Types of Collectivities

After my unresolved discussions with Lewis, I decided to take up the matter of collective moral responsibility by first looking at rocks. Actually I didn’t just look at rocks, I purloined a geology book from a science colleague’s bookshelf, adopted some basic terminology from it and published a paper (French 1975) maintaining there are at least two different categories into which human groups or collectives can be sorted for the purposes of evaluating their actions from the moral point of view: aggregates and conglomerates—like rocks.

A group of people is an aggregate collective if it is nothing more than a gathering of folks. The identity of an aggregate is just the sum of the identities of its parts. If an aggregate were formed naturally, like sand, gravel, and limestone formed by pedogenic processes, adopting the geologist’s lingo, it could be called a ped. If the aggregate was formed artificially, again using the nomenclature of geology, it is a clod. Most human aggregate collectives are clods. I suppose natural family relations, if understood to be collectives, e.g. my two children and me, are peds. A change in the membership of a clod (or a ped, for that matter), substituting a new member for an old one or adding or eliminating a member, changes the identity of that particular aggre­gate. Clodhopping is a way of changing aggregate identities. (Throughout our daily lives most of us do rather a lot of clodhopping.) Simply, an aggregate collective is the sum of its individual members at a specific time and/or in a specific space. Generally, what is predicable of a clod is reducible to the assignment of a like predication to each of its members, allowing for the grammatical fact that certain verbs can be predicated of an aggregate collective but not of any individual member—disbanded, for example. Nonetheless, when it is true that a clod, a mob in a park for example, disbanded, it is also true that its members left the clod and took off in various directions, no longer amassed.

Katherine Ritchie distinguishes what she calls “feature social groups” from “organized social groups” (Ritchie 2018). She fails to mention unorganized aggregate groups, or what I have called clods (and peds), which, along with organized social groups, would constitute the class of what she calls “social objects.” Feature social groups, for Ritchie, are “social kinds.” Social kinds, on her account, have instantiation conditions such as specific identifiable types of behavior, beliefs, practices, activities, norms, and intentions. To be a member of a feature social group one must have or exhibit the specific traits (or at least a significant number of them) that define that group. For example, to be a member of the feature clod of “American White Supremacists” one must be an American that exhibits racist behaviors, spouts or holds racist beliefs, or practices racism during one’s typical activities, regardless of one’s location in time and space.⁹ According to Ritchie, American White Supremacists are a social kind (not a natural kind!), which undoubtedly includes slave owners in the antebellum American South as well as all of the Neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Claiming American White Supremacists are responsible for the ill treatment of African Americans, Native American Indians, Asian Americans, and other minority groups in American society in the past and pre­sent is feature social group (or clod) blaming. It lacks a specific temporal or spatial identification of its subject. The responsibility ascribed to a feature social group devolves on the individual members of the group.

Holding the Neo-Nazi group that marched in Charlottesville responsible for the death of a bystander blames what Ritchie calls a specific social object. That social object, for her, was an organized social group formed to carry out specific concerted actions. It had a rudimen­tary decision structure and even evidenced, qua group, a degree of normative competency.

An accidental grouping of six people waiting on a corner for a bus clearly constitutes a clod. Each person in that clod, we will suppose, is on the corner pursuing his or her private interests, though they share the intent of boarding the bus when it arrives and many may be planning to disembark at the same bus stop on the route. The clod has no established collective deci­sion procedure for determining how to act in unison should circumstances arise that might require their concerted actions. They are strangers, just would-be bus passengers, and might be called a “random collective,” as Virginia Held (Held 1970) and David Cooper (Cooper 1968) maintained.

Clods qua clods obviously are not normatively competent, though their members, or most of them, typically are. Any responsibility for not doing something that is attributed to a clod must, as with all aggregates, devolve on its individual members. Clods are prime examples of the sort of entities about which the reductionism of methodological individualism (MI) is appropriate. Clods per se cannot bear moral responsibility. Paraphrasing Kipling, in the case of clods, what two and two do (or three and three do, etc.) morally must be paid for one by one.

Suppose a summer wind comes blowing in, scatters trash from an overstuffed barrel all over the place, and the members of the clod standing on the corner watching all the trash swirl around their shoes make no attempt to pick it up and deposit it back in the barrel. None, it turns out, are citizens with enough civic pride to make the effort. It seems reasonable to say that the clod on that corner is responsible for failing to pick up the trash, but Anne Schwenkenbecher rightly argues that a random collection, like the people on the corner, should not in itself be thought of as a moral agent (Schwenkenbecher 2018).

