## 1. Collective Responsibility: the Controversies



Both notions of collective responsibility are controversial. The
traditional, backward looking, notion does not sit well with those who
are skeptical about the ability of collective entities *to
will* and *to act* as collective entities. The forward
looking notion is less controversial than its backward looking
counterpart is with respect to its metaphysical foundations. But it
does raise questions about how--on the basis of what norms and
principles--we can ascribe such responsibility in practice.



Three kinds of controversies surround the traditional notion of
collective responsibility.



The first of these controversies concerns whether or not collective
responsibility makes sense as a form of moral responsibility. Not
surprisingly, the primary focus of attention here has been with both
the moral agency of groups in general and the possibility of group
intentions in particular. How, participants in this controversy have
asked, can we understand the notion of collective responsibility as a
matter of moral--and not just causal--responsibility? Is it
possible for groups, as distinct from their members, to cause harm in
the sense required by moral responsibility? to act as collectives? to
have intentions? Is it possible for groups, as distinct from their
members, to be morally blameworthy for bringing about harm? to be
guilty as moral agents?



The second controversy, interestingly enough, is not really about the
moral responsibility of groups at all, even though it is couched in
the language of collective moral responsibility. Instead, it is about
the moral responsibility of individuals who belong to groups that are
themselves thought to be morally responsible for particular cases of
harm. How, participants in this controversy have asked, can we
distribute collective responsibility across individual members of such
a group? Does it makes sense to distribute collective responsibility
in general? Is it appropriate to hold individual group members morally
responsible for harm that other group members caused? that the group
itself caused? that the group as a whole failed to prevent? If so,
under what conditions and with respect to what particular kinds of
groups? Random collections of individuals? Interest-based groups?
Corporate entities?



The third controversy is primarily normative and concerns the value of
ascribing collective responsibility in practice. In some cases, the
concern is with the general practice of collective responsibility and
its consequences for our ability to sustain the values of
individualism, freedom, and justice. In other cases, the concern is
with the ascriptions of collective responsibility in particular
contexts, e.g., in the contexts of war tribunals, reparations for
slavery, terrorism, and rape, and with whether such ascriptions are
productive and/or fair to those being blamed. What would happen,
critics ask, if we were to replace individual responsibility with
collective responsibility? Would we be letting individuals off the
hook? Would we be eroding the practice of personal responsibility in
general?



The controversies surrounding forward looking collective
responsibility have to do with both the role of agent causation in
ascribing responsibility for remedying harm in the world and the norms
and principles that may--or may not--be appropriate to
invoke in this context. Does responsibility for remedying harm come
down to who caused the harm? If not, what other criteria should we
employ? Should we turn to those who are most capable of preventing the
harm and hold them--and the community of which they are a
part--responsible for remedial action? (Is forward looking
collective responsibility primarily an exercise in pragmatism?) Do
considerations of fairness have any place in our ascriptions of such
responsibility and, if so, what kinds of fairness are relevant? What
happens in cases where there is no collective entity capable of taking
remedial action? Do we have a moral obligation to bring such a
collective entity about and, if so, on what basis?


## 2. Making Sense of Collective Responsibility: Actions, Intentions, and Group Solidarity



Almost all of those now writing about collective responsibility agree
that collective responsibility would make sense if it were merely an
aggregative phenomenon. 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:



> 
> Value belongs to the individual and it is the individual who is the
> sole bearer of moral responsibility. No one is morally guilty except
> in relation to some conduct which he himself considered to be wrong
> ... Collective responsibility is ... barbarous. (Lewis 1948,
> pp. 3-6)
> 



Contemporary critics of collective responsibility do not generally go
as far as Lewis does here in equating collective responsibility with
barbarism. But they do generally share their predecessors'
skepticism about the possibility of both group intentions and
genuinely collective actions. (See below.) Likewise, they, too, worry
about the fairness of ascribing collective responsibility to
individuals who do not themselves directly cause harm or who do not
bring about harm purposefully. Stephen Sverdlik writes:



> 
> It would be unfair, whether we are considering a result produced by
> more than one person's action or by a single person, to blame a
> person for a result that he or she did not intend to produce.
> (Sverdlik 1987, p. 68)
> 



Both of these claims--that genuinely collective actions are not
possible and that it would be unfair to consider agents morally
blameworthy for harm that they did not bring about
purposively--rest on two normative assumptions that are key to
the critic's position. Both concern the importance of
intentions. The first is that actions--whether they are
individual or collective--necessarily begin with intentions.
(Otherwise, they are not actions but instead kinds of behavior.) The
second is that moral blameworthiness has its source in and requires
the existence of bad intentions--or at least moral
faultiness--on the part of those being held responsible.



The first assumption, namely, that all actions begin with intentions,
is very useful to critics because it enables them to write group
intentions into the definition of collective action itself and hence
render group intentions a necessary condition of collective
responsibility. J. Angelo Corlett's definition of a collective
action is typical here. According to Corlett,



> 
> [a] collective (intentional) action is an action the subject of which
> is a collective intentional agent. A collective *behavior* is a
> doing or behavior that is the result of a collective, though not the
> result of its intentions. A *collective action* is caused by
> the beliefs and desires (wants) of the collective itself, whether or
> not such beliefs and desires can be accounted for or explained in
> individualistic terms (Corlett 2001, p. 575).
> 



The second assumption, namely, that moral blameworthiness of all kinds
is grounded in the bad intentions of moral agents who cause harm, is
also very useful to critics of collective responsibility, since it
enables them to stipulate that collective responsibility requires, not
just group intentions, but the ability of groups to have bad
intentions or at least to be morally faulty. How, critics ask, can
groups, as distinct from their individual members, be understood to
have bad intentions? to be morally faulty? to have a moral character,
faulty or not? How, in other words, can they be understood as
appropriate bearers of moral blameworthiness, guilt, or shame?



A majority of critics here concentrate on showing either that actions
are associated exclusively with individuals, not groups, or that
groups, which do not have minds of their own, cannot make choices or
hold beliefs in the sense required by the formulation of intentions.
H. D Lewis concentrates on making both points in his 1948 critique of
collective responsibility. So, too, does J. W. N. Watkins (1957).
Later methodological individualists such as Alvin Goldman (1970),
Stephen Sverdlik (1987), J. Angelo Corlett (Corlett 2001), and Jan
Narveson (2002), unlike their predecessors, are generally willing to
acknowledge the sensibility of collective responsibility in a limited
number of cases. But, they, too, draw attention to the host of
difficulties that arise for collective responsibility as a moral
construct once we acknowledge the simple fact that collectives do not
have full blown mental lives.



Critics of collective responsibility pay somewhat less attention to
the nature of collective moral blameworthiness than they do to the
nature of collective actions. But they do sometimes worry about the
appropriateness of associating moral blameworthiness with groups, as
distinct from group members. R. S. Downie, among others, places what
turns out to be a very traditional notion of moral responsibility at
the center of his attention and argues that



> 
> [c]ollectives do not have moral faults, since they don't make
> moral choices, and hence they cannot properly be ascribed moral
> responsibility. ... For there to be moral responsibility there
> must be blameworthiness involving a morally faulty decision, and this
> can only occur at the individual level (Downie 1969, p. 67).
> 



Jan Narveson goes as far in this context as to argue that the bearers
of moral blameworthiness *have* to be individuals because only
individuals can have moral agency. "Nothing else,"
Narveson writes, "can literally be the bearer of full
responsibility" (Narveson 2002, p. 179). The word
"literally" here turns out to be significant for those
writing on collective responsibility. For, it contrasts with the sense
shared by Narveson and others that we might in the end be able to make
sense of collective responsibility in metaphorical terms by treating
individual moral agency, including both agent causation and moral
blameworthiness, as a metaphor for group agency of the sort relevant
to moral responsibility traditionally understood.



Defenders of collective responsibility rely on a variety of
philosophical strategies to debunk the above claims and to justify
both the possibility of collective responsibility in some, if not all,
cases, and the coherence of collective responsibility as an
intellectual construct. One of these strategies has been simply to
point out both that we blame groups all the time in practice and that
we do so in a way that is difficult to analyze with the precepts of
methodological individualism. David Cooper, among others, uses this
strategy to great effect in his own defense of collective
responsibility. According to Cooper, "[t]here is an obvious
point to be recognized and that obvious point is that responsibility
is ascribed to collectives, as well as to individual persons. Blaming
attitudes are held towards collective as well as towards
individuals," (Cooper 1968, p. 258.)



Deborah Tollefsen (Tollefsen, 2003) zeros in on the fact that we
express various reactive attitudes to groups, e.g., anger, resentment,
and moral indignation. How, she asks, can we make sense of these
attitudes? She argues that we cannot do so by simply positing that our
emotions are misfiring here or that our attitudes are really directed
at group members rather than at groups themselves. Instead, we have to
recognize that, within our practices of moral responsibility (a
la Strawson), groups have the ability of moral address and
exhibit moral competence.



But of course our practices of moral responsibility, as well as the
reactive attitudes that ground them, may not be justified. Cooper
himself acknowledges that both our use of language here and our
blaming attitudes may be misguided. Hence, they find it necessary to
show, not just that we ascribe blame to collectives in practice, but
that the collective blame that we ascribe cannot be analyzed in terms
of individual blame. Cooper himself takes on this project by exploring
particular cases of blame, e.g., those associated with sports clubs
and nations, that, he argues, can only attach to groups. According to
Cooper, when we look at how such collectives act, we see that whether
we regard statements about collectives as propositional functions or
not, we cannot deduce from them statements about particular
individuals. "This is so," he argues, "because the
existence of a collective is compatible with varying membership. No
determinate set of individuals is necessary for the existence of the
collective" (Cooper 1968, p. 260).



In a similar vein, Peter French focuses on that class of predicates
that, he contends, can only be true of collectives. According to
French,



> 
> [t]here is a class of predicates that just cannot be true of
> individuals, that can only be true of collectives. Examples of such
> predicates abound ... and include 'disbanded' (most
> uses of), 'lost the football game', 'elected a
> president', and 'passed an amendment'. ...
> Methodological individualism would be at a loss in this context.
> (French 1998, p. 37)
> 



A majority of those who defend the possibility of group actions in
this context rely on linguistic analyses. But there are also those
who, like Larry May, turn instead to social theory and to the
existentialist tradition. May himself uses the relational theory of
Jean-Paul Sartre to argue that groups can legitimately be ascribed
actions in cases where individuals are related to one another and act
in ways together that would not be possible if they acted alone. May
sets down two relationally-based conditions under which we can
legitimately say of an action that it is collective rather than
individual--which for May means, not trans-individual, but
relational. The first condition is that the individuals in question be
related to each other so as to enable each to act in ways that they
could not manage on their own. The second is that some individuals be
authorized to represent their own actions as the actions of the group
as a whole (May 1987, p. 55).



What about group intentions? Not surprisingly, group intentions
present an even greater challenge than group actions do. For,
intentions are mental states and hence not the kinds of things that
are normally thought to be shareable. Are they shareable?



According to Brook Sadler and others, the question is inherently
puzzling. For, "if intentions are mental states, states which
play a fundamental role in an agent's practical deliberation and
volition, the prospect of a shared intention introduces the specter of
shared mental states and hence shared minds"--which is
something that philosophers have traditionally hoped to leave behind.
(Sadler 2006, p.115.)



Indeed, the possibility that collective responsibility requires, not
only collective actions and intentions, but a collective mind, has
proven to be one of the greatest challenges to those who want to
sustain a notion of collective responsibility. For while groups can
legitimately be said to have beliefs and other states characteristic
of a mind in particular cases, e.g., when the group is organized
around such beliefs, they do not seem to have minds in any sense other
than their ability to build on the minds of individual members. As
David Sosa argues, "groups might be said to have a mind or a
will but only in a derivative sense: the persons that are members of
the group have minds, and the group's mind (in whatever sense it
has one, its beliefs and desires) is some sort of construct from those
minds" (Sosa 2007, p. 215).



Not surprisingly, the matter of consciousness becomes key here.
Matthew Baddorf (2017) argues straightforwardly that for something to
have a mind, it must be phenomenologically conscious and, and
according to Baddorf, collectives lack consciousness. Baddorf is
willing to go as far as to conclude here that lacking such
consciousness, collectives are inappropriate sites of accountability
and responsibility. But not everyone is willing to go so far.



Indeed, there are an increasing number of scholars in the field who
wonder whether we really need to talk about a collective mind (or
consciousness)--or even a unified self--in order to sustain
a notion of collective moral responsibility. Michael Bratman appears
to have developed a coherent view of collective intentions that does
not require us to go that far. According to Bratman, we can talk about
collective intentions as intentions that are shared among group
members.



> 
> [w]e *intend to do J* if and only if: (1)(a) I intend that we J
> and (b) you intend that we J and (2) I intend that we J in accordance
> with and because of (1)(a), (1)(b) and meshing sub-plans of (1)(a),
> (1)(b), and you intend likewise. (3):(1) and (2) are common knowledge
> between us. (Bratman 1999:121)
> 



In *Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together*
(Bratman 2014), Bratman associates these shared intentions with a
pattern of ordinary intentions and beliefs that coordinates multiple
individuals' activity in a fashion analogous to the way in which
an individual's intention coordinates her activity through time.
Here, again, Bratman presents shared intentions as a matter of
"meshing subplans." According to Bratman, to say that we
have a "shared intention to J," where J is a joint
activity, is to say that "[w]e each have intentions that we J,
and we each intend that we J by way of each of our intentions that we
J and by way of subplans that mesh." (Bratman 2014, p. 103)



Two things are important to underscore here. First of all, Bratman is
not concerned to account for a collective mind. Instead, he is
concerned to account for collective intentions. Second, while he
suggests in *Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting
Together* that we can think of shared activity as the activity of
a group agent, he makes clear that he is not positing a group subject
of the kind necessary to the ascription of moral blameworthiness to
the group itself *qua* moral agent.



Both points together suggest that while Bratman's theory
provides us with a very helpful way of understanding both collective
intentions and coordinated activities of various kinds, as well as a
basis for grasping the nature of shared deliberation and shared
reasoning, it does not attach those collective intentions to the kind
of collective moral agent that is required of moral responsibility.
Nor does it establish the kind of moral agent in question.



Bratman was not himself interested in establishing this kind of moral
agent in his theory of collective intentions. But, if we want to talk
about collective moral responsibility, we will have to do so.
Moreover, we will have to do so regardless of our stance on the
possibility of a collective mind or a collective consciousness. (In
other words, we will have to do so regardless of what other conditions
of collective moral responsibility we posit and whether we think that
these conditions can be met.) For, responsibility of all kinds
requires the location of agents and moral responsibility requires that
these agents be appropriate sites of blameworthiness.



How, if at all, might we talk about the kind of collective moral agent
and/or unified collective moral subject required by collective moral
responsibility? Interestingly enough, defenders of collective
responsibility frequently turn back here to the works of Durkheim
(1895) and Simmel (1971), as well as to that of Sartre (1960), for
inspiration, although they themselves proceed analytically. Margaret
Gilbert, who grounds several of her arguments in Durkheim's
theory of social facts, develops what she calls a
"plural-subject account" of shared intentions to justify
the coherence of collective responsibility (Gilbert 1989, 2000, 2006
and 2013) (Gilbert and Priest 2020). She does so in large part by
zeroing in on joint commitments. According to Gilbert, group
intentions exist when two or more persons constitute the plural
subject of an intention to carry out a particular action, or, in other
words, when "they are jointly committed to intending as a body
to do *A*" (Gilbert 2000, p. 22).



David Velleman goes on to stress the unified nature of this plural
subject. A "truly plural subject", he writes, involves
"two or more subjects who combine in such a way as to make one
subject" (Velleman 1997). Both Gilbert and Velleman make clear
that a unified moral subject is required of a collective moral
responsibility.



While Gilbert and Velleman provide us with a compelling view of a
plural subject, two questions remain. Does their plural subject
constitute a unified moral subject of the kind that can be morally
blameworthy for bringing about harm? If so, is the kind of moral
blameworthiness associated with such a unified moral subject the same
in the case of a collective as it is in the case of individual moral
agents? We address these questions in Section 5.



Suffice it to point out here both that (as Gilbert herself recognizes)
such a unified moral subject is necessary to collective moral
responsibility and that the location of a plural subject is not the
only way of making sense of a collective moral agent. Raimo Tuomela
(1989, 2005, 2006 and 2013) chooses a somewhat different strategy in
his defense of collective responsibility. He puts forward what he
calls "we intentions." Like Gilbert, he constructs a
collective subject on the basis of joint commitments and then applies
it to the notion of collective responsibility. But he does not, like
Gilbert, stress the pluralistic nature of this subject. Instead, he
argues that collective intentional agency *supervenes* on
individual intentional agency in ways that allow us to talk about both
collective intentions and collective actions. According to Tuomela,
actions by collectives *supervene* on the actions of the
operative members of the collective in such a way that the properties
of particular collectives, such as their intentions, beliefs, and
desires, are "embodied in" and "determined by"
the perspectives of the properties of individual members or
representatives of the collective in question (Tuomela 1989, p.
494).



Interestingly enough, Tuomela's attempt here to save collective
responsibility by positing such a representative subject recalls the
efforts of Thomas Hobbes to create a collective subject in the guise
of his Leviathan (1651). Hobbes, in an effort both to explain
sovereignty in general and to justify the legitimacy of the English
monarchy in particular, posited a higher authority in the
community--the Leviathan--whose own will, as well as
actions, came to be those of its/his subjects as a result of their
having transferred their own agency to it/him as part of the only kind
of social contract that from Hobbes's perspective made
collective life possible. Hobbes's collective subject not only
represented group members but captured their very being as members of
his Leviathan.



Contemporary defenders of collective responsibility sometimes recall
Hobbes's Leviathan in their own attempt to develop a collective
subject (see for example: Copp 1980). But they do not, in light of
Hobbes's own authoritarianism, go as far as to accept
Hobbes's argument that a Leviathan is necessary to capture the
collective will. Nor do they generally toy with the possibility of
reintroducing the seemingly more benevolent general will of Rousseau
(1762) as a way of substantiating group intentions. Instead, they look
for an alternative, less authoritarian, way of substantiating group
intentions--representational or not--or else argue that
group intentions of the sort associated with traditional Kantian
notions of moral agency are not after all necessary to collective
moral responsibility.



Larry May offers one of the most interesting arguments of the latter
sort in his own defense of collective moral agency (May 1987, 2006 and
2010). May rejects many of the above accounts of group intentions as
too closely tied to Kantian notions of moral agency. But he does not
do away with group intentions as a necessary condition of collective
responsibility. Nor does he accept a fully collectivist methodology.
Instead, he reformulates group intentions within a theory of what he
calls interdependence and, in doing so, develops a general outlook on
collective responsibility that not only combines individualism and
collectivism but places both relationships and social structures at
the center of our attention. The challenge here becomes to describe
what such group intentions actually look like.



May relies in this context once again on the work of Sartre to develop
his account of group intentions and posits what he calls a
"pre-reflective intention", i.e., "an intention
which is not yet reflected upon by each of the members of the
group" (May 1987 p. 64). May makes clear here that group
intentions of this sort arise out of the relationships between
particular members of a group rather than from any one group member.
Hence, while they are not trans-individual or collective in any sense
that stands totally above individuals, they can be treated "as
if they are collective" (May 1987, p. 64) Moreover, these
intentions are, May makes clear, not *individual* intentions
but *group-based*. "Since each member of the group comes
to have the same intention, either reflectively or
pre-reflectively", it is "different from their individual
intentions." Indeed, "the sameness of intention is
collective in the sense that it is caused by the group structure, that
is, it is group-based" (May 1987, p. 65). The question for May,
as for the others, is whether the "sameness of intention"
is sufficient for talking about a collective moral agent worthy of
blame.



While many of those defending the possibility of collective moral
responsibility do not explore the conditions of collective moral
blameworthiness, List and Pettit (2011), in an important work on the
subject, extend inquiry about collective moral agency into the realm
of ethical, political, and legal accountability. List and Pettit argue
that groups can meet the requirements of moral agency by virtue of the
fact that they "have representational states, motivational
states, and a capacity to process them and act on their basis."
(List and Pettit 2011, p. 21) Likewise, they argue that groups can
have obligations, entitlements, and power relations that have hitherto
gone unnoticed and that require our moral attention.



List and Pettit devote a great deal of their own attention to how we
might use our recognition of these obligations, entitlements, and
power relations to re-work various institutions in contemporary
society. But they do not neglect the question of collective moral
blameworthiness. Nor do they simply assume that such blameworthiness
follows automatically from group moral agency. Instead they make clear
that in order for a group to be morally blameworthy, its actions must
be associated with a "grave matter"; the group must have
"full knowledge of guilt"; and there must have been
"full consent of the will" (List and Pettit 2011, 155).
List and Pettit think that these conditions can be met by at least
some groups. Are they right?



While they provide convincing evidence that at least some groups can
meet the first two conditions, we need, once again, to be worried
about the third, i.e., that which pertains to the willfulness or
control of a collective agent. In their own words, "the question
raised by the third condition is whether a group agent is in control
over the actions it takes so that we might expect its normative
judgment, for example, to be capable of impacting on its
behavior" (List and Pettit, 2011, 159). How can a group, above
its individual members, exert this level of control?



List and Pettit do not answer this question. Instead, they point out
(correctly) that the question is not more serious for groups than it
is for individuals.



> 
> This notion of control needs analysis in any full theory of agency,
> but since the issue arises with individual agency as much as it does
> with group agency, we need not provide that analysis here. The
> challenge for us is not to explain what an agent's control is,
> but rather to show that there is no special reason why such control,
> whatever it involves, shouldn't be instantiated in a group agent
> as much as in an individual. (List and Pettit, 2011, 159)
> 



But if we are going to justify the possibility of group moral
blameworthiness, we cannot be satisfied with simply knowing that the
matter of control is no more serious for groups than it is for
individuals. Instead, we have to know what group control entails in
this context and whether it is possible. In other words, we have to
develop the kind of explanation of group control that List and Pettit
concede is important, as well as an account of the "whatever
such control involves" that they cite.



There have been several interesting efforts in recent years to
articulate and justify such a notion of group control. Kendy Hess, in
"The Free Will of Corporations and Other Collectives"
(Hess, 2014) argues that collectives possess free will to the extent
that they act from their own "actional springs" and from
their own "reasons-responsive mechanisms". Hess argues
that when collectives do so, they both act freely and are morally
responsible for what they do.



Kenneth Silver (2022) follows through on the reasons-responsive
approach to group free will and moral responsibility. According to
Silver, while it is difficult to establish a group mind or mental
state in this context, to do so is not necessary. Instead, we need
only establish that groups are sensitive to their reasons and can be
motivated to act by them. In Section 5, I address whether such a
notion of group control is sufficient to sustain ascriptions of moral
blameworthiness.



While List and Pettit do not provide us with their own notion of group
control (leaving the question of group moral blameworthiness still up
in the air), they do make two related points of importance. The first
is that control in this context does not need to reside in the group
*or* in individuals. Instead, it can reside simultaneously in
both places, albeit in different forms: "programming
causes" vs. "implementing causes" (List and Pettit,
2011, p. 162).



The second is that we need to think, not only about whether groups are
morally responsible for harm, but about whether we should
*hold* them morally responsible for harm and, if so, under what
conditions. List and Pettit do not take a wholly consequentialist
approach to the latter matter themselves. But they do underscore the
positive consequences that can follow from our *holding* groups
morally responsible in particular cases, consequences that range from
our "recognition... of the true contours of the moral and
political world we inhabit" (List and Pettit 2011, p. 185) to
the persuasion of group members to give up harmful behaviors to the
socialization of group members to act more responsibly in the future.
We discuss these and other consequences more fully in Section 6.


## 3. Collective Responsibility and the Structure of Groups



While Gilbert, May, List, Pettit, and others who concentrate on
redeeming collective responsibility as an intellectual construct do so
by defending the coherence of collective actions and group intentions,
they do not go as far as to assert that all kinds of groups are
capable of acting and intending collectively. Nor do they go as far as
to assert that all kinds of groups can be understood as collectively
responsible for bringing about harm. Instead, they assert that only
particular kinds of groups are capable of acting and intending
collectively and that only particular kinds of groups are capable of
being collectively responsible for harm. What kinds of groups are
these?



The most common approach taken to distinguishing between appropriate
and inappropriate sites of collective responsibility has been to focus
on nations, corporations, and other groups that have well-ordered
decision-making procedures in place, since, it is argued, these groups
are, by virtue of their well-ordered decision-making procedures, able
to demonstrate two things that are often assumed to be necessary to
collective responsibility. The first is a set of group actions that
have an identifiable moral agent, e.g., a governing board or a
representative body, behind them capable of carrying out a group
action. The second is a set of decisions that are made
self-consciously on a rational basis--or at least
purposively--by the group that take the form of group intentions
or group choices.



Peter French considers groups that are so organized to be especially
appropriate sites of collective responsibility because of three
salient features that they all share. The first is a series of
organizational mechanisms through which courses of concerted action
can be, though not necessarily are, chosen on a rational basis. The
second is a set of enforced standards of conduct for individuals that
are more stringent than those usually thought to apply in the larger
community of individuals, standards that enable us to talk about both
group conduct and group discipline. The third is a configuration of
"defined roles by which individuals can exercise certain powers
" (French 1984, pp. 13-14) All three of these features,
according to French, signal the existence of purposeful and controlled
actions that are capable of rendering groups collectively responsible
for harm.



A second approach to the location of appropriate sites of collective
responsibility has been to use groups such as ethnic communities,
clubs, and social movements as paradigmatic cases of appropriate
collective responsibility on the grounds that these groups have
members who share interests or needs in common. Two assumptions
prevail here. The first is that groups whose members share interests
or needs in common show signs of group solidarity, which Joel Feinberg
defines in this context as a matter of individuals taking a strong
interest in each others' interests (Feinberg 1968). The second
is that groups that show signs of group solidarity understood in this
way are capable of acting and intending in the sense relevant to
collective responsibility, since while they are made up of
individuals, they pursue projects together.



Not surprisingly, group solidarity is generally thought to exist
primarily in either cases where group members identify themselves as
group members and assert their shared interests and needs or in cases
where group members exhibit collective consciousness to the extent
that they are inclined to take pride or feel shame in group actions
without prompting. But, according to at least some of those who make
use of the concept of group solidarity here, e.g. Larry May (1987) and
Howard McGary (1986), group solidarity does not *require* group
self-consciousness. Indeed, according to both May and McGary, group
solidarity can be understood as present in what McGary calls
"loosely structured groups", such as privileged racial
groups whose members provide support or benefits to other members
*qua* group members, even though they may not, in
McGary's words, "see themselves as interested in one
another's interests" (McGary 1986, p. 158). In these
groups, McGary contends, mutual benefits, as well as practices that
may, unbeknownst to those who participate in them, maintain forms of
oppression such as racism and sexism, signal group solidarity of the
sort relevant to collective responsibility.



A third approach here is to pick up on *shared attitudes* among
group members as something that renders the group itself an
appropriate site of collective responsibility. The attitudes taken to
be relevant here are generally those that both produce serious harm in
society and that require acceptance by many individuals in a community
together in order to be effective, e.g., attitudes such as racism,
sexism, and anti-Semitism. May (1987), McGary (1986), Marilyn Friedman
(Friedman and May 1985) and others cite these attitudes as enough to
render groups such as "men" and "white
Americans" collectively responsible for the oppression of women
and black Americans in some, but not all, cases. Other defenders of
collective responsibility, e.g., Peter French, refrain from going this
far on the grounds that the groups in question are not organized
enough to be capable of sustaining a sense of moral agency that is
genuinely collective (French 1984).



All three of the above approaches take us in different directions.
Hence, they are sometimes thought to be competing. But they all rest
on a general distinction between aggregate and conglomerate
collectivities. An aggregate collectivity, Peter French writes, is
"merely a collection of people" (French 1984, p. 5). It is
not, from the perspective of most of those now writing on collective
responsibility, an appropriate site of collective responsibility. A
conglomerate collectivity, on the other hand, is an
"organization of individuals such that its identity is not
exhausted by the conjunction of the identities of the persons in the
organization" (French 1984, p. 13). It is, from the perspective
of most of those now writing on collective responsibility, an
appropriate site of collective responsibility, since, unlike an
aggregate collectivity, it supplies us with a moral agent capable of
purposeful action.



While most of those who defend collective responsibility as a moral
construct adhere to this distinction in general, they do not all agree
on what counts as an aggregate collectivity in practice. Indeed, there
is considerable disagreement among those now writing about collective
responsibility (including some who take the above three approaches)
about two particular kinds of groups that appear to some to be
aggregative groups. One of these kinds of groups is the mob. The other
is what Virginia Held calls a "random collection of
individuals." Neither of these kinds of groups has a
decision-making procedure in place. Nor do their members show much
solidarity. Hence, they are usually rejected as candidates for
collective responsibility by many of those who otherwise find the
notion of collective responsibility to be very useful. But there are
those who put forward both groups as appropriate sites of collective
responsibility.



Virginia Held (Held 1970) argues that members of an unorganized group
may be said to be responsible for not taking an action that could have
prevented harm in cases where they could have done something to
prevent the harm together but chose not to do so. Her particular
examples are those of victims of violence who are beaten or killed in
full sight of strangers assembled around them, strangers who are
themselves neither related to the victim nor there together as part of
any group-based project. According to Held, while none of these
individuals may have been able to prevent the violence on their own,
they could have prevented it if they had organized themselves into a
group, i.e., cooperated with at least some of the others. Hence, they
can as a group be blamed for the victims' suffering and/or
death.



Held acknowledges here that holding a random collection of individuals
responsible for harm is more difficult than holding an organized group
responsible for it, since the latter, unlike the former, has a method
for deciding how to act, whether it is a voting procedure or a set of
hierarchical authority relations. But, she argues, we can still hold
the former group, i.e., that which she calls a random collection of
individuals, responsible for the violence done to victims, since, if
they had tried, they could have come up with such decision-making
procedures themselves. "In the foregoing examples," she
writes, "we can say that the random collection of individuals
was morally responsible for failing to transform itself into an
organized group capable of taking action rather than inaction"
with respect to the prevention of harm. (Held 1970, p. 479.)



Mobs are often thought to be the last groups that we should be tying
to hold collectively responsible. For, they completely lack
decision-making procedures, their members are seemingly not related,
and they are often chaotic and irrational. But, Larry May (1987),
Raimo Tuomela (1989), and others argue, we can nevertheless hold mobs
collectively responsible if at least some of their members contribute
directly to harm and others either facilitate these contributions or
fail to prevent them. For, in these cases, all mob members are
"implicated" in mob action, even if not all of them
produced specific harms or organized together to do so. Tuomela (1989,
2005, 2006), much like Le Bon (1896) before him, argues that both
crowds and rioters are appropriate sites of collective responsibility
by virtue of the fact that they perform their acts as members of a
group, even if they do not think of themselves as doing so.



> 
> Crowds and rioters ... are without much or any structure (and
> divisions of tasks and activities) ... with respect to the goals
> and interests of the group. ... But they can be said to act in
> virtue of their members' actions. ... Thus in a riot the
> members of the collective typically perform their destructive actions
> as *members* of a collective without acting on its behalf.
> (Tuomela 1989, p. 476.)
> 



Interestingly enough, in both of these cases--mobs and what Held
calls random collections of individuals--the groups in question
may not be as unrelated as Held and others suggest they are. Indeed,
it may be precisely because these groups are made up of individuals
who *become* *related* to each other in the process of
producing harm together (even though they were initially strangers)
that they are now potentially appropriate sites of collective
responsibility. Stanley Bates suggests as much in his own arguments
that Held has presented us with a group that is neither as random nor
as disconnected as the term "random" normally suggests,
but that is "related" to the extent that group whose
members share a particular challenge and are capable of communicating
with one another (Bates 1971).



Two aspects of the debate about random collections have resurfaced in
recent years in two related debates about collective moral
responsibility. The first is the importance of group *inaction*
when it comes to some cases of collective moral responsibility. The
second is the ability of disorganized groups to constitute the kind of
moral agents that can be held morally responsible for not acting.



The matter of omissions turns out to be particularly challenging for
those who want to hold disorganized groups morally responsible for
anything, since, as Joseph Metz (2021) points out, it is hard to see
how an individual contributes anything to a collective omission to
prevent harm if she could not have made a difference to that
harm's coming about (or at least not on her own). But, Metz
argues, we can scale things up to a model of group capability and
point to the ability of a group of individuals who did nothing to,
say, prevent global warming, and use that ability to say that they
could have acted together to prevent the harm.



Metz may well be right here. But the ability of a collective to
prevent harm is only one condition of its collective responsibility in
cases where the collective did not act. Also necessary is that the
collective have been *morally expected* to act.



Where do these moral expectations come from? The most commonly cited
source of them is a *collective obligation* on the
collective's part to prevent harm. David Copp (2020) underscores
the controversial nature of such an obligation and rightfully insists
that it be justified in general.



Not surprisingly, a collective obligation to prevent harm is not all
that difficult to justify in the case of *organized*
collectives (whether we are talking about actions or omissions), since
in these cases we can reference group identity, inter- and intra-
group relationships, moral commitments, and promises, as well as
expediency. In *Group Duties*, Stephanie Collins (2019)
explores the various ways in which we might justify collective
obligations in these cases; she also draws out the implications of
them for individual group members.



In "How Much Can We Ask of Collective Agents?", Collins
(2020) goes on to explore the scope of collective obligations and
defends them against claims of over-demandedness.



In cases of yet-to-be-formed collectives, collective obligations are
more difficult to justify, since the contours of the collective are by
nature fuzzy and there is no clear collective moral agent to be
pinpointed. But there have been efforts to justify collective
obligations in these cases nevertheless. Interestingly enough, they
have generally focussed on *group capacity*. In Violetta
Igneski's words (Igneski, 2020), "[W]hen there is evidence
that a group of individuals has the capacity to prevent harm or a
wrong and the individual members are aware (or should be aware) of
this, they have a duty, as a group, to prevent the harm or
wrong" (p. 447).



As we shall see in Section 7, things may not be quite so simple. For,
even if a group has the capacity to act if organized, there are other
factors that need to be taken into consideration before we can posit a
collective obligation and make a subsequent claim of collective
responsibility. One of these considerations is whether the prevention
of the particular case of harm in question ranks high on the list of
the many cases of harm prevention that require the group's
attention in a situation where choices have to be made. Another is
whether, given other demands on the group, including the well being of
the group itself, it would be fair to expect the group to pursue this
particular project (and hence take it on as a collective
obligation).



Moreover, even in cases where we agree that the group *should*
take on the project as a collective obligation, we still face a
further challenge, namely, that the groups we are talking about here
are not (at this point) organized to the point where they can act.
Hence, even if we can *expect* them to act and they would be
able to do so if they were organized, they are not at this point able
to d oso. How, we have to ask, can we transform a disorganized
collective into one that is organized enough to be associated with a
collective obligation (and hence collective responsibility)? What
might motivate such a transformation? Igneski (2020) gestures to the
place of individual moral agents with duties of their own as a
starting point for getting the requisite collective organized. We
discuss this possibility more fully in Section 7, where the
transformation in question becomes key to the coherence and
workability of forward looking collective responsibility.



