The Very Idea of Collective Moral Responsibility
We focus on backward-looking moral responsibility, rather than forward-looking moral responsibilities (obligations).3 From now on, “responsibility” refers to backward-looking moral responsibility unless otherwise stated.
An agent is responsible not only for doing the wrong thing or for the bad outcomes that she brings about, but also for actions or outcomes that are morally neutral, right or good.4 Furthermore, she can be responsible for a bad action or outcome even if she is fully excused or justified and therefore not blameworthy. We will assume, as philosophers often do, that being responsible is a threshold property, so that an agent is either responsible or not for an action or outcome.5As we use it, the term “collective moral responsibility” applies whenever several agents bear moral responsibility for one and the same action or outcome.6 We restrict ourselves to collectives that are not group agents. Even so, some philosophers regard the very idea that responsibility can be collective as suspect or incoherent.
According to Elazar Weinryb, “[o]ur idea of responsibility requires that it should be uniquely ascribed [to a single agent]” (1980: 9). If there were such a unique agent requirement, then the idea of collective responsibility would be incoherent. One motivation for the requirement regarding collective responsibility for an action could be a Davidsonian action ontology according to which all actions are primitive actions that can be described in various ways, for example in terms of the outcomes they are intended to bring about (Davidson [1971] 2001). An agent’s primitive actions are those that she can perform directly, without intending to do anything else by means of which the primitive action is performed. Davidson takes these to be restricted to a repertoire of movements of the agent’s own biological body.
On this view, several agents cannot share direct responsibility for an action (Sverdlik 1987: 64—66).Another motivation for a unique agent requirement is the claim that “only agents can act,” where this is taken to imply not only that “only an agent can do any component of an action,” but also that “only an agent can do any action as a whole” (Collins 2013: 235). This means that, if cooperating individuals do not form a group agent, then they cannot perform an action and, a fortiori, cannot bear collective responsibility for an action. If they do form a group agent on the other hand, then it is the group agent that is responsible for the action, not the group members.
However, it is incontrovertible that an outcome or event can nevertheless be brought about by several agents, each of whom is morally responsible for it (Zimmerman 1985: 118; Sverdlik 1987: 66—67). Each could also be blameworthy for that outcome or event. Furthermore, if one accepts, as we do, that there is such a thing as acting together, where several agents perform different components of one and the same action, then there is no reason to deny that several agents can also in principle be collectively responsible and blameworthy for shared actions.
10.3
More on the topic The Very Idea of Collective Moral Responsibility:
- Collective Moral Responsibility
- Two Senses of Autonomy
- Breaking Free of the Seinfeld Paradigm
- Collective Responsibility
- Other Dimensions of Collective Action and Liability
- Conclusion
- Collective Responsibility: Agency Worries
- Collective Blameworthiness and Shared Intentional Action
- From the Aristotelian Categories to the Kantian Critical Trichotomy?
- 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.