The Capacity Response to Agency Worries
The first suggestion, pursued by Bill Wringe (2010), is that the agency requirement is too strong and that one can be the subject of moral obligations merely by having the capacity for the sorts of properties associated with moral agency (cf.
Shockley (2007) and Aas (2015), though Aas takes demands on groups to be entirely dependent on moral demands on members (2015: 18); Shockley 2007). This capacity response has some initial plausibility. Central requirements for moral agency, such as self-control and reasons-responsiveness, are themselves at least in part capacity requirements, and so is the most obvious precondition for the existence of an all-things-considered obligation: that the bearer of the obligation is able to discharge it. But the suggestion faces difficult problems.The general problem is to explain why properties that are usually taken to be necessary for moral agency and moral obligations are not in fact necessary.
On certain views about the source of moral obligations, the problem is particularly stark. Consider contractualism: on standard contractualist views, agents are subject to moral norms in virtue of being parties of a hypothetical social contract. But the group of adults who happen to be on the same beach is not itself plausibly such a party in addition to its three members. Or take versions of constitutivism according to which duties have their source in constitutive aims of moral agents: the aim of rational self-determination, say. It is not obvious how the kinds of groups that we have looked at could have constitutive aims of that sort.
Of course, some will reject both contractualism and constitutivism. But the problem is raised directly by a more uncontroversial requirement on moral agency: that of self- control. It is unclear how unstructured groups can exert such control when they lack anything corresponding to a controlling self, as these are commonly understood in the literature: a practical self-conception, or a set of values, principles, or higher-order plans or preferences. The problem is also raised by standard epistemic requirements on particular obligations. Generally speaking, an agent has no obligation to respond to morally relevant factors when, for no fault of her own, she lacks any beliefs about these factors. If the sort of unstructured groups that we have looked at lack beliefs of their own, it is thus unclear how they can have any obligations. It is true, of course, that each of the three adults in Offshore Wind has beliefs about how all the children could be saved. But because, apparently for no fault of its own, the group is not yet organized such that individual beliefs are tied to the group’s decision making in any systematic way, it is unclear how these individual beliefs can be beliefs of the group.
9.4