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 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.
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.
Held , p. 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 , Raimo Tuomela , 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.
Tuomela , , , much like Le Bon 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. 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.
In almost all of the examples relied upon in discussions of group structure and collective responsibility, the groups in question are made up of living members. 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.
How can we possibly hope to hold groups morally responsible for the bad actions of previous generations? 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 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 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. What place does benefiting from harm have in the ascription of collective responsibility?
As Janna Thompson , 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. 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 morally responsibility for past injustices, particular kinds of collective entities—e.
For, the latter have decision-making bodies, executive processes, and belief systems that extend over time. Thompson 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. 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. 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.
Collective responsibility refers to the responsibility of a collective entity, e. Shared responsibilty 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.
Lewis , 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 , Richard Wasserstrom 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 s 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 and , Howard McGary , Marilyn Friedman Friedman and May , and Anthony Appiah , and Derrick Darby and Nyla Branscombe and 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? 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. 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.
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 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. 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 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 distinguishes between moral guilt that is based on what one does and moral guilt that is based on who one is.
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. 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. 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 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. 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 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. Here we might want to use voluntariness of membership as a criterion of responsibility. Jan Narveson 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.
For, identification does not implicate an individual in either the intentions or the actions of the group with which she identifies. 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. Lucas , and Michele Moody-Adams 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.
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,. 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. Smiley argues that this has not always been the case.
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.
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. Smiley 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.
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 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.
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 incidently 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.
Neta Crawford , and , 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.
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. 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. What kind of causation or agency is required by moral blameworthiness of this kind?
It is good practice to have documents drawn up stating such policies so that all members are clear. Decisions about compensation within the organisation may be the collective responsibility of the board, and there should be a minimum number of members who must attend meetings, so they will hold a collective responsibility to ensure that such standards are met.
Board members must collaborate on resolving issues and making decisions, avoid conflicts of interest, and comply with all laws. There can be tension between the individual responsibilities of board members and the collective responsibilities of the group.
This could manifest itself where respective directors have been chosen because they possess specific expertise but are invited to vote on board issues outside of the expertise. None of this means that individuals do not have individual moral responsibilities and cannot be individually morally guilty. In both the Old Testament and the New Testament we see God deal with individuals with regards to moral responsibility, praise, blame, and punishment.
Human beings have both individual and collective moral responsibilities, and both are significant. But in our highly individualistic culture, it is important to emphasize the fact that there is such a thing as collective moral responsibility and guilt. So if there is such a thing as collective moral responsibility and guilt, what does this mean?
Does this mean that all Americans are guilty of the sins of America? Does this mean that all men are guilty of sexism, even if they are not individually sexist? Does this mean that all white people are guilty of racism, even if they are not individually racist? Such are ideas touted by the proponents of critical theory, which divides society into classes of oppressed and oppressors and sees morality as essentially about dismantling systemic structures of oppression.
According to critical race theory, for example, white people as a whole are guilty of racism, and black people cannot be guilty of racism in any meaningful sense. Critical theory can be a useful tool for unmasking hidden structures of injustice and highlighting the systemic nature of some sins. However, from a Christian perspective, it also has serious problems. Typically, this type of responsibility does not focus on the degree of participation that each member contributes to the overall effort, or the position or rank of each person within the structure of the group itself.
With both approaches, the idea is to focus more on what occurred and less on assigning individual responsibility when that effort either fails or succeeds. This has the advantage of preventing individual personalities from dominating the outcome or the efforts of some members going unnoticed while others are singled out for taking specific courses of action that seem to be responsible for the outcome.
In terms of applications in a business setting such as a company operation or the function of a non-profit organization, collective responsibility requires accountability of all employees involved in a certain function or aspect of the operation.
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