In the mid-1960s I had the privilege of studying with H.D. Lewis while he was writing The Elusive Mind (Lewis 1970).

During a lunch chat about Vietnam War issues, Lewis expressed dismay at my insistence that the whole population of a nation could be held morally respon­sible for the untoward actions of the government it elected and the military fighting in its name.

Over a few more lunches he argued, or rather politely pressed, his position. I contended that ordinary language spoke in my favor. Exasperated with my recalcitrance, Lewis suggested the matter between us could be dropped if he acknowledged that in ordinary discourse we often ascribe responsibility to various types of human collectives and I accepted that such ascriptions to collectives are nothing more than colloquial shorthand devices that are always reducible to attributions of responsibility to individual humans, the members of those collectives, or at least some of them, without any remainder of moral responsibility residing in the collective as a whole. He pointed out that my countenancing any sort of irreducible collective moral respon­sibility wandered too far from the boundaries of most Western moral philosophy. None of the justly famous ethicists, Kant for example, were collectivists when it came to attributing moral responsibility. The Categorical Imperative is not collectivized in any of Kant’s formulations of it, Lewis reminded me. The moral world is exclusively the domain of flesh and blood individual human beings, so he maintained. He then quoted from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, one he later used to bolster his case in a paper he contributed to the book I edited on individual and collective responsibility (Lewis 1972). The crucial lines were: “carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die: That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one!”(Kipling 1932).

Powerful stuff²—Kant and Kipling! And H.D. Lewis! Still, I continued to point out that political theorists, sociologists, and ordinary people often characterize human experience in collective terms and not infrequently attribute what certainly looks like moral responsibility to groups and organizations qua collectivities—no divisibility, no reductions to specific individual humans implied or entailed. Lewis replied that our job as philosophers is to point out that only individual human beings with certain capacities populate the moral community. The subjects of all moral responsibility ascriptions necessarily are individual human beings. Morality does not recognize collectives or organizations. He insisted that the missteps of the collectivists in other fields must be corrected, as he had labored to do in his paper attacking the collectivist positions of some of the judges on the Nuremburg Tribunal. He also tossed in a reproach at me for paying too much attention to the Oxford clique of Ordinary Language Philosophers with whom I also was studying.

I replied that the bias favoring individualism blinds many philosophers in the Western eth­ical tradition to the crucial roles groups, collectives, organizations, and nations play in social/ political/moral affairs and devolving the responsibility for what groups do on individuals may not always capture what occurred in specific cases when something goes awry, why it occurred, and who or what group, or organization ought to be blamed for it. Even when responsibility for an untoward event has been fairly distributed among the individual participants there may remain a not insubstantial amount sticking to a collective qua collective and that will have to be ignored, swept under the mental or moral rug, if moral philosophers continue to insist on individual-centric responsibility theories. Unless we want to render moral philosophy incapable of addressing many, perhaps most, social issues and events, I argued, other kinds of entities will have to be admitted into the community morality addresses and evaluates.

I agreed with Lewis that Christian theology conceives of salvation (for Kant the reward of the summum bonum), and damnation in individualist terms, but morality, I maintained, should not be so much concerned with afterlives, despite Kipling’s warning, as about how we can manage to get along relatively successfully in this life, often in groups and very often dealing with and in organizations. He told me to read some of the latter parts of Kant’s Second Critique where I would find Kant’s argument that the immortality of the human soul is necessary if humans are to satisfy Kant’s moral perfection requirement and be rewarded with true happiness. I told him that part of the Critique never impressed me. It seemed like a backhanded sop to the utilitarians, albeit shifting the reward of happiness for doing the right thing into a distant dim future existence of one’s soul.

We agreed to disagree, and I decided to explore a different tack and approach the topic of collective responsibility from a structural and functional basis rather than focusing on arguments regarding calcified principles of responsibility championed by the ethicists that then almost unanimously favored some form of methodological individualism¹ when collectives are involved.

Two matters require a bit of clarification before sorting out collectives and when and how moral responsibility might reasonably be ascribed to at least some of them. First, membership qualifications in the community to whom responsibility ascriptions are directed should be iden­tified, if only in a rudimentary way. Second, some distinctions need to be drawn regarding the types of moral responsibility that may come into play when collections of people are morally judged, especially when events break badly.

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