Suffice it to underscore two things here. First of all, when it comes
to traditional, backward looking, collective responsibility, we need,
at the very least, to be able to locate a group that is capable of
being construed as a collective moral agent, that could have been
expected to prevent the harm in question (by virtue of, say, having a
collective obligation to do so), and that was capable of acting in the
ways required. Second, it is much easier for a collective that is
organized to meet these conditions than a collective that is not.
Third, in order for a collective that is not organized to meet these
conditions, it may have to rely on individual members to organize it,
individual members who are motivated in some way to do so *qua*
individual moral agents.



In almost all of the above discussions of collective moral
responsibility, the groups being held morally responsible for harm are
made up of those individuals who either caused the harm themselves or
refrained from preventing it at the time it occurred. But in recent
years, a number of efforts have been made to hold groups morally
responsible for actions performed by earlier generations. The case of
slavery tends to take center stage here and is often accompanied by
arguments for reparations. While such efforts have generally taken
place in the legal arena, they have not been excluded entirely from
contemporary philosophical discussions of collective responsibility.
Indeed, in recent years, a variety of philosophers have set out to
ascribe moral responsibility to groups whose present members were not
even alive when the bad actions in question were carried out, even
though, as Janna Thompson points out, "not being born when an
injustice took place seems to be a very good reason for denying any
responsibility" (Thompson 2006, p. 155).



How can we possibly hope to hold groups morally responsible for the
bad actions of previous generations? Farid Abdel-Nour (Abdel-Nour,
2003) argues that community solidarity is sufficient to render at
least some kinds of groups morally responsible for the harms brought
about by earlier generations, especially if there is a high level of
cross-generational identification and pride in one's
ancestors' deeds.



Not surprisingly, these kinds of arguments run into trouble when
questions of agency arise. For, while the existence of solidarity and
identification may allow us to talk about a group over time and even
label its actions morally wrong,they do not allow us to posit the kind
of agency that is required of moral responsibility as traditionally
understood. For, as Michael Bratman shows in his own work on
collective responsibility, the latter requires, not only that
individuals share intentions but that they *interact*. (See
especially Bratman 2000).



While most of those writing on collective responsibility seem to agree
with Bratman here on the necessity of interaction, not all do. Linda
Radzik (Radzik 2001) claims that we need only show that existing group
members benefit from a past injustice to hold them responsible for it.
Larry May makes similar claims throughout his work, including in his
arguments that men are collectively responsible for rape and whites in
the U.S. are collectively responsible for racism (May and Strikwerda
1994).



What place does benefiting from harm have in the ascription of
collective responsibility? As Janna Thompson (2002, 2006) points out,
to benefit from a harm is not the same thing as to cause it. Hence
benefit--as when men benefit from sexism and whites from
racism--does not appear to be an appropriate source of collective
responsibility for the past actions of others. But it might be an
appropriate source of collective responsibility for the
*prolongation* of the harm and/or its consequences into the
future. In other words, it might be an appropriate source of
collective responsibility for present and future, if not for past,
injustices--including injustices that began with earlier
wrongs.



Moreover, while groups of persons might not be good candidates for
moral responsibility for past injustices, particular kinds of
collective entities--e.g., states, corporations, and organized
religions--might be. For, the latter have decision-making bodies,
executive processes, and belief systems that extend over time. Surely,
positing such a collective entity would be very helpful in the case of
reparations for slavery in the U.S. and elsewhere. As Maeve McKeown
(2021) argues in her study of collective responsibility and
reparations, backward looking reparations for racial abuses
can--and should--be justified on the basis of state
liability over time. Janna Thompson (2006) argues therefore that they
can be understood as legitimate sites of moral
responsibility--although it is not clear that they have the kinds
of agency that we normally associate with moral responsibility.



How, if they are not moral agents, can Thompson or anyone else speak
of groups such as states, corporations and organized religions, as
morally responsible? Thompson feels comfortable speaking of these
groups as morally responsible for harm on the grounds that they are
*like* moral agents. According to Thompson, "whether they
count as real moral persons or only act as if they were, it seems that
we are, at least sometimes, justified in judging these collectives
according to the standards that we apply to moral persons"
(Thompson, 2006, p. 158).



But it is not clear that *likeness* is strong enough to sustain
the nature of these groups as moral agents of the kind that we
normally associate with moral responsibility. For "acting like a
moral agent" is not the same thing as being a moral agent. (And
if one really is a moral agent then there is no need to go to the
lengths of specifying likeness.)



We suggest below that the unlikelihood that groups are really moral
agents does not mean that the latter cannot be held morally
responsible for harm. But it does mean that we have to re-think the
kinds of moral responsibility that we associate with groups in such a
way that moral agents of the Kantian kind are not necessary.


## 4. Can Collective Responsibility be Distributed?



*Collective responsibility* refers to the responsibility of a
collective entity, e.g., a corporation, a nation state, or a club, for
harm in the world. *Shared responsibility* refers to the
responsibility of group members for such harm in cases where they
acted together to bring the harm about. Collective responsibility is
associated with a single, unified, moral agent. Shared responsibility
is associated with individual moral agents who contribute to harm as
members of a group either directly through their own actions or
indirectly through their membership in the group.



Contemporary moral and political philosophers are generally careful to
distinguish between collective responsibility, on the one hand, and
shared and individual responsibility, on the other. But they do not
leave individual moral agents behind altogether. Indeed, after
analyzing collective responsibility as part of group morality, they
frequently place individual moral agents back at the center of their
attention in an effort to discern what collective responsibility means
on the level of individual moral actors. Is it possible, they ask, for
individual members of a group to be collectively responsible for
group-based harms in cases where they did not directly cause it? In
cases where they did not do anything to stop it? If so, under what
conditions?



While those who answer these questions tend to focus on the
transferability of collective responsibility and its relationship to
individual moral agency in general, they do not ignore concrete
historical examples in which the moral responsibility of particular
groups of individuals for harm is in question. Indeed, almost all of
those who write about collective responsibility and the question of
distribution place such concrete historical examples of harm at the
center of their analyses of collective responsibility in an effort,
not just to understand collective responsibility as an abstract
construct, but to discern whether or not particular groups of
individuals in history can be held morally responsible for harms that
their groups caused, whether those groups are ethnic groups
("Germans"), nations ("America") or racial
groups ("Whites").



Both Karl Jaspers (1961) and Hannah Arendt (1987), as well H. D. Lewis
(1948), were clearly concerned in their writings on collective
responsibility about whether or not the German people can legitimately
be held collectively responsible for World War II Nazi crimes. So,
too, were Sanford Levinson (1974), Richard Wasserstrom (1971) and
others who produced their own arguments about collective
responsibility in light of the Nuremberg trials. The My Lai killings
of the Viet Nam War, along with the Kitty Genovese murder and
corporate scandals of all kinds, influenced much of the philosophical
work done on collective responsibility during the 1970s and 80s,
including that of Peter French, Larry May, and Virginia Held, and
while it is only recently that group-based oppression such as racism
and sexism have come to be of interest to those writing on collective
responsibility, they now figure importantly in the writings of Larry
May (1987 and 1992), Howard McGary (1986), Marilyn Friedman (Friedman
and May 1980), Anthony Appiah (1987), Derrick Darby and Nyla
Branscombe (2012 and 2014), and Eva Boodman (2022).



In all of these discussions, the question is whether the whole
community--or large parts of it--can be held responsible for
the harms produced by particular group members in cases where not all
group members caused the harm directly. Is it appropriate to hold all
Germans responsible for the deaths of extermination camp victims
during WWII? all Americans for the atrocities of the Viet Nam War? Can
we legitimately blame all men for the gender-based oppression and
sexual violence that women experience in all societies? Can we blame
all whites for the racist treatment of blacks in the U.S.? What about
members of these groups who go out of their way to stop the harm? Are
they excused from blame because they tried to reform their communities
or are they, too, responsible for the harm in question by virtue of
their group membership?



While the arguments made in this context tend to be tied to particular
cases of group-based harm, they are for the most part designed either
to establish general criteria for distributing collective
responsibility among group members or to demonstrate that collective
responsibility cannot in the end be distributed at all. The latter
arguments frequently proceed as follows: While collective entities
generally act through their individual members, their actions do not
*coincide* with their members' actions. Nor is their
moral agency merely the moral agency of their members or the moral
agency of group representatives. Instead, such agency is--if it
is to be genuinely *collective* moral agency--an agency
that is attached to the collective itself and hence not the kind of
thing that can be distributed across group members or, for that
matter, attached to anything other than a collective itself. In other
words, such agency is the kind of thing that necessarily has
collectives, and not individuals, as its subject matter.



Peter French makes such an argument himself in *Individual and
Collective Responsibility* (1998). But he cautions that the
non-distributional character of collective responsibility does not
mean that individual members of the group that is collectively
responsible for harm are themselves blameless. Indeed, he claims, many
of these group members will be morally responsible for all sorts of
harms that their group causes.



> 
> [I]t should be noted that from 'Collectivity *A* is
> blameworthy for event *n*, and *A* is composed of
> *x*, *y*, and *z*,' it would be
> presumptuous to conclude that *x*, *y*, and *z*
> do not warrant any blame for *n*, or that *x*,
> *y*, *r* *z* is not himself blameworthy in the
> case of *n*. My point is that such judgments assessed on
> members of the collectivity do not follow necessarily from judgments
> of collective blame (French 1998, p. 25).
> 



The above claim clearly makes sense if we are talking about keeping
collective responsibility in tact *qua* collective
responsibility in our efforts to ascribe it in practice. But we might
want to loosen things up here a bit and suggest that collective
responsibility is *the basis* upon which we ascribe
responsibility to individual group members for harm that the group
itself caused. In other words, we might want to suggest that
individual group members can take collective responsibility into
themselves as persons, in which case collective responsibility changes
form and becomes something closer to personal responsibility, albeit
personal responsibility that exists only because one's
collective is responsible for harm. In many cases, this is what those
in philosophical circles who are concerned with the question of how to
distribute collective responsibility seem to have in mind. How do they
attempt to distribute collective responsibility?



In *The Question of German Guilt*, Karl Jaspers (1961)
distinguishes between moral guilt that is based on what one does and
moral guilt that is based on who one is. He argues that the latter,
which he calls "metaphysical guilt", can be distributed to
all members of a community who stand by while their fellows produce
harm, e.g., murder Jews. In this context, to be morally blameworthy
for harm is largely a matter of belonging to an "evil"
community without asserting one's own moral powers over the
community to cleanse it of such evil. According to Jaspers,
"[t]here exists a solidarity among men as human beings that
makes each as responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the
world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his
knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can do to prevent them, I too am
guilty" (Jaspers 1961, p. 36).



Jaspers has several contemporary followers, including Larry May and
Juha Raikka (Raikka 1997), who choose to express Jaspers' notion
of metaphysical guilt as "moral taint", a notion that
emphasizes, among other things, the extent to which, in Anthony
Appiah's terms, we are "dirtied" by association with
our community's harmful actions. Appiah himself is very
reluctant to apply the language of moral taint in general and does so
only in particular cases where there are strong causal connections
between individuals and harm. May, on the other hand, finds moral
taint in many places and goes as far as to tout the utilitarian
virtues of distributing collective responsibility widely. According to
May, "seeing one's own moral status as interrelated to
that of one's fellow group members will negate the tendency to
ignore the most serious moral evils: those which can only be thwarted
by the collective efforts of the community" (May 1987, p.
253).



Methodological and normative individualists tend to reject the notion
of metaphysical guilt on two related grounds. The first is that it
severs the link between responsibility and control, especially in
cases where the group membership being invoked is one that individuals
cannot possibly choose, e.g., membership in racial, ethnic or national
communities (For a very interesting assessment of this claim, see:
Radzik 2001). The second is that the metaphysical notion of guilt
violates the liberal ethic of what Rawls calls the "separateness
of persons". According to Rawls, in ascribing responsibility we
have to consider persons separately and focus on their own actions so
as not to violate principles of justice, principles of justice that
for Rawls themselves begin with the value of discrete individuals
(Rawls 1971).



While not all liberal individualists agree with Rawls'
particular claims here, they do agree with Rawls that, at the very
least, individual group members have to be faulty in some way in order
to be held collectively responsible for harm. Joel Feinberg's
theory of group liability is often taken as a starting point of
discussion in this context. According to Feinberg, in distributing
collective responsibility, we need to focus on two kinds of cases:
cases in which all members of a collective share the same fault or
cases in which all members of a collective contribute to harm but at
different levels. In both kinds of cases, Feinberg stresses, there
does not need be a direct link between the individual being held
responsible and the harm, but there does need to be the sharing of
faultiness.



> 
> Various faults can exist in the absence of any causal linkage to harm,
> where that absence is only a lucky accident reflecting no credit on
> the person who is at fault. Where every member of a group shares the
> same fault, but only one member's fault leads to any harm, and
> that not because it was more of a fault than that of others, but only
> because of independent fortuities, many will be inclined to ascribe
> collective liability to the whole group (Feinberg 1968, p. 687).
> 



Feinberg himself is willing to ascribe collective responsibility to
group members for such harm in some cases, although, he makes clear,
in doing so we need to shift our attention away from strict liability
to a softer kind of social blame on grounds of fairness. He concerns
himself with three kinds of cases in particular, namely, those in
which large numbers of individuals are independently at fault; those
in which the harm is caused by a joint undertaking of numerous persons
acting cooperatively, and those in which the harm is ascribed to a
particular feature of the common culture which is self-consciously
accepted by or participated in by members of the group. Feinberg is
willing to accept the possibility of ascribing collective
responsibility in all three kinds of cases. But he cautions that we
need to proceed on a situation-by-situation basis, since to ascribe
collective responsibility in cases such as these requires not only
that we locate genuinely shared faults but assess various
incommensurable dimensions of individual contributions, including
degrees of initiative, importance of assigned task, levels of
authority, etc.



Gregory Mellema (2006) provides a very useful way of assessing
different levels of individual contribution by distinguishing between
six different ways in which individuals can be complicit in
wrong-doing. According to Mellema, individuals can induce or command
others to produce harm. They can counsel others to produce harm. They
can give consent to the production of harm by others. They can praise
these others when they produce the harm. They can fail to stop them
from producing it.



A second way of tackling the distribution question in this context
that does not seem to violate the principle of individual freedom is
to look, not just at the particular role that individuals played in
their community's production of harm, but at how much freedom
the individuals had to distance themselves from the community that has
done wrong. Here we might want to use voluntariness of membership as a
criterion of responsibility. Jan Narveson (2002) does so himself in
his generally skeptical work on collective responsibility. Narveson
argues that in thinking about the responsibility of individuals for
group harms we need to be careful to distinguish between four
different kinds of groups, namely: those that are fully voluntary;
those that are involuntary in entrance but voluntary in exit; those
that are voluntary in entrance but involuntary in exit; and those that
are voluntary in neither respect. As Narveson makes clear,
responsibility is diminished, if not eradicated, as we go down this
list.



Narveson clearly takes an individualistic perspective here. Hence, he
is able to address the questions of individual freedom and personal
responsibility with relative ease. Not surprisingly, things get
somewhat more complicated when we start to think about individuals,
not only as participating in groups, but as taking their identity from
groups. Karen Kovach (2006) contends that in some cases, individuals
align themselves with their groups--Kovach is concerned with
ethnic groups in particular--to the extent that they see the
group's agency as an extension of their own. In these cases,
Kovach contends, we can distribute collective moral responsibility to
all members of the group because of what she calls "moral
alignment".



"Moral alignment" cannot of course be a simple matter of
identification if it is to sustain collective moral responsibility.
For, identification does not implicate an individual in either the
intentions or the actions of the group with which she identifies.
Hence, Kovach finds it necessary to insist that if individuals are to
be held collectively responsible for group harms that they be
understood as having "acted out the view of themselves as group
members" or as having "performed" the group
identity.



While such an insistence goes far in showing how collective
responsibility might be distributed to all members of a group for harm
that the group produced in particular cases, e.g., in cases such as
genocide or ethnic cleansing where ethnic identity is everything, it
is not clear that the responsibility in question is the kind that we
normally associate with moral responsibility. For, while "acting
out" or "performing" a group identity may contribute
to harm in cases such as these, it is not the same thing as
*doing* something that contributes to that harm. In other
words, it does not signal moral agency--unless one asserts
one's identity knowing that it will lead to harming others, in
which case it is the act of assertion, not identification, that is
doing the work here.



Interestingly enough, one of the major points of agreement among those
now writing about collective responsibility is that responsibility
cannot be distributed to those group members who openly resist or
fight against their communities' bad actions or policies. See
here, for example, the arguments of Joel Feinberg (1968), Peter French
(1998), Howard McGary (1986), J. R. Lucas (1993), and Michele
Moody-Adams (1994). While the above writers, who find collective
responsibility to be a compelling moral construct in general, differ
in particular respects, they all agree that it would be wrong to
ascribe responsibility to dissenters or, in other words, that if one
tries to fight harm one should not be held responsible for it. McGary
makes his own claim here in terms of what he calls the
"dissociation condition", according to which a person is
exempt from collective responsibility in cases where one's
community caused harm if he or she dissociates him or herself from the
action of the community by opposing its bad actions or policies
(McGary 1986).



But there are some who do call for the distribution of collective
responsibility to individuals even in cases where these individuals
actively opposed their community's wrong doings. Juha Raikka,
for example, claims that the only way that opposition can exonerate
those who, say, live in a society that systematically pollutes the
environment or depletes resources, is if they are able, by dissenting,
to avoid supporting the system that does these things (a condition
that, Raikka acknowledges, is very hard to meet). According to
Raikka,



> 
> [o]pposing an evil practice cleans one's hands only on the
> condition that it does not require supporting another evil practice.
> ... In the end, even those who oppose evil practices may be
> blameworthy for those practices. A single member of a group may have
> acted as he or she, all things considered, ought to have acted, but
> still share responsibility for the group's evil practices.
> (Raikka 1997, p.104.)
> 



Raikka claims in this context that dissenters can be morally
blameworthy even if they cannot control the system that implicates
them in evil. Hence, he finds it necessary to do two things that not
only place him squarely in the camp of Karl Jaspers and other
advocates of metaphysical guilt but that are very telling with respect
to contemporary philosophical debates about collective responsibility
in general. The first is to subtract from the set of conventionally
invoked criteria of collective responsibility a criterion that the
majority of those now writing about collective responsibility take
very seriously, namely, the ability of individuals to control those
things (whether actions or harms) for which they are being blamed. The
second is to detach moral blameworthiness from the will of discrete
individuals (where traditional, Kantian notions of agency place it)
and to locate its source in the greater community of which the
individuals deemed guilty are ostensibly a part.



Both of these moves force us to acknowledge that, in the end, the
various differences that exist among contemporary philosophers with
respect to the coherence and applicability of collective
responsibility as a construct have their source, not just in competing
theories of intentions and actions, but also in competing notions of
moral blameworthiness. While neither defenders nor critics of
collective responsibility generally take on the nature of the moral
blameworthiness that they put at the center of our attention, they do
make clear that for some of them the traditional, Kantian standards of
moral blameworthiness still prevail and that for others the
appropriate standards of moral blameworthiness take us beyond the
wills of discrete individuals to the structure of guilty
communities.


## 5. Alternative Approaches to Collective Responsibility



Moral Responsibility has traditionally been understood to entail
moral--and not just social or legal--blameworthiness and
moral blameworthiness has, during the modern period, been understood
to be an aspect of an individual's own moral agency rather than
a judgment that we ourselves make on the basis of our own social and
legal standards. Hence, those who search for the conditions of moral
responsibility generally insist that an agent has herself
caused--freely willed--that for which she is being held
morally responsible. Marion Smiley (1992) argues that this has not
always been the case but is rather a modern development.



Not surprisingly, the kind of free will that is required of the modern
notion of moral responsibility--contra-causal freedom--is
difficult if not impossible to locate in practice. So, too, is the
"softer" notion of free will preferred by
compatibilitists. Hence, when contemporary philosophers turn their
attention to the conditions of moral responsibility in practice, they
frequently zero in on what they take to be one of free will's
key components--intentionality--and ask: Under what
conditions can we say that an agent intended *X*?



Smiley (1992) argues that having an intention is neither equivalent to
free will nor sufficient to ground the modern notion of moral
responsibility (as distinct from its Aristotelian counterpart).
Suffice it to point out here that contemporary philosophers who write
about collective responsibility place intentionality at the center of
their attention and because they have accepted (consciously or
unconsciously) the modern notion of moral responsibility, they
associate it with a unified moral self that is capable of controlling
outcomes.



But, as we have seen in Section 2, such a unified moral self might not
be possible in the case of collective entities. Where, then, does that
leave us? Critics of collective responsibility assume that if such a
unified moral self is not possible in the case of collective entities,
collective moral responsibility does not make sense. But such an
assumption may be premature and in the end not warranted. For, if we
were to develop an alternative notion of collective moral
responsibility, i.e., one that does not attempt to mimic its (modern)
individualist counterpart, we might not have to insist on such a
unified moral self. What might such an alternative notion of
collective moral responsibility look like?



Three things suggest that we have a lot more creative freedom in this
context than we now realize. First of all, contrary to the assumptions
of many contemporary philosophers, the modern notion of moral
responsibility is not moral responsibility *per se*. Instead,
it is a distinctly Kantian notion of moral responsibility that has at
least a trio of respectable counterparts, namely, the Aristotelian,
Christian, and pragmatist notions of moral responsibility (Smiley
1992).



Second, while many contemporary moral philosophers may in the end
prefer the Kantian notion, we cannot dismiss these others simply
because they do not live up to Kantian standards. Nor, for that
matter, can we designate these other notions of moral responsibility
as non-moral or as "merely sociological" simply because
they do not conform to what Kantians see as "the moral
realm". Instead, we have to make room for the above notions of
moral responsibility--and perhaps others still--in our
discussions of collective responsibility.



Third, given its association with discrete individuals, the Kantian
understanding of moral responsibility would seem to be especially out
of place when it comes to collective responsibility. For, moral
responsibility as Kantians understood it is not something that we just
*happen* to associate with individual moral agents. Nor is its
notion of moral blameworthiness just *incidentally* applied to
individuals. Instead, moral responsibility as put forward by Kantians
is *by nature* associated with individual moral agents. So,
too, is the notion of moral blameworthiness that grounds it. Indeed,
the latter is best defined as *individual moral
blameworthiness*.



All three points should be liberating for those who want to re-think
collective responsibility in ways that render it both possible and
appropriate to groups. The first suggests that there are other notions
of moral responsibility available to us. The second makes clear that
these other notions of moral responsibility cannot be dismissed simply
because they do not conform to the Kantian notion of morality. The
third points to the need to move beyond what is by definition a notion
of *individual* moral blameworthiness and to figure out how
groups might be understood as morally blameworthy *qua*
groups.



What might it mean for groups to be morally blameworthy? What kind of
causation would be required to sustain a notion of group moral
blameworthiness? How might we put these two things--group moral
blameworthiness and causation--together in this context to
constitute an alternative way of thinking about collective
responsibility that is both possible and appropriate to groups?



