Title: Collective Responsibility (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Headings: Collective Responsibility
Collective Responsibility
1. Collective Responsibility: the Controversies
2. Making Sense of Collective Responsibility: Actions, Intentions, and Group Solidarity
3. Collective Responsibility and the Structure of Groups
4. Can Collective Responsibility be Distributed?
5. Alternative Approaches to Collective Responsibility
6. Collective Responsibility and the Question of Consequences
7. Forward Looking Collective Responsibility
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Content: But they disagree markedly about whether collective responsibility makes sense as a non-distributive phenomenon, i.e., as a phenomenon that transcends the contributions of particular group members. In this context, as in many others, skeptics set the agenda. Two claims become crucial. The first is that groups, unlike individuals, cannot form intentions and hence cannot be understood to act or to cause harm qua groups. The second is that groups, as distinct from their individual members, cannot be understood as morally blameworthy in the sense required by moral responsibility. Both claims come out of classical methodological individualism of the sort articulated by Max Weber (Weber 1914) and H. D. Lewis (Lewis 1948) in their respective rejections of collective responsibility. In Economy and Society Vol. I, Weber (Weber 1914) argues that collective responsibility makes no sense both because we cannot isolate genuinely collective actions, as distinct from identical actions of many persons, and because groups, unlike the individuals who belong to them, cannot think as groups or formulate intentions of the kind normally thought to be necessary to actions. H. D. Lewis follows suit in his own arguments and couples his methodological individualism with a sense of moral outrage at the idea of blaming individuals for the actions of others. Lewis writes: