By the term “collective responsibility,” I will understand a collective consisting of two or more human moral agents that bears moral responsibility for an outcome that consists of a state of affairs.
Many have raised doubts about whether a collective can bear moral responsibility for what happens, and many have flat-out rejected the possibility of collective or group responsibility.
I have discussed elsewhere the arguments of those raising these doubts at considerable length, and in this chapter, I will simply assume that collectives are capable of bearing moral responsibility (although I will refer to some of these arguments in passing).In this chapter, I will focus upon the anatomy of collectives that are morally responsible for what happens. Who exactly are the individual moral agents that constitute collectives capable of bearing moral responsibility? Additionally, I will raise the parallel question concerning complicity: who exactly are the individual moral agents who are complicit in the actions of another? In some instances, a group of individual moral agents can both constitute a collective responsible for an outcome and have its members be complicit in the actions of a principal actor. In other instances, this will not be the case. Either the individuals that constitute a collective responsible for an outcome fail to qualify as accomplices, or the accomplices in the actions of another fail to constitute a collective responsible for an outcome. This is hardly a surprising conclusion in and of itself, but I believe that examining the differences between the anatomy of a collective and the anatomy of a group of accomplices can shed light both on the nature of collective responsibility and the nature of complicity.
In the first section, I present some background material relating to the topic of complicity. Section 11.2 analyzes the relationship between complicity and moral responsibility. Section 11.3 presents Kwame Anthony Appiahs notion of “moral taint,” and its significance relative to a theoretical understanding of complicity. Section 11.4 lays out some basic features of the concept of collective responsibility. Finally, section 11.5 describes the intersection of complicity and collective responsibility: under what conditions are moral agents who are complicit in another’s actions also collectively responsibility for the outcome of these actions?
11.1
More on the topic By the term “collective responsibility,” I will understand a collective consisting of two or more human moral agents that bears moral responsibility for an outcome that consists of a state of affairs.:
- By the term “collective responsibility,” I will understand a collective consisting of two or more human moral agents that bears moral responsibility for an outcome that consists of a state of affairs.
- What are the implications for agency — and in particular, the idea of acting for reasons — if we are to take seriously the notion of collective responsibility?
- MORAL RULES
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- The Pragmatics of Corporate Moral Responsibility
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- 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,
- Collective Responsibility: Agency Worries
- THE LESSON OF THE LAST CHAPTER has been that if there is moral pluralism in our world, it is there because the concepts with which different groups make moral judgments are different from one another - perhaps radically so, perhaps in more mundane ways.