What is Collective Responsibility?
What “collective responsibility” means is hotly contested. There is no consensus in the literature regarding the meaning of the phrase “collective responsibility” (used interchangeably in some cases with group responsibility) and the phrase itself is unclear in at least two ways.
First, the term “collective” often refers to lots of different types of groups, including committees, nationstates, corporations, aggregates such as the citizens of a state, task groups, and people unified by spatial location and context such as strangers on the beach. Second, scholars working on this topic will sometimes use the phrase “collective responsibility” to refer to the responsibility individuals have within a group for outcomes produced by their group, or for the contributions that they make to that outcome, or they use it to refer to the responsibility the group, itself, has for the outcomes of a group action. That is, some scholars will provide a theory of collective responsibility, which reduces to individual responsibility (a distributive account) whereas others will argue that in some cases the responsibility lies with the group itself and with no particular individual (a non-distributive account). The question “Who’s responsible?” gets a different answer depending on different theories.This handbook is no different in that the reader will notice the variable uses of the phrase. Although our authors have been instructed to be clear about how they are using the phrase, they were not instructed to use the phrase in a uniform way. The same goes for other frequently used terms such as “shared responsibility,” “joint responsibility,” “group responsibility,” and so on.
Rather than using the phrase to identify a state of affairs in the world we think the phrase best describes an area of inquiry. Those working on collective responsibility are unified by their focus on certain types of questions.
To motivate those questions, consider the following cases:On July 8, 2017 8-year-old Stephen Ursey and his 11-year-old brother were swimming with their family in the waters of Panama Beach, Florida. A powerful riptide swept them away from their family and as their parents and several other people tried to save them, they were all overpowered and swept out into the ocean where they struggled to stay afloat and were unable to swim against the force of the tide to the shore. As they screamed for help, more people began to enter the water in an attempt to help but it became clear that tide was too strong to conquer individually. Each time an individual went out to save one person they were swept away. No one knows for sure where the idea came from or how it was initiated but people began to clasp
Deborah Tollefsen and Saba Bazargan-Forward
hands at the edge of the water and they formed a human chain that extended 90 meters into the water. Seventy to eighty strangers formed the chain and did so at considerable risk to their own lives. Through their joint action more than 30 lives were saved.
The Raccoon River in central Iowa runs through one of the most intensely farmed regions of the nation. Agriculture is vital to the area’s economy, but polluted runoff from farms poses an acute threat to the residents’ tap water—and a daunting challenge to utilities struggling to keep the water clean. No one farmer is responsible for the pollution nor could any single farmer prevent it. But together those farms produce serious health risks to residents’ tap water and have been linked directly to cancer and other poor health outcomes in those areas.
In 1996, Purdue Pharma (a privately held pharmaceutical company owned by members of the Sackler family) released a new prescription painkiller called OxyContin. The drug uses a controlled release mechanism to deliver large doses of a chemical closely related to heroin. Over the next two decades, Purdue aggressively pushed sales of OxyContin and the opioid addiction grew. From 1999 to 2017, almost 400,000 people1 died from opioid overdoses.
In each of these cases, a collection of people did something, through their joint or aggregate actions, that produced a morally significant outcome. Who is responsible and how ought praise and blame be allocated? These are the central questions that unify the field of collective responsibility.