However, according to Held (1970) there may be something else for which those in the clod on the corner as a group may be held responsible. In cases where a group action is required to perform a task, Held maintains the individuals gathered in a clod can be held responsible for failing to form themselves into an informal association capable of some deliberation that leads to coordinated action. The clod on the corner certainly does not need to create a full-fledged organization with elected or appointed leadership and decision-making rules just to pick up the trash, but, on Held’s account, they each ought to contribute to transforming their group, so they are capable of completing the task by becoming what Schwenkenbecher refers to as a goal-oriented collective, if not a group agent (Schwenkenbecher 2018). Doing so might involve little more than agreeing among themselves about which part of the trash each is going to try to corral before their bus arrives. In effect, recognizing the capabilities of a clod to perform a task seems to be sufficient on both Held’s and Schwenkenbecher’s accounts to hold a clod respon­sible, albeit retrospectively, for not forming into a goal-oriented collective and doing what they, qua clod, were capable of doing. Even if a clod formed into a goal-oriented collective, it will not be a group agent per se, so any responsibility ascriptions to it will devolve in some way on its putative members without remainder. [It may not devolve in equal portions as I argued in “Power, Control, and Group Situations: And Then There Were None” (French 1992)]. So Schwenkenbecher’s goal-oriented collectives still are no more than clods.

Toni Erskine thinks that all that is morally required of the individuals in cases like the trash on the corner is to jointly act, forming “a coalition of the willing” (Erskine 2014) in which responsibility ultimately distributes between the members of the group and none resides at the group level.

I believe Erskine’s position is more consistent with the way aggregate collectives might form and act than one that grounds collective responsibility of the aggregate on a counterfactual of the aggregate creating a minimal organization. A coalition of the willing requires no collective organization, but it also is not a moral agent and cannot be held morally responsible as a col­lective for what was done or not done. From the moral point of view, such a clod dissolves into individuals. It never has any moral standing. Kipling would approve.

Back to the study of rocks for the characteristics of a conglomerate—a conglomerate is a clastic, lithified sedimentary rock containing rounded clasts of various kinds of rock material cemented together in a matrix with calcite, iron oxide, silica, or clay by the action of moving water. The rounded clasts can be mineral particles or sedimentary, metamorphic or igneous fragments.

Consider the townspeople and cowboys hanging out in the Canby Saloon in Bridger’s Wells in WalterVan Tilburg Clark’s novel The Ox-Bow Incident (Clark 1940). Each is in the saloon for personal reasons. Some have just ridden into town in need of a drink to wash the dust of the trail out of their throats. At the beginning of the story the patrons of the Canby Saloon form a clod, not unlike the folks on the street corner waiting for a bus. Then they learn that a herd of cattle were rustled from a local ranch and the rustlers murdered a cowboy known to some of them. A subset of the Canby Saloon crowd, augmented by others from the town, forms into a vigilante posse committed, if they catch the rustlers, to doing justice in a rough, quick, and sure manner at the end of noosed ropes. They cannot be formally deputized because the sheriff is out of town, so the deputy who has no legal authority to do so, garbles the administering of an oath to which they all nod agreement. The clod by that process is cemented into a con­glomerate of very disparate parts. They agree on rudimentary rules of operation and select an ersatz major, who may or may not have been in the Civil War, as their leader. They ride out of town to the Ox-Bow where they capture three men with a herd of cattle and no bill of sale, and, as a group, conclude they have caught the rustlers. The posse lynches the three, only to learn later that the cattle were legitimately purchased and were being driven to the ranch of the purchaser. The “murdered” cowhand also is very much alive. The conglomerate acted on gross misinformation.

1.4 Types of Collective Responsibility

A distinction between collective responsibility and types of individual-collective responsibility is important in sorting out the complications in distributing responsibility in conglomerate collective cases like that of the Ox-Bow posse. “Individual-collective responsibility”¹⁰ is the responsibility an individual member of a conglomerate collective bears for an untoward action or event for which the collective as a whole is blamed. Consequently, the collective responsibility of the conglomerate is conceptually prior to any assignment of individual-collective responsi­bility to a conglomerate collective member. Jeff Farnley is a member of the Ox-Bow posse that is responsible for lynching three innocent men. Farnley is individual-collective responsible for the hangings because Farnley was a member of the posse that carried out the hangings, as are all of the members of the Ox-Bow posse members regardless of their actual specific participation in the lynchings of the innocent cowboys. Membership is the factor that matters. Call this form of individual-collective responsibility “individual-collective membership responsibility.”

A member’s affiliation in the Ox-Bow posse may have come about in a variety of ways, and, it may be argued, not all of the members of the posse should bear the full weight of individual­collective membership responsibility. The major’s son, for example, was coerced into joining the posse and that may be adequate to assign him a lesser amount of individual-collective member­ship responsibility for the hangings than most of the other members, like Farnley Voluntarily agreeing to join the posse and not quitting when the posse reached a collective decision to administer “rough justice” should be sufficient to secure a full measure of individual-collective membership responsibility for the posse’s murderous activities.

Another type of individual-collective responsibility is participatory. The degree or amount of such responsibility a member has for the collective’s deeds is a function of two factors: a member’s power within the collective and the member’s contribution in bringing about what­ever untoward event is the focus of the responsibility ascription that targets the collective. Individual contribution sets the degree of individual-collective participatory responsibility, but power within a collective that itself has power to do something is also a crucial element in determining degrees of individual-collective participatory responsibility.

