivist to view the unstruc­tured collective as a putative or potential collective agent, either along the lines of a potential goal-oriented collective or, in some instances, a potential highly structured organization. Either way, the main claim is that we have good normative and explanatory reasons to recognize two distinct levels of obligation—the collective and the individual—such that there is a collective obligation that falls on the collectivity, and also a derivative individual obligation that falls on the individual members.

The collectivist view is intuitively appealing because it captures the idea that there is a col­lective or group that has a duty to rescue, and that if the individual members fail to act, they— together, as a group—violate the duty to rescue. Of course, if the group under consideration was already a group agent there would be no worry. But when the collective is a group of bystanders or all of humanity, we must consider how it fares against the agency objection.

There are a few different ways one might respond to the agency worry. Wringe has one response: we should distinguish between the entity to which the obligation is addressed and the entity that is the duty-bearer. Doing so allows us to say that we address all of humanity (as a group) with the duty to end global poverty and that individual persons—who have the requisite agency to bear duties—are the duty-bearers. Thus, on his view, potential agents that are currently unstructured collectivities can be the subjects of actual duties (Wringe 2010; 2014).

Another approach is to attribute the collective obligation to a putative collective agent instead. Putative groups are groups “in which people are sometimes capable of acting in con­cert but in which no formal organization exists” (May 1992: 109). Larry May claims that if a putative group participates in harm through inaction, the members share responsibility, but he follows Held by endorsing an exception for cases of putative groups that could have developed a sufficient structure in time to avoid inaction (Id.). In this latter case, collective responsibility can attach to the putative group.⁴

In order to avoid the difficulties of a view that attributes actual obligations to putative agents, Isaacs (2011) modifies May’s view and attributes putative collective obligations to putative collective agents. For example, the member states of the UN may not currently con­stitute a group agent, but we can consider them as a putative agent; and, once the members take the necessary steps, they will become an actual agent. This route avoids the agency objec­tion rather than responding to it, since it doesn’t dispute that it is only collective agents that have actual obligations. The challenge with this interpretation is then to show how it is that individual members get actual obligations. Deriving actual individual obligations from actual collective obligations is one thing, but deriving actual individual obligations from putative collective obligations is tricky. And it seems that this is exactly what is required in order to explain why individuals have obligations to form actual collectives that can be the bearers of actual duties.

I want to suggest that in the cases of the bystanders, the EU, and the UN member states, all instances where it is reasonable to hold that the collectivity has the capacity to meet a morally mandatory goal, the collectivity has an actual collective duty to do so. We would only say that an unstructured group has the capacity to act in some way if it has the capacity, through the actions of its members, to become sufficiently organized to so act. On this view, we would say that the collectivity currently has mediated capacity and once its members take the necessary steps (such as coordinating and collectivizing), they will have immediate capacity (Igneski 2018; Pinkert 2014). The collective’s mediated capacity gives individual members (who are agents) reason to act to take the necessary steps required for the group to become an effective collective agent.

Take humanity as an example. We do not think that humanity is an agent, nor that it has the immediate capacity to end poverty. However (and I will assume that this is true), there is good evidence to think that if human beings were to take steps to coordinate and organize (some­thing I’m also assuming here that they have the capacity to do), they could together, as a group, effectively act to end poverty. Moreover, human beings can reasonably be expected to know that there are steps that they can take to achieve this goal. This gives humanity an actual duty to end poverty and gives human beings individual duties to take the necessary steps to becoming an effective collective agent.

Recall my earlier reference to the UN General Secretary’s assertion that we are the first gen­eration in human history with the capacity to end poverty. Unless we have reason to dispute this assertion or to think that we are unable to organize ourselves to act effectively, we can say it follows that humanity has an obligation to end poverty. Notice that we could not have said this 200 years ago, as 200 years ago, humanity did not even have the mediated capacity to end poverty, given how widespread poverty was and given the lack of capacity for global commu­nication and coordination.

This response challenges the agency condition because it holds that to have a moral obliga­tion it is sufficient that one is a potential agent. But it is important to reiterate that not just any potential agent can bear an obligation. An unstructured group, which is composed of a plurality of individual agents, can only be the subject of moral obligations if it has the capacity to act to meet a morally mandatory goal, even if intervening steps must first be taken by the individuals that compose the group to enhance the group’s capacity to take immediate action. It is the very fact that the group as such is capable (even in a mediated sense) that obligates the individuals to take the intervening steps in the first place.

Wringe makes a similar point when he says “it seems plausible that if a collective is (merely) a potential agent, it is capable of doing any of the things which it would have the capacity to do if it were appropriately organized” (Wringe 2014: 176). As long as we consider the unstruc­tured group to have the capacity to act intentionally, even if it is a mediated capacity, we should consider it to have sufficient capacity and agency (initially in a potential state) to be the bearer of moral duties.

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