The articles in Part II delve deeper into a variety of theoretical issues within the domain of collective responsibility.
One such issue concerns collective inaction or omission—the failure of a group to act. Should individuals who are capable of forming a group but fail to do so be responsible for the harms that that potential group could have prevented or rectified? Are bystanders responsible for not acting to prevent harms committed by a group?
Another important issue discussed in Part II is that of complicity.
Are group members complicit in the actions of the group to which they belong? How can an individual bear responsibility for what the group of which she is a part does when she has limited to no control over the conduct of that group? Pinning responsibility for what the group does on any marginally contributing individual seems to violate a basic principle of ethics that says that an individual can only be morally responsible for events within her causal reach.Other topics covered in Part II include: the possibility of group emotions such as guilt and their relation to collective responsibility, the concept of a commitment and its role in joint action and responsibility, collective obligation, and the possibility that groups are self-aware.
In Chapter 11, Gregory Mellema assumes that collectives are capable of being the bearer of moral responsibility and asks who are the moral agents that constitute such collectives and whether such individuals are complicit in the actions of the collective and actions of individuals within the collective. Although complicity and collective responsibility often intersect, they need not. Mellema argues that exploring the differences between the anatomy of a collective and the anatomy of a group of accomplices can reveal important insights about the nature of collective responsibility and the nature of complicity.
In Chapter 12, Hans Bernhard Schmid takes up the Sartrean idea of radical responsibility.
Radical responsibility is the idea that as agents, we are what we decide to do, and we are therefore—in a rather radical sense of the word—responsible for who we are. Schmid argues that radical responsibility should be understood as self-determination through pre-reflective self-awareness and that such radical responsibility applies to us jointly as well as individually. It is not just the case that each of us is radically responsible for who he or she is; rather, we, together, are collectively responsible for what we are jointly, as the teams, groups, or societies we are. Radical collective responsibility, according to Schmid, is our plural self-determination through plural pre-reflective self-awareness.In Chapter 13, Caroline Arruda explores the concept of commitment. Various accounts of shared agency appeal to commitments, either individual commitments to aid others or joint commitments to do some action. Arruda aims to identify the explicit and implicit role of commitments in shared agency and explores the ways that commitments might inform collective responsibility, highlighting the relationship between moral and non-moral commitments and forward and backward-looking responsibility.
Michael Doan, in Chapter 14, questions the use of thought experiments in discussions of collective responsibility. Beginning with an example of collective responsibility drawn from the last episode of the Seinfeld show, Doan considers the costs of focusing on certain cases rather than others. He asks: What questions about collective responsibility cannot be asked when the focus of inquiry is narrowed to cases fitting the mold? He argues that the use of fictional thought experiments in analyses of collective responsibility unhelpfully constrains our thinking. Focusing on the issue of responsibility for collective inaction, Doan proposes a different methodology and motivates it by exploring a concrete case of what he calls, collective brilliance.
In Chapter 15, Shannon Fyfe offers a revised version of Larry May’s account of shared responsibility for wrongdoing (1987, 1992) and she argues that it can help us address important problems in the domain of collective inaction: namely, failures to prevent further harm.
After setting up May’s account of shared responsibility, focusing on the features that are most relevant for the issue of shared responsibility for collective inaction, she explores the most compelling criticisms of May’s view and suggests that his view should be more focused on forward rather than backward-looking responsibility. She uses this revised version of May’s view to sketch a way to think about responsibility for collective inaction, where no specific individual or entity has the positive obligation to act.In Chapter 16, Bjorn Petersson discusses Christopher Kutz’s assumption (2001) that moral responsibility presupposes the capacity for guilt feelings. Such an assumption seems to undermine arguments for the view that groups, themselves, can be held morally responsible. Petersson explores current defenses of the possibility of collective guilt and places them within two categories, positions that preserve intuitions about the phenomenology of guilt feelings by analyzing collective guilt feelings in terms of individual experiences, and views that reject the idea that guilt feelings require a phenomenological component and attribute guilt feelings to groups themselves. Petersson argues for an approach of the first kind, which builds upon the we-mode approach to collective intentionality. He concludes that Kutz is correct in that groups cannot feel guilty, but the guilt felt by individual group members has a collective character, such that the feeling is an appropriate response to assignments of collective responsibility.
Abraham Sesshu Roth argues, in Chapter 17, that if we take collective responsibility seriously it has implications for the idea of acting for a reason. According to Roth, cases of collective responsibility help us to make sense of how it is that an individual member can be entitled to collective reasons for action, i.e. entitled to a reason had by the collective rather than by the individual alone. This entitlement makes it possible for the collective reason to be a reason for which one acts, even if one’s individual contribution makes little or no difference in the collective effort.
In Chapter 18, Ann Schwenkenbecher argues that in addition to having moral obligations as individuals to do and not do things, we have collective moral obligations. Schwenkenbecher defines collective moral obligations as those obligations we share or have in common with group members. They are moral obligations that attach to two or more agents where neither has that obligation on their own. According to Schwenkenbecher collective moral obligations can fill a conceptual gap left by cases where no individual member is obligated to do something but where collective action is obviously needed.
Michael Skerker develops, in Chapter 19, standards for assessing individual moral responsibility to group members for collective action. In some cases, these standards will result in individual member responsibility beyond what they would be responsible for if they performed the same physical behavior as a non-member. Skerker argues that structural differences between two types of groups—organizations and goal-oriented collectives—determine the baseline moral responsibility of group members for the group’s collective action. The same physical behavior can make a member of a goal-oriented collective responsible for the outcome of collective action to an equal degree with her fellow group members, whereas the typical organizational member is only responsible for her contribution to the action.
In Chapter 20, Cassie Striblen reminds us that a central concept in debates regarding the responsibility of groups is the concept of an individual. Those that deny groups can be morally responsible and those that argue that they meet the standards for moral responsibility agree on the following assumption: if groups are to be morally responsible, they must mimic individuals in particular ways. Striblen argues that a narrative understanding of individuals is particularly helpful for understanding collective moral responsibility. A narrative understanding of groups provides justification for ascriptions of certain kinds of collective responsibility, particularly for shared responsibility among members of large social groups.
Andras Szigeti offers, in Chapter 21, a critical overview of arguments for non-distributive collective responsibility—responsibility that is had by groups rather than their members—based on the discursive dilemma. The discursive dilemma looms large in the literature on group agency and is used by many to establish a divergence between group states and individual states. Szigeti tracks the various ways the discursive dilemma is used in debates regarding collective responsibility and presents possible rejoinders to these arguments by individualists who deny the possibility of non-distributive collective responsibility.
In Chapter 22, Linda Radzik discusses the moral responsibilities of bystanders. In particular, she focuses on the ways in which witnesses to wrongs can share responsibility with others. She distinguishes between (a) shared responsibility for wrongs and harms; (b) shared responsibility to provide aid; and (c) shared responsibility to enforce moral norms. According to Radzik, bystanders are not mere witnesses. Rather, they are agents with choices and ought to be held morally responsible in some cases.
References
Kutz, C. (2001) Complicity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
May, L. (1987) The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, and Corporate Rights, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
May, L. (1992) Sharing Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.