In recent years, a small group of moral philosophers has begun to ask
these questions and in doing so has provided us with intriguing
alternatives to the traditional understanding of moral responsibility.
In his own re-thinking of collective responsibility, Kenneth Shockley
(2007 and 2016) sets out to replace the Kantian notion of moral
blameworthiness with a looser notion of "being at fault"
that allows us to talk about a particular collective as
"deserving of some kind of punishment apart from that meted out
to its members for their role in harm" (p. 452). Such punishment
might mean "eradicating the groups themselves or dismantling
part of them. Likewise, it might take the form of reducing the
strength of bonds between individual members or ...
de-institutionalizing group norms" (p. 452).



Neta Crawford (2007, 2013 and 2014), who also distances herself from
the Kantian notion of moral blameworthiness, points to the importance
of recognizing that collectives, as distinct from their members, can
do morally bad things--in some cases through the actions of their
members--by virtue of the particular kind of group that they are
and how they are organized. Crawford's particular concern here
is with military groups whose soldiers end up killing innocents as a
result of either their rules of engagement or the kinds of weapons
that they use. What sense does it make to say that such military
groups, as distinct from their members, are morally blameworthy for
the deaths of these innocents?



Crawford argues that while it makes no sense to consider a military
group morally guilty in the sense of having a tainted soul, it does
make sense to consider that it is in at least some respects a morally
bad organization that deserves punishment. Not surprisingly, such
punishment has to be appropriate to organizations, as distinct from
individuals, if it is going to ground collective moral responsibility.
Hence, Crawford chooses to view punishment here as a matter of forcing
a collective to apologize, make amends, and change.



The "change" here frequently amounts to either eradicating
parts of the group in question or changing those aspects of the group
that lead it to produce harm. In the case of a morally blameworthy
military group, it means "reducing the likelihood of systematic
atrocities and avoidable accidents by reviewing and revising the
choice of weapons and rules of engagement ... and apologizing and
making amends when systematic atrocity occurs" (Crawford 2007,
p. 212).



In other cases, the punishment associated with a morally blameworthy
collective may amount to eradicating the group altogether or to
forcing it to give up important aspects of itself. The Nazi
regime--or any other regime whose purpose is to destroy a race of
persons--would presumably fall into the first camp. A government
or business club that excludes persons of color and/or women as part
of its raison d'etre would presumably fall into the second.



What kind of causation or agency is required by moral blameworthiness
of this kind? Since we are not talking about a Kantian notion of moral
blameworthiness, we do not have to go as far as to insist on free will
or focus all of our attention on the possibility of a unified moral
self. Nor as such do we have to make sense of a group's having
freely willed something bad. But, unless we want to ground moral
blameworthiness in pure utility, we do have to assume, at the very
least, that the collective in question has *produced* the
harm.



Not surprisingly, not just any kind of production will do here. At the
very least, the collective has to play what Shockley (2007) calls an
"eliminable role" in the production of harm--even if
that role is primarily one of providing the conditions under which
members of the collective carry out the harmful actions. In other
words, the collective has to be necessary to the harm's
production by virtue of what Shockley calls its "coordinating
control" over members.



How can we understand such control? In the case of corporations, we
can focus on the way in which the norms of the collective determine or
shape particular paths of behavior, as well as on how incentive
structures and patterns of discipline lead individuals to act in
harmful ways. Shockley finds many of these things at work in the case
of Enron. According to him, "[t]he norms operative within the
membership of Enron controlled for the climate of secrecy and
doubt" (Shockley 2007, p. 449).



Shockley assumes here that the collective is morally responsible for
harm because it exerts "coordinating control" over what
happens in the group. But he does not excuse individual members from
moral blameworthiness in the process. Nor, for that matter, does he
allow for the possibility that individual members may together bring
about harm without having acted in a morally blameworthy fashion
themselves. Indeed, he insists on individual members having acted as
such if collective moral responsibility is to be coherent. In cases
where collectives are morally responsible for harm, "the
collective serves as an enabling condition of individual blameworthy
agents to perform harmful acts" (Shockley 2007, p. 442).



Shockley is wise to point out that the moral responsibility of a
collective does not preclude the moral responsibility of its members.
But he may go too far in including the moral blameworthiness of
individual members in collective moral responsibility itself. For,
there are--even according to Shockley's own criteria of
coordinating control--cases of collective moral responsibility in
which individuals either do nothing wrong but together bring about
harm within a collective or do harmful things but are excused from
moral blameworthiness by virtue of their inability to do otherwise.
Mobs are a case of the first kind. Neta Crawford's soldiers are
a case of the second.



Moreover, as argued in Smiley 2010, if we are truly concerned about
collective moral responsibility, rather than about the moral
responsibility of individuals who belong to collectives, we do not
have to insist that individual members have performed actions that
render them morally blameworthy. Instead, we have to insist only that
the collective, by virtue of its very nature as the particular kind of
collective that it is, has led individual members to produce harm that
they could not have produced themselves. For, it is the moral
blameworthiness of the collective itself, rather than that of its
members, that constitutes collective moral responsibility.



While associating collectives with moral blameworthiness is difficult,
it is not, as we have seen, impossible. Indeed, by both reimagining
moral blameworthiness in the context of groups and developing
alternative notions of collective agency that allow us to locate such
moral blameworthiness, we can move toward a coherent and empirically
feasible practice of collective moral responsibility. Two recent
efforts to defend collective moral responsibility appear to be
particularly promising in this context. The first involves
appropriating P. F. Strawson's reactive attitudes model of moral
blameworthiness for the purpose of showing how a collective might be
construed as morally blameworthy *qua* collective. Gunnar
Bjornsson and Kendy Hess (2017) pick up on Strawson's approach
in their own work on collective moral responsibility and ask whether
corporations and other collective entities can have the requisite
reactive attitudes to be held morally responsible for bringing about
harm. They answer in the affirmative and argue that collective
entities can have the capacities associated with guilt and
indignation, as well as the relevant epistemic and motivational
capacities to be blamed.



The second effort zeros in on the motivational capacities of groups
associated with reason-giving. Here the argument is that while
collectives may not have the kind of free will associated with
individual moral agents, they do have the capacity to formulate
reasons and act on them. Silver (2022) argues that it is this capacity
to respond to one's reasons and to be motivated by them that
renders collectives self-directed in a way that lends credence to our
ascriptions of collective moral responsibility to them.



Presumably, not all groups which are appropriate sites of moral
responsibility *should* be blamed. How, if at all, can groups
which are appropriate sites of collective moral responsibility, in
general, avoid blame in particular cases? While, as Andres
Garcia (2021) argues, collective moral responsibility is not itself
inherently unfair in ways that early critics such as H. D. Lewis
(1948) claimed, it can be unfair in particular cases. In some of these
cases, its unfairness will be a matter of a group's not having
made a sufficient contribution to the harm for which it is being
blamed. In other cases, it will be a matter of the group's not
having known what was going on. In these latter cases, we confront the
possibility that the group can make a plea of ignorance to avoid blame
in the way that individuals do. A plea that as Smiley (2016) points
out, needs to be assessed with various standards of fairness in
mind.



Not surprisingly, the possibility of group-based ignorance is itself
controversial. Anne Schwenkenbecher (2021) articulates several
different kinds of group-based ignorance and goes on to argue for
collective epistemic obligations. Sade Hormio (2018) explores how
group-based ignorance is structured, as well as maintained, within
organizations and provides us with a framework for distinguishing
between acceptable and unacceptable excuses in the context of
group-based blame. While such efforts face the same kinds of
challenges faced by all efforts that treat groups as moral agents,
they signal the possibility of yet another alternative approach to
collective moral responsibility (and a very promising one at that) by
treating collective moral responsibility as at least shaped, if not
designated by worldly practices such as excuse-giving,


## 6. Collective Responsibility and the Question of Consequences



When is it appropriate to hold a group responsible for harm? When is
it appropriate to refrain from holding a group responsible? As things
now stand, we generally assume that to hold a group--or, for that
matter, an individual--responsible for harm is simply to
establish that he, she, or it is responsible for the harm, and as such
we do not generally find the above question especially challenging.
Indeed, we often assume that we can answer it by simply reiterating
the conditions of collective responsibility itself.



But to hold an agent responsible for harm is not simply to establish
that he, she, or it is responsible for the harm. Instead, it is to
make the agents' responsibility known both to them and to the
rest of the community or, in other words, to publicize their
responsibility as part of a social or legal practice of accountability
in particular contexts with particular purposes in mind.



The differences between these two things--the act of
*holding* an agent responsible for harm and the agent's
*being* responsible for it--are worth underscoring. While
*X*'s *being* responsible for harm is a matter of
what *X* has done, our *holding* of *X*
responsible is a matter of what we do with our knowledge of
*X*'s behavior. The former is ostensibly a moral fact
about *X*. The latter is an act that we ourselves perform as
part of a social or legal practice of accountability.



When are we justified in performing such an act of accountability?
Since holding agents responsible for harm sheds a negative light on
them and frequently results in calls for compensation and/or
punishment, we generally insist on taking *fairness* seriously
in this context and, in our efforts to take fairness seriously, we
generally require *accuracy* with respect to the facts of
responsibility. Indeed, we often combine these two conditions and say
that it would not be fair to hold an agent responsible for harm if he,
she, or it was not *really* responsible for it.



But fairness is not always just a matter of factual accuracy when it
comes to holding groups responsible. Instead, it can be--and
often is--a matter of making sure that we do not in our holding
of agents responsible discriminate between equally responsible agents.
In other words, it can be--and often is--a matter of
treating like cases in the same fashion so as not to be
discriminatory. Hence the emphasis that we now see being placed by
post-war tribunals on making sure that if collective responsibility is
ascribed to particular groups it is ascribed to all groups according
to general rules.



As it turns out, we do not always treat like cases in a similar
fashion. Nor, for that matter, do we always place fairness above all
else. Indeed, we sometimes choose to discriminate between cases that
appear to be the same. Moreover, we do so in some cases on
self-consciously consequentialist grounds that we find to be
justified.



In many of these cases, we are concerned with whether or not we can
bring about positive consequences in the world by holding particular
groups responsible. (Would these groups behave better if we did? Would
others follow suit? Would harm be prevented?) In other cases, we are
concerned with consequences of a decidedly more negative sort. (Would
holding particular groups responsible for harm lead to greater
animosity among groups? create resentment in the community? stand in
the way of peace?)



Interestingly enough, those who are concerned about responsibility in
philosophical circles are frequently hesitant to enter into a full
blown consequentialist debate about when we should hold particular
agents responsible in practice. (We suggest why this may be so below.)
But they do often make clear that they have particular consequences in
mind when, in an off-handed fashion, they assess collective
responsibility in practice. In the case of individual responsibility,
these consequences tend to be positive and include the reinforcement
of norms associated with moral agency. In the case of collective
responsibility, they tend to be both positive and negative.



While defenders of collective responsibility do not always distinguish
between the consequences of holding particular groups responsible in
practice and the value of collective responsibility *per se*,
they do make clear that we can do important things in the world by
holding particular groups responsible for harm. Among other things, we
can raise consciousness among groups about what they are doing. We can
get them to stop harming others. We can reinforce social norms that
prevent such harm from occurring in the future. And we can make clear
to the world that those being harmed are worth taking seriously.



List and Pettit (2011), as we saw in Section 2, make clear that
holding groups responsible for particular kinds of harm not only
"lets us discern the true contours of the moral and political
world we inhabit" (List and Pettit 2011, p. 185), but provides
incentives for change among group members (p. 168), and conditions
them to behave better in the future (p. 157). Likewise, it can provide
the basis for institutional reform in cases where collective acts were
hitherto invisible.



What about the negative consequences that might follow from holding
particular groups responsible for harm? Not surprisingly, the most
commonly cited of these consequences are those associated with the
freeing of individuals from personal responsibility in both private
and public life. In some cases, the negative consequences thought to
follow from collective responsibility are a matter of moral degeneracy
and/or the avoidance of just punishment. In other cases, they are a
matter of the erosion of liberal ideals and/or threats to democratic
governance.



