Distributing Collective Moral Responsibility to Group Members

Abstract

There has been considerable recent interest in the "collective moral autonomy" thesis (CMA), that is, the notion that we can predicate moral successes, failures, and duties of collectives even if there are no comparable successes, failures, and duties among members.1 One reason why this position looks appealing is because the opposing individualist position seems to have what we might call an accounting problem. Individualists maintain that only individuals can be subjects of moral success, failure, or duty; however, many reasonable judgments about collective actions include moral information on a scale and of a stringency that it does not seem possible to predicate even of the duties of members who have steering power in the actions of the collective. Here I offer a paradigm for thinking about responsibility judgments in organized collective cases to help individualism solve its accounting problem, and allow us to account within a strict individualist perspective for moral information that ostensibly favors CMA. I begin by presenting this problem of moral accounting in organized collectives, and the cases and arguments that favor CMA ( §1).

Duties of Group Agents and Group Members

“… David J. Zoller () equates group blameworthiness with the blameworthiness of members with “steering power.” By contrast, my analysis does not distinguish steering from non‐steering members (this is surely a difference in degree rather than kind), and does not hold any members blameworthy for the group failure as such (because steering members rarely have the entire group under their thumb). This is not to deny that members with more steering power will likely have a higher degree of blameworthiness than members with less steering power, when both members fail to discharge their membership duties.…”