Abstract
There is one perfectly good colloquial sense of collective responsibility which does not concern me in this contribution. That is the sense in which each of a number of individuals might be held (or hold themselves) to account for the actions of one or more of their number. I make some brief comments on that question in section 3, but my topic is rather the responsibility of collective entities as such. The thesis to be argued for can be stated in one brief sentence:
Collective entities can be treated as morally responsible agents.
For helpful comments on an earlier draft of this contribution I am grateful to audiences at the Universities of Bristol and Essex and the Institute of Education at the University of London. I received further helpful comments from participants in the conference on Moral Responsibility and Ontology in Utrecht and I am especially grateful to Jay Wallace.
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References
I have argued for endowing collective entities with the status of moral patients, objects of legitimate moral concern, in `The Moral Status of Collective Entities’, paper read at The Individual And Community conference, School of Advanced Study, University of London, January 1997.
In one terminology, this would then be an aggregate collectivity rather than a conglomerate collectivity. Cf. P. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 ), 5–13.
Notice too that of course it will not follow that all collectivities on my earlier defini- tion are moral agents in this way. The senate’s deliberative structure is a vital feature, and that is not a defining feature of collectivities. Nor, however, is it the only feature. Without the existence of appropriately irreducible collectivities there would be no irreducible responsibility, but only responsibility which could be distributed unproblematically to individuals who happened to be acting together.
C. McMahon, Authority and Democracy ( New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994 ), 54–55.
C. McMahon, op.cit., 61.
In the individual case, the most plausible additional necessary condition for moral responsibility is the availability of alternative possibilities. Extension of this condition to collectivities is far less problematic, once the idea is accepted that collectivities are agents, capable of deliberating and deciding in the first place.
G. Brennan and L. Lomasky, Democracy and Decision ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ), 169.
Brennan and Lomasky, op.cit., 169.
Brennan and Lomasky, op.cit., 170; italics in original.
Brennan and Lomasky, op.cit., 171; italics in original.
L. May, Sharing Responsibility ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ), 84.
Ibid.
The explicit performative is a common enough device for creating institutional facts. See J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995 ), 34, 54–55.
For discussion and or occupancy of these positions see P. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 113–114; C. McMahon, Authority and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 208ff; L. May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 106–107; and H. D. Lewis. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 113–114; C. McMahon, Authority and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 208ff; L. May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 106–107; and H. D. Lewis, `Collective Responsibility’, Philosophy, 23 (1948), 17.
This possibility is correctly described as a danger only if the security of ascriptions of moral responsibility is taken as a means of independently justifying the practice of passing moral comment. An alternative position is not to aim for such independent justification but to allow mutual interdependence between ascriptions of moral responsibility and the making of moral comment, so that responsibility and blameability stand or fall together. See R. J. Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 66, 85. The problem I see with this position is that it provides no resources against a skeptic who raises doubts about the reasonableness (as opposed to the moral acceptability) of the practice of blaming.
S. Hurley, Natural Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 157. Hurley adds that it does not follow that we should take the unit of agency as fixed, but if I understand her argument correctly, it will nevertheless always be individuals who take decisions about the appropriate unit of agency, not collectivities.
L. May, The Morality of Groups ( Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987 ), 70.
S. Scheffler, `Individual Responsibility in a Global Age’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 12, 1995, 232.
Robert Sugden gives the engaging example of manuals written for members of bridge teams. Someone might object, in the style of rational choice theory, that they had a reason to follow the manual’s advice only if they had reason to think that their partner would follow it. But they would thereby demonstrate that they had missed the point. Such manuals are written for people thinking already as members of a team (R. Sugden, `Thinking as a Team’, Social Philosophy and Policy,10 (1993), 85). I do not wish to deny that the questions when and why it is appropriate to conduct one’s practical reasoning in the first person plural (or in other words to identify with a collectivity) are enormously difficult and complex. I hope to address them on another occasion.
For such an argument, see May, Sharing Responsibility,53, 161–162, and for the effects of globalization on responsibility see Scheffler, `Individual Responsibility in a Global Age’.
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Graham, K. (2000). Collective Responsibility. In: van den Beld, T. (eds) Moral Responsibility and Ontology. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2361-9_4
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