Not surprisingly, these arguments have been taken in a variety of
directions over the years. Garrett Hardin's early work focused
on the squashing of individual initiatives associated with collective
responsibility (Hardin 1968). So, too, did the works of many others
during the Cold War. Contemporary liberals tend to be less vehement
than Hardin with respect to the ways in which collective
responsibility undermines individual moral agency. But they, too,
worry that individuals will not take responsibility for harm that
their group is being held responsible for as well. Moreover, there is
some historical evidence for their concerns.



Richard McKeon, in an essay that rarely finds its way into
contemporary work on collective responsibility, provides us with
important insights into the ways in which the replacement of
collective responsibility with personal responsibility in the West was
politically, as well as morally, crucial to the development of
liberalism. According to McKeon, the replacement of collective
responsibility with personal responsibility meant not only that
individuals could exercise moral agency as individuals but that the
state would no longer be as necessary as it once was, since
individuals could now take responsibility for governing themselves
(McKeon 1957).



But, of course, we cannot, on an a priori basis, treat personal and
collective responsibility as mutually exclusive. For, there is always
the possibility of bringing them together and doing so in ways that
enhance both. Robert Goodin (Goodin 1998) suggests what such an
integrated system of responsibility might look like in the context of
a welfare state. List and Pettit underscore how individual and
collective responsibility might co-exist on a more general level.
(List and Pettit 2011, pp. 121-122)



One of the most interesting critiques of the practice of collective
responsibility put forward by a contemporary philosopher is that of
Mark Reiff (2008). Reiff concedes that holding particular groups
responsible for harm can do good things in the world, e.g., deter
these groups from performing harmful actions in the future, aid us in
bringing about social order more generally, and provide communities
with a basis for justice. But he makes clear that holding groups
responsible for harm can also lead to both the escalation of violence
and the watering down of moral strictures. Indeed, he claims,
"some of the most heinous crimes in human
history--including the Nazi's Final Solution and genocide
in Rwanda--have been facilitated if not motivated by a belief in
collective responsibility" (Reiff 2008, p. 234).



Reiff's primary focus when discussing collective responsibility
and violence is on what can go wrong when we hold groups responsible
for harm over time in contexts where each side in a conflict defines
the other as collectively responsible for historical wrongs. According
to Reiff, in such cases, we are bound to encounter endless cycles of
retaliation, as well as the presentation of murderous acts as acts of
punishment. Moreover, we are bound to encounter these kinds of things
not because the actors in question lack a sense of morality but
because of the particular kind of moral righteousness that claims of
collective responsibility allow those who want to retaliate against
their enemies in the name of a higher morality.



Since Reiff's focus here is on moral righteousness, we might
expect him to view the practice of holding groups responsible as
bolstering morality (albeit morality of a peculiar and skewed kind).
But he does not do so. Instead, he argues just the opposite, namely,
that claims of collective responsibility can--and often
do--undermine both the importance of morality in general and the
effectiveness of punishment in particular. Here his focus is primarily
on what happens when we *internalize* claims of collective
responsibility.



Reiff argues that when we internalize claims of collective
responsibility, we may come to feel more responsibility--or
responsibility for more things--than we used to feel. But we are
less likely to follow the dictates of morality. For, while the range
of our responsibility has been expanded, the ties between
responsibility and morality have been weakened. Indeed, these ties may
in some cases be totally severed. How might this happen?



Reiff does not claim, as those before him did, that the practice of
collective responsibility allows individuals to avoid personal
responsibility and hence reduces both their moral agency and their
culpability for harm. Nor does he, as his predecessors did, understand
the problem in question as a matter of too little personal
responsibility in general. Instead, he understands the problem as a
matter of individuals feeling responsible for harm even when they have
done nothing wrong. (Presumably, the moral dictates that Reiff is
concerned with here are those associated with an individual's
own actions.) According to Reiff,



> 
> [the] problem is not that people are less likely to feel
> responsibility for their own misconduct if they feel that others will
> be held collectively responsible for harm. ... The problem is
> that collective responsibility encourages people to feel responsible
> and subject to punishment even when they have behaved correctly.
> Hence, punishment is no longer an incentive. (Reiff 2008, p. 241)
> 



In the end, he concludes, "[e]mbracing collective responsibility
undermines the very concept of responsibility itself, for it
encourages people to disregard rather than obey the structures of
morality" (Reiff 2008, p. 242).



Interestingly enough, most of those who offer consequentialist
critiques of collective responsibility--and again they are almost
always concerned with the practice of holding groups responsible for
harm rather than with the facts of responsibility *per
se*--do so on a surprisingly general level. In other words,
they do not provide us with a set of criteria for thinking about the
value of holding groups morally responsible in particular situations.
But they could do so very productively on the basis of the more
general arguments that Reiff and others provide. Moreover, they could
do so without violating their own agent-based approaches to moral
responsibility. For, as we have suggested above, being morally
responsible and holding others morally responsible are not the same
thing. Nor do they have the same relationship to consequences. While
consequences may be irrelevant to moral responsibility itself, they
may be absolutely key to our choice to hold--or not to
hold--agents morally responsible in practice.


## 7. Forward Looking Collective Responsibility



While the majority of those now writing on collective responsibility
continue to focus on the kind of responsibility explored above, i.e.,
backward looking collective responsibility, a small but growing number
of philosophers have chosen to focus instead on forward looking
collective responsibility. Two things appear to explain such a shift
in focus. The first is the recognition that collective entities such
as states, corporations, and movements may now be the only agents
capable of preventing particular kinds of suffering in the world. The
second is the publication of David Miller's *National
Responsibility and Global Justice* (Miller 2007), Iris
Young's *Responsibility for Justice* (Young 2011), and
Peter French and Howard Weinstein's edited collection
*Forward Looking Collective Responsibility* (French and
Weinstein 2014).



What is forward looking responsibility? Forward looking
responsibility, like its backward looking counterpart, refers to a
collective agent's responsibility for a particular state of
affairs in the world. But, unlike its backward looking counterpart, it
does not make responsibility out to be a matter of having caused an
existing (morally problematic) state of affairs. Instead, it makes
responsibility out to be a matter of being morally charged
with--responsible for--bringing about a state of affairs
which we as a community consider to be better. Hence, when we ascribe
forward looking responsibility to a collective agent, we do not tell a
causal story about the agent. Instead, we specify what the agent
should be doing in the world.



Not surprisingly, we often end up pointing to the particular tasks
that we think the agent should be carrying out and refer to these
tasks as the agent's *responsibilities*. But we need to
be careful here. For forward looking responsibility is not simply a
matter of carrying out tasks. Instead, it is a matter of being morally
charged with bringing about a state of affairs that is, by virtue of
the ascription of forward looking responsibility itself, now part of
the agent's moral business. Hence, in discussions of forward
looking responsibility, we do not simply say of an agent that the
agent has responsibilities X, Y, and Z. Instead, we say that the agent
is responsible for making sure that a particularly desirable state of
affairs X, Y, or Z comes into existence.



Since forward looking responsibility requires that an agent bring
about a particular state of affairs, it has a lot in common with
*being morally obliged* to do something. But the emphasis is
different. So, too, is the level of flexibility associated with moral
agency. In cases where we use the language of moral obligation, we
signal that the agent has to perform a particular act. In cases where
we use the language of responsibility, we allow the agent to use its
own judgment in deciding how to bring about the desired state of
affairs. Likewise, we charge it with exercising its judgment
wisely.



What is morally salient about forward looking collective
responsibility? Backward looking collective responsibility, as we have
seen, is morally salient because of its association with
blameworthiness. Forward looking responsibility is not completely
removed from considerations of blame--we sometimes blame those
who fail to take their responsibilities seriously--but it is not
morally salient because blame sometimes enters the picture. Instead,
it is morally salient because we think that such responsibility may,
if taken seriously by those who are being held responsible, help to
bring about a desirable (or better) state of affairs in the world.



The requirements associated with forward looking collective
responsibility are not as steep as those associated with its backward
looking counterpart. Nor are they as metaphysical. For, unlike its
backward looking counterpart, forward looking collective
responsibility is not designed to capture an agent's will.
Instead, it is designed to distribute moral labor. Hence, while
forward looking collective responsibility only works with purposeful
agents, it does not require either a "collective mind" or
that an agent be able to form "we intentions". Instead, it
requires only that the agent be able to *do something* in the
world and *take responsibility* for making things happen.



While forward looking collective responsibility is thus not saddled
with controversial metaphysical conditions in the way that its
backward looking counterpart is, it is not without its own
controversies. In some cases, these controversies are about what kinds
of groups are capable of forward looking collective responsibility.
Bill Wringe (Wringe 2014) and Felix Pinket (Pinket 2014) cover these
controversies nicely. In other cases, they are about how--on what
normative basis--we can ascribe forward collective looking
responsibility in practice. What principles should we invoke to do so?
How should we order these principles?



Interestingly enough, not everyone thinks that such principles are
necessary. Indeed, a few key figures in the field still assume that
forward looking (remedial) responsibility is grounded in causal
responsibility for the harm now deemed in need of a remedy. David
Lyons (Lyons 2004) feels comfortable assuming that because the U.S.
was causally responsibility for poverty and racism in the past, it now
has a responsibility for doing everything that it can to create
opportunities for the poor and minorities. David Schmidtz (Schmidtz
1998), who, in contrast to Lyons, takes the poor to be causally
responsible for many of their own problems, also moves directly from
causal to remedial responsibility. So, too, does Iris Young (Young
2011).



But, again, we need to be careful. For, forward looking (remedial)
responsibility is not ascribed for the purpose of gauging moral agency
per se. Instead, it is ascribed for the purpose of ensuring the
success of a particular, morally justifiable, project, e.g.,
alleviating poverty, hunger, or racism. Hence, when it comes to
forward looking responsibility, we need to think about who is in the
best position to do something about the harm, and when we do, as
Robert Goodin (1998) points out, we may--and probably
will--discover in some cases that the agent who caused the harm
is not the agent who is now able to remedy it in practice.



None of this suggests that we should abandon judgments of causal
responsibility altogether when ascribing forward looking
responsibility. Indeed, as we suggest shortly, such judgments may
become relevant to matters of fairness in ascribing remedial
responsibility. But it does suggest that we cannot move directly from
causal to remedial responsibility, i.e., ground the latter exclusively
in the former. Likewise, it does suggest that we need intermediary
considerations. Carol Rovane (Rovane 2014), Tracy Isaacs (Isaacs 2011;
Isaacs 2014), Ludger Jansen (Jansen 2014), Derrick Darby and Nyla
Branscombe (Darby and Branscombe, 2014) and Marion Smiley (Smiley
2014) all make this clear from their own theoretical perspectives.



How, then, are we to ascribe forward looking collective responsibility
in practice? At the very least, we need to make room for various kinds
of practical judgments, including those that draw attention to who is
best able to remedy the harm in question and at what cost. But such
practical judgments, which are very important, are not the only
non-causal matters that we need to take into consideration when
ascribing forward looking responsibility. Indeed, as recent debates
concerning our responsibility for remedying health care problems at
home, starvation abroad, and environmental disasters everywhere
attest, judgments about the relative value of our projects in the
world are also crucial. So, too, are judgments about fairness and
obligation.



Not surprisingly, we incorporate judgments about relative value
primarily in cases where we cannot pursue all of our
projects--eradicating hunger, bringing up healthy children,
creating jobs, reversing global warming--at once or even at all.
But we make these judgments in other kinds of cases as well, including
those in which a supposed cause of harm, say, capitalism, is also the
cause of something that we value. In these cases, we may think that
our choice to focus on a particular state of affairs is
uncontroversial. But it is in fact steeped in our own priorities.



