The chapters in Part I discuss some of the central debates and theories in the area of collective responsibility including whether collective responsibility should be understood distributively, as attributions of responsibility to group members or non-distributively,
as attributions to groups themselves; whether a group, such as a corporation, could meet the conditions for moral agency; and whether moral obligations are obligations of individuals only or whether they can be shared among people or had by groups themselves.
In Chapter 1, Peter French, well known for his work defending the view that corporations are moral agents, begins his contribution with a discussion of the prerequisites for membership in the moral community. According to French moral competency or reasons responsiveness is necessary for membership in the moral community and he argues that certain groups, particularly corporate organizations, may demonstrate the requisite mechanisms for reasons responsiveness. He goes on to offer a helpful taxonomy of collective-types, types of collective responsibility, and ends with a discussion of the theory of corporate responsibility he has developed over the last several decades.
In Chapter 2, Margaret Gilbert and Maura Priest provide an overview of Gilbert’s contributions to debates regarding collective moral responsibility. Gilbert’s On Social Facts (1989) is a foundational text in the area of collective intentionality and responsibility. According to Gilbert social groups and social phenomenon such as collective action can be understood in terms of a joint commitment formed by individuals to act as a body or single unit. Gilbert’s work can be understood as offering an anti-individualistic account of collective responsibility. In this chapter, the authors further elucidate Gilbert’s joint commitment account, the theory of collective blameworthiness that results from it, and its implications, if any, for the blameworthiness of members of the relevant collective. Further, they provide an argument for the intelligibility of a member’s feeling guilt over what her group has done.
In Chapter 3, Seumas Miller begins by distinguishing three kinds of theories of collective moral responsibility.
The first of these conceives of collective moral responsibility as a convenient way of referring to what is in fact simply an aggregate of individual responsibilities. He refers to this account as the atomistic account. The second holds that it is the group or collective itself that is the bearer of moral responsibility. He refers to this view as the collectivist account. The third theory is a relational account in which collective moral responsibility is a form of joint moral responsibility (JMR); this is the account developed by Miller elsewhere (Miller 2001b; Miller 2006). JMR contrasts with collectivist accounts since the only bearers of moral responsibility are individual human persons (or like creatures) and not collective entities per se. However, JMR also contrasts with atomistic accounts since on this third view collective moral responsibility is to be understood in relational terms; joint responsibility is not analyzable into a mere aggregate of individual responsibilities. Miller further develops the JMR in this chapter and shows how JMR might accommodate at least some of the central categories of collective omissions and morally significant diachronic institutional action.In Chapter 4, Carol Rovane explores the concept of self-constitution and offers a distinction between collective agency and group agency. When an agent constitutes itself, it establishes boundaries within which it thinks and acts as a single unified subject. The boundaries of an agent, according to Rovane, are the bounds of their deliberative point of view. In setting these boundaries an agent not only sets metaphysical boundaries (determining the self) but also normative ones, setting the boundaries of responsibility. Building on her prior work, Rovane argues that although agency is often realized within the boundaries of a single human life, it can also be realized by multiple human lives. When this happens, there is a genuine individual that constitutes itselfby thinking and acting from its own rational point of view.
This is group agency. It is different from collective agency in which multiple humans coordinate their agency, by thinking and acting from their distinct points of view. This distinction makes a difference for issues of responsibility. Rovane argues that the human constitutions of a group agent cannot take responsibility for what the group agent does, as they do not have a first personal relation to what the group does. However, collective agency does not involve an individual agent in its own right and therefore the individual humans who comprise the collective must take responsibility for the outcomes of their shared agency.In Chapter 5, Raimo Tuomela and Pekka Makela also offer a distributed understanding of collective responsibility. On their view, the “truthmaker” of a collective attribution of moral responsibility is the moral responsibility borne by the individual members, qua members, of the group. Unlike Ludwig in the next chapter, however, Tuomela and Makela acknowledge that certain groups, such as institutions, can act. Accordingly, they allow for cases in which the individual responsibility is held jointly or ascribed jointly to members of the group acting qua members of the group. The group members are together and interdependently responsible for the action.
In Chapter 6, Kirk Ludwig provides a defense of an individualistic account of collective responsibility. He motivates his view by the following claim: if there is no link between collective moral responsibility and individual moral responsibility then collective moral responsibility becomes detached from pressures to alter collective behavior. If individual members are not moved to change their behavior because they are not individually responsible, there is no normative mechanism by which holding collectives morally responsible can induce relevant change. “Attributions of collective moral responsibility will become idle.” He then goes on to argue against that, because groups are not agents, they cannot be moral agents and, therefore, cannot be held morally responsible.
Given that we cannot let moral responsibility become detached from a mechanism by which the behavior on the basis of which it is attributed can be changed, Ludwig presents a view he calls the factor model of collective moral responsibility: Any claim that a group is morally responsible for something must be resolved into a distribution of moral responsibility to its members, with none left over for the group per se.In Chapter 7, David Copp argues that there is nothing metaphysically or morally problematic in the idea that institutional entities, such as corporations, are capable of intentional action, and that they can have moral obligations and bear moral responsibility. The analogy between individual human agents and institutions is strong enough to establish that institutions act. At least on one conception of the point of morality, and on the normative theory it supports, we can explain how institutional entities can have moral obligations. According to Copp, this means that facts about the obligations or responsibility of institutional entities are grounded in the same kinds of facts that ground the obligations or responsibility of relevant individuals.
In Chapter 8, Kendy M. Hess argues that theories of corporate or group agency often focus on certain aspects of it to the exclusion of others. For instance, the literature on corporate agency often focuses on the mechanism by which decisions are made in a corporation. According to Hess, a broader and richer conception of corporate agency is required and must appeal to different mechanisms and different group members. According to Hess, this also has implications for understanding the responsibility of a corporation and the responsibility of its members.
In Chapter 9, Gunnar Bjornsson discusses what he calls the agency challenge. Often, no individual member of a group had control over the outcome for which they are blamed, and no individual member can make a difference as to whether the group meets its obligation.
This makes it difficult to understand group attributions of obligation or responsibility in terms of individual blameworthiness and obligations. But the groups themselves often fall short of standard conditions of moral agency. They seem to lack many properties normally associated with agenthood. Finding the agency responsible is a challenge. Bjornsson details some cases where it is natural to attribute obligations or blameworthiness to groups that cannot be plausibly attributed to their individual members, and discusses replies, problems, and prospects for resolving the agency challenging. According to Bjornsson, the most promising replies understand group obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents.In Chapter 10, Olle Blomberg and Frank Hindriks explore the difference between acting together (which involves shared intention) and strategic cooperation (which does not involve shared intention). According to Blomberg and Hindriks, the degree to which the participants in a shared intentional wrongdoing are blameworthy is normally higher than when agents bring about the same wrong as a result of strategic interaction. This might be explained by the fact that shared intentions cause intended outcomes in a more robust manner than the intentions involved in strategic interaction. However, Blomberg and Hindriks argue that this isn’t an adequate explanation. Rather, what explains the higher degree of collective blameworthiness in the case of acting together is a difference in the quality of will. When we share intentions, we are implicated in each other’s will, whereas in strategic interactions we are not, and degrees of blameworthiness depend on the quality of will an agent displays in actions.