The debate about shared agency and its relationship to collective responsibility has focused on two related questions: (1) Is collective responsibility non-distributive or distributive—that is, should it be attributed to the group[2] as such or to its individual members?;

and (2) If groups can be held collectively responsible, is this attribution explained by reference to the actions of the group or its individual members?

Answering these questions is often, although not uniformly,^[3] taken to depend on whether groups are genuine agents in much the same way individual persons are.

Notwithstanding the fact that commitments have received comparatively less attention than other, more central aspects of shared agency (such as what a shared intention is), they do not play a marginal role in the literature. Most notably, Margaret Gilbert (1989: 183; 2000: 23-4; 2002; 2006a: 101; 2006b; 2013; 2014; 2018) uses what she calls “joint commitments” to explain “the plural subject account of shared intention” (2014: 119).^[4] More recently, she has suggested that “a plural subject is... a set ofjointly committed persons” (2018: 180). Commitments play a central, albeit different, role in other accounts (e.g., Bratman 2014; Heim 2015; Roth 2004; Tuomela 2006; Westlund 2009; cf. Alonso 2009). Like Gilbert, Michael Bratman (2014) regards commitments as an important feature of shared agency. Unlike Gilbert, however, he takes them to play a role in shared deliberation rather than being necessary or sufficient for shared agency itself.

Although commitments are not typically used to explain collective responsibility, their puta­tive role in shared agency underscores the value of exploring the connection between the two. This task is complicated by the fact that there is no settled view of commitments, let alone the role that they play in shared agency. I thus have two aims in this chapter: (1) to identify the explicit and implicit roles that commitments play in accounts of shared agency, where “shared agency” is a catchall term that includes joint action, shared intention, collective intentionality, and other related phenomena;⁵ and (2) to determine how these accounts of commitments do (or could) inform collective responsibility.

I begin with a discussion of commitments (§13.1). I formulate a case to highlight commitments’ defining characteristics, with a special focus on how they might be fruitfully used to understand both individual and collective responsibility. In §13.2, I summarize the role of commitments in the literature on shared agency, with a particular focus on Gilbert’s and Bratman’s respective accounts. I then turn to the relationship between (moral and non-moral) commitments and backward-looking collective responsibility (§13.3).

13.1