Corporate Responsibility and Judgment Aggregation

Abstract

Acknowledgments: I am grateful for comments from and discussions with Matthew Braham,

The Duty to Join Forces: When Individuals Lack Control

“…A collective agent is constituted by its members (Uzquiano 2004;Hindriks 2012). This supports the idea that it has causal powers of its own (Baker 2007).…”

“…of dimensions. Some groups are established from the inside by means of group identification; others are externally determined, for instance by their oppressors (Young 1990;Pierik 2004;Hindriks 2017). Some are organized, but many are not.…”

“…I argue, however, that its responsibility cannot come apart from those of its members. Proponents of irreducible collective responsibility commonly defend their view in terms of 'the Irreducibility Thesis' (Hindriks 2009): a collective can be responsible for an action or outcome without any members bearing a correlative responsibility. Even though it involves irreducibly collective responsibility, the Irreducibility Thesis does not apply to the duty to join forces.…”

Distributing States' Duties

“…Hindriks ; Mäkelä . Even those who emphasise structural injustice accept that individuals ‘contribute’ to such injustice—even if the individuals are not blameworthy.…”

Distributing Collective Moral Responsibility to Group Members

“…Hindriks has argued that the apparently excused member agents in Copp's and Pettit's excuse and "discursive dilemma" cases might be faulted in ways that Copp and Pettit have not recognized, namely for failing to be responsive to the right reasons in the case. 23 They would for Hindriks be open to the Scanlonian charge of "faulty self-governance." 24 For members to regard the rules that aggregate their judgments and yield the final collective action (e.g., voting procedures or premises that will connect their judgments) as fixed and beyond consideration is irresponsible, since it implies a lack of sensitivity to the basic moral issue in the relevant situation.…”