To have power in a conglomerate is to possess the dispositional property of being able, if one wants, under certain conditions, to move the conglomerate to action or inaction. When someone has power¹¹ with respect to a particular action or event, there is something that he or she can do at an appropriate time that will insure that the event or collective action will occur and there is something that he or she can do at that time that will prevent the event or action from occurring. The major definitely had such power with respect to the Ox-Bow posse, as did a few of the other members of the posse, but definitely not all of them. (William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (Golding 1954) can be read as portraying how power in a conglomerate is revealed and exercised and how it can shift among the members, alter the behavior of subsets of and the entire conglomerate, and change the distribution of individual-collective participatory responsi­bility for collective actions committed by the members.)

Suppose we speculate that, besides the major, a subset of eight members of the Ox-Bow posse had the power to prevent the hanging of the three innocent cowboys. They are a crit­ical mass with respect to the participation of the posse in the event. We might expect that the subset’s power distributes in some way over its members. Although each member is essential to the identity of the subset because it is an aggregate within the conglomerate, each subset member may not be non-dispensable with regard to the power that this subgroup has to con­trol the activities the conglomerate collective qua collective may undertake. We might say that a member of the group is dispensable with respect to a certain task, if all of the members of the group except that member wanted the task to be done, it would be done, even if that person vehemently opposed its being done. A person may be non-dispensable with regard to the task in at least two ways: (1) His or her opposition significantly would change the group’s course of action. The task would not get done despite the fact that the other members of the group were willing to do it. (2) The member’s skillset or position is recognized by the group as crucial to the successful completion of the task and whether or not the member harbors a positive attitude toward the doing of the task, it will be done because he or she will be forced to participate by the members who want the task done.

Suppose if Farnley had opposed the hangings and swayed the critical mass subgroup of the posse not to support the hangings, the hangings would not have occurred and if Farnley advocated for the hangings, they would occur, in either case, regardless of the opposition of even a majority of other members of the posse. That would mean that Farnley was a non-dispensable member of the crucial sub-group. He has power with respect to the hangings. Farnley wants the hangings to occur and they occur. So Farnley should bear more individual-collective participa­tory responsibility for the murders of the three innocent men than other members of the posse who pulled the nooses around their necks or started the horses on which they sat, even though Farnley cannot carry out the hangings without the participation of at least some of the other members of the posse. The major not only wanted the hangings to occur, he had an ulterior motive for ordering them: he wanted his son, whom he regarded as effeminate, to participate in the hangings to “make a man out of him.” The major had considerable power within the posse and had he not wanted the hangings to occur, the suspected rustlers would have been carted back to Bridger’s Wells to stand trial. He therefore bears more individual-collective participatory responsibility for the illicit hangings than most of the other members of the collective, including Farnley.

The Ox-Bow posse was normatively competent. The members of the posse spent much of the night after they captured the supposed rustlers debating reasons to haul them back to town or to lynch them in the morning. As a collective they recognized reasons supporting both options. As a group they certainly were capable of acting on either option and some recognized the first option as the morally better one though they choose to follow the bidding of Farnley and the major and other members of the pro-execution sub-group and carry out the hangings. Most of the members of the posse clearly cared about the moral quality of their actions. After the posse learns they made a colossal mistake, many of them display remorse and try to work out some way to compensate the widow of one of the cowboys they hanged. Two of them, the major and his son, commit suicide.

Of course, there is no way the posse can alter its synchronic moral responsibility for the hangings. After being chastised by the sheriff who encounters them as they are leaving the Ox­Bow, their feeble attempts back in town to rectify or redress what they did may slightly alter the remaining members of the posse’s diachronic moral responsibility for the hangings, but barely an iota. It may be tempting to regard the suicides of the major and his son as positive modifiers of their diachronic individual-collective participatory responsibility for the hangings. But I doubt a convincing case can be made in that regard. There is good reason to believe that the major’s suicide was more motivated by his disappointment in his son than deep regret at his having led the posse to commit the unjustified incident on the Ox-Bow. The synchronic and diachronic moral responsibility of the Ox-Bow posse for the lynchings are virtually the same, even though the posse members collect more than five hundred dollars to give to the widow. One of them comments, “It’s not a bad price at that... for a husband that don’t know any better than to buy cattle in the spring without a bill of sale.” That sentiment and the money hardly lightens the diachronic responsibility of the posse and its members, if at all.

A further point is worth mentioning: There are likely to be cases of collective responsibility in which sorting out the individual-collective participatory responsibility for an event or action of a conglomerate is extremely difficult. In such cases moral evaluation will likely have to settle for individual-collective membership responsibility assessed on each member of the conglom­erate. But in all cases of individual-collective responsibility the collective responsibility of the conglomerate takes precedence and that requires that the collective is minimally normatively

competent qua collective. Otherwise, what may have appeared to be a conglomerate is nothing more than a clod.

1.5