Collective Responsibility and Group-Control

Abstract

Collectives are more or less structured groups of human beings. Responsibilitycollectivism is the view that the moral responsibility of at least some such collectives is something over and above the combined moral responsibility of individual group members. This paper focuses on one of the key conditions of responsibility: the requirement of control. It is plausible that this requirement also applies to collective agents and so collective responsibility presupposes group-control. Responsibilitycollectivists have often tried to unpack the idea of group-control as non-causal control. I argue that non-causal control is not an admissible basis for attributing responsibility. Only causal group-control is. This is because non-causal group control does not provide the right kind of information regarding the ancestry of a certain outcome. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the difficulties which arise for responsibility-collectivism if one understands group-control as causal group-control. One of these difficulties is whether causal group-control is consistent with ontological individualism. The second concerns the relationship of group-control and individual control. I argue that the first difficulty is manageable, but only at the price of having to accept a solution to the second difficulty which runs counter to the original aim of the responsibility-collectivist of characterizing irreducible collective responsibility as compatible with individual responsibility. Worse still, responsibility-collectivists may have to choose sides in other areas of social ontology as well. This further raises the price of this position.2

Why Change the Subject? On Collective Epistemic Agency

“…In general, responsibilitycollectivists think the following can be true: You have allocated all the moral responsibility there is to be allocated at the individual level, and still you have not allocated all the responsibility there is to be allocated. If you want to allocate all the responsibility there is to be allocated, you have to ascribe responsibility to the group as a group as well (Szigeti 2014b). According to Claim 4, it is in this robust sense of collective responsibility that some groups are responsible for group-level irrationality.…”

Exploitation and Joint Action

“… We grant that if irreducibly collective agents (as opposed to joint agents) are possible (for some doubts, see Szigeti , ), then collective agents (e.g., corporations) can also be exploiters. It is also possible that, say, the cooperation between multinational and its subcontractor becomes formalized and structured to an extent that they can be said to form an irreducibly collective agent (we thank an anonymous reviewer for calling our attention to this possibility).…”