Take, for example, Young's ascriptions of responsibility for
alleviating poverty, hunger, and violence around the world cited
above. Young may be correct that capitalism (or at least unregulated
capitalism) is causally responsible for these problems. (There would
of course be other agents to consider as well.) But if she is going to
go on to ascribe remedial responsibility to those who benefit from
capitalism--which is what she is concerned to do--then she
has to take into consideration that capitalism (or at least regulated
capitalism) may also be causally responsible for things in the world
that we value, e.g., significant improvements in health care,
education, and food production, as well as the separation of economic
from political power.



Moreover, she has to take these things into consideration because of
the very nature of remedial responsibility itself as organized and
distributed across cases. Remedial responsibility, as we have seen, is
attached to a particular project. (Who, we ask, is responsible for
carrying out this project?) But it cannot be formulated in isolation.
Instead, it has to be formulated with an eye to our other projects.
For, we are limited with respect to both moral energy and resources.
Hence, we have to prioritize our projects as well as to coordinate our
ascriptions of remedial responsibility across them. Likewise, we have
to be aware of the priorities that others, e.g., Young, incorporate
into their own ascriptions of remedial responsibility.



All of this is to suggest that if we want to ascribe remedial
responsibility in a justifiable fashion-- in a way that avoids
arbitrariness and bias-- we will have to argue openly about the
relative value of our projects and proceed with an overview in mind.
What projects, we will have to ask, are most valuable to us and how do
they rank in importance with respect to other projects? Whose needs
and interests are being taken into consideration by these projects?
How might we ensure that everyone's needs and interests are
taken into consideration? What is the relative cost of the projects in
question and how does cost itself rank in importance here?



Robert Goodin defends this kind of pragmatic approach to forward
looking collective responsibility in his arguments for why the U.S.
should be held responsible for providing the poor with welfare
benefits. In distancing himself from the practice of blame, he
writes:



> 
> It is forward-looking, task oriented, collective responsibility that I
> am championing.... There are good reasons for pursuing certain
> sorts of goals through some sort of coordinated, collective apparatus
> like the state....Responsibilities get collectivized simply
> because that is the only realistic way (or anyway, much the most
> effective way) of discharging them. (Goodin 1998, p. 50)
> 



The pragmatic approach to forward looking collective responsibility
gestured to here is very valuable (and sound). But we cannot treat it
in isolation from other approaches. In other words, we cannot simply
replace *causal responsibility* with *capacity for remedying
a problem* as a basis for ascribing forward looking
responsibility. Instead, we have to incorporate other values and
principles into our ascriptions of responsibility. What might they be?
As things now stand, the value of fairness is frequently invoked, if
not thoroughly explored, in this context. So, too, are the values of
citizenship and collective obligation, as well as the principle of a
social contract.



Admittedly, those who invoke the value of fairness in ascribing
forward looking responsibility do not always have the same thing in
mind by the term. Alexander Brown [2009] incorporates judgments about
who caused harm into his arguments about who can fairly be held
responsible for remedying such harm and, in doing so, treats fairness
as a response to causal agency. Brown's concern is with the
behavioral lapses of the poor in a welfare state.



> 
> If a person is causally responsible for becoming an addict, then he
> cannot fairly expect our assistance in getting him off of
> drugs....The government can only be expected to do so much.
> (Brown 2009, p. 151)
> 



Michael Walzer also considers fairness to be very important to
ascriptions of forward looking collective responsibility in a welfare
state. But he does not consider fairness in this context to rest on
considerations of who caused harm. Instead, he considers it to rest on
the norms of communal membership. According to Walzer, a fair
distribution of responsibilities in a welfare state will always come
down to what we owe each other as members of a community--which,
from his perspective, translates into all of those things that will
make communal membership possible among those in the community, e.g.,
financial security, health care, education, peace, and security,
regardless of whether members caused harm to themselves. (Walzer
2008)



Christian Neuhauser, who underscores the importance of distributive
justice in the organization of forward looking collective
responsibility, concurs on the importance of fairness to the
ascription of remedial responsibility. But he takes things in a
somewhat different direction from both Brown and Walzer by treating
fairness as a matter of *doing one's fair share*.
Moreover, Neuhauser places fairness in the context of various
collective action scenarios. Hence, he is naturally led to talk about
fairness as a *motivating force*. "The motivation of
agents to embrace a forward looking responsibility also depends on
whether other actors contribute their fair share". (Neuhauser
2014, p. 246)



While the value of fairness is commonly invoked by those concerned to
locate criteria for ascribing (or organizing or distributing) forward
looking collective responsibility in practice, it is not the only
value or principle in play. Indeed, many of those in the field
continue to look to collective obligations as a basis for remedial
responsibility. In some cases, the collective obligations in question
are thought to be built into the collective itself. (Miller 2007) In
other cases, they are thought to derive from various other norms of
moral and political life.



In her discussion of forward looking collective responsibility and the
prospects of war, Neta Crawford locates the source of these
obligations in the sphere of citizenship. According to Crawford,
"ordinary citizens have a collective moral and political
responsibility to participate in decisions about wars that are
undertaken by their governments and they have a responsibility to
protest unjust wars or immoral conduct during wars." (Crawford,
2014, p. 141) Moreover, they have such responsibility, according to
Crawford, by virtue of their identity as citizens in a democratic
community. Bill Wringe takes such an analysis to the global level
(Wringe 2014), as do many others in the field of global justice,
including David Miller (2007).



Derrick Darby and Nyla Branscombe, in their work on responsibility for
overcoming social, political, and economic inequality, choose to look,
not to the identities of democratic citizens, but to the kinds of
social, political, and economic institutions that democratic citizens
would choose within a Rawlsian social contract, as a basis for
ascribing remedial responsibility. In doing so, they manage not only
to bring both shared interests and rational choice together, but, in
doing so, to make clear what is unique about forward looking
responsibility.



> 
> The shift to a forward looking account of political responsibility
> requires placing greater emphasis on the interest that we all share in
> sustaining the major social institutions that so profoundly shape our
> life prospects....Hence, we should take political responsibility
> for inequality given our vital interest in sustaining the system of
> cooperation and institutions that give rise to both permissible and
> impermissible inequalities. (Darby and Branscombe 2014, p. 133)
> 



Tracy Isaacs, who develops a full-blown account of collective
obligations and their relationship to collective responsibility
[Isaacs 2011 and 2014], points to many of the norms cited above and
emphasizes the centrality of identity. But, interestingly enough, she
does not steer clear of causal responsibility in doing so. Instead,
she offers a sophisticated view of how causal responsibility helps
shape our criteria for ascribing remedial responsibility fairly.



> 
> Agents who are causally implicated and who benefit do indeed bear a
> heavier burden of obligation for alleviating harmful circumstances.
> Where collective obligation is concerned, these connections to the
> harm or wrong doing make some collective agents more obligated than
> others...and play a role in determining the identity of the
> collective agent who has the collective obligation. (Isaacs 2014, p.
> 41)
> 



All of these arguments underscore the cluster of values and principles
that go into ascribing forward looking collective responsibility in
practice. Isaac's work in particular provides a way of bringing
causal responsibility back into play without either blurring the
distinction between backward and forward looking responsibility or
treating the latter as a natural extension of the former. How, if at
all, should we prioritize all of these values, principles, and causal
judgments, in ascribing remedial responsibility? It has been suggested
(Smiley 2014) that instead of treating one of them as primary and the
others as secondary we bring all of them together into a pluralistic
normative account of forward looking collective responsibility.



In doing so, we would undoubtedly make the project of forward looking
collective responsibility out to be more complicated than it now
appears to be in the hands of those who choose one value to place at
the center of our attention in this context. But we would also make it
more sensitive to the various ethical demands that we rightly place on
each other in holding each other responsible for harm in the
world.



What about the practical constraints associated with forward looking
collective responsibility? Two such constraints (or possible
constraints) have come to the fore in recent years. The first has to
do with structured injustice. The second has to do with how we can (or
cannot) move forward in cases where our collective is not yet
organized, i.e., in cases where the kind of collective required for
remedial action, namely one that is capable of acting, still has to be
created or at least organized.



Iris Young introduces the matter of structural injustice in her
arguments for why we should now be focussing on forward looking rather
than backward looking, collective responsibility. According to Young,
we should be focussing on forward looking collective responsibility
because the source of much injustice in the world is located in
social, economic, and political structures, and only forward looking
collective responsibility can deal with confronting these structures
head-on. Robert Goodin and Christian Barry (2021) argue persuasively
against the sharp distinction that Young relies on here between
individualized responsibility for past structural injustice and
collective responsibility for preventing structural injustice in the
future. Moreover, Young herself relies on backward looking causal
histories of various collectives that bring about harm to sustain her
notion of forward looking collective responsibility. Nevertheless, her
insistence on viewing both backward and forward looking collective
responsibility through the lens of structural injustice sets a very
important precedent for future theorizing in the field.



The second practical challenge to the practice of forward looking
collective responsibility pertains to the dilemma that we face when
trying to hold disorganized collectives responsible for preventing
harm in the future that they could, if they were organized, prevent.
The problem is that they are not now organized and hence cannot act as
a collective. A transformation is necessary. But we cannot expect a
disorganized group (say, a mob or a group of persons who are not in
any way institutionally connected) to instigate such a transformation.
For such a group is by definition not organized enough to act as a
collective.



What, then, are we to do? How can we transform a disorganized group
into one that is organized enough to take on a collective obligation
to prevent harm? A promising solution here might be to revisit the
place of individual moral agents in ascribing forward looking
collective responsibility in cases where a group is not yet organized
enough to be ascribed such responsibility. In particular, we might
want to ask how, if at all, individual moral agents might be motivated
and even obligated to create the kind of organized collective that is
needed here.



Not surprisingly, the value of self-interest comes to the fore here,
especially with the recognition that moral agents may have
intergenerational interests moving forward. But we need not rely on
self-interest. Nor need we forgo the possibility that existing moral
systems of a non-utilitarian kind can provide the necessary moral
motivation. Indeed, we may even be able to argue that individual moral
agents in a not-yet-organized collective (that, if organized, could
prevent harm) have a moral duty to create (together) the kind of
collective capable of performing the required actions.



Frank Hindriks takes on this challenge in "The Duty to Join
Forces: When Individuals Lack Control" (Hindriks, 2019) and
elsewhere (Blomberg and Hindriks, 2020). Hindriks argues very
persuasively that we can create the required organized collective if
we can substantiate a duty on the part of the individual moral agents
to join forces: to approach others, to convince them to contribute to
the joint efforts, and to become part of a collective action. This
duty is initially associated with individual moral agents. But,
Hindriks claims, since it focuses on mobilizing others rather than on
preventing harm *per se*, it is "irreducibly
collective" (Hindriks, p. 204).



Whether or not the duty expressed here is "irreducibly
collective" (as distinct from being a fusion of individual and
collective responsibility) it does appear to be a very promising
solution to one of the thorniest problems associated with forward
looking collective responsibility, namely, how to bring organized
collectives about in cases where their existence is crucial to the
prevention of harm.



Suffice it here to underscore three more general points suggested by
efforts such as Hindriks'. The first is that reliance on
individual moral duties and other kinds of individually based
incentives to create new (or newly recognized) collective entities
does not undermine the integrity of forward looking collective
responsibility, but instead makes the latter possible. The second is
that the creation (or recognition) of these new collective entities is
absolutely crucial in cases where we are faced, in Stephen
Gardiner's words (Gardiner, 2017), with "paradigmatically
global, intergenerational and ecological problems such as climate
change" (Gardiner, 2017, p. 22) that require an expanded
community of both concern and action. The third is that when we step
back and ask how these expanded communities of concern and action can
be created, we confront the importance of thinking about individual
and collective responsibility, not as mutually exclusive, but, at
least in some cases, as mutually supportive in both theory and
practice.