I, Volkswagen

Abstract

Philosophers increasingly argue that collective agents can be blameworthy for wrongdoing. Advocates tend to endorse functionalism, on which collectives are analogous to complicated robots. This is puzzling: we don’t hold robots blameworthy. I argue we don’t hold robots blameworthy because blameworthiness presupposes the capacity for a mental state I call ‘moral self-awareness’. This raises a new problem for collective blameworthiness: collectives seem to lack the capacity for moral self-awareness. I solve the problem by giving an account of how collectives have this capacity. The trick is to take seriously individuals’ status as flesh-and-blood material constituents of collectives. The idea will be: under certain conditions that I specify, an individual can be the locus of a collective's moral self-awareness. The account provides general insights concerning collectives’ dependence on members, the boundaries of membership, and the locus of collectives’ phenomenology.

Intelligent machines, collectives, and moral responsibility

“…Fischer and Ravizza, for example, state them as the "freedom-relevant condition", which concerns control, and the "cognitive condition", which includes both the matter of what is aimed at and what is known. 3 As Fischer and Ravizza point out, each of these conditions (in their formulation) "corresponds roughly to … negative excusing conditions" for saying someone is not responsible; either they were not in control of what happened, or it was not what they were aiming at, or they acted in ignorance. 4 A similar formulation is also described by Pettit, as value sensitivity, having the control necessary to choose between actions, value relevance, being an autonomous agent who may face making a choice of action that may inflict harm or do good, and value judgement, having understanding and evidence necessary to make judgements.…”

Zombies Incorporated

“…There are two, interrelated, points where philosophers recently have appeared to start to go beyond even beefed‐up functionalism. While most writers on the topic doubt that corporations can have phenomenal consciousness, some have recently started to question whether this is so, instead allowing that they do (Collins, 2022; Huebner, 2013; Kramer, 2021; Schwitzgebel, 2015; Silver, 2019). Sometimes for this – and sometimes for other – reasons, philosophers have also started to wonder whether corporations in fact might count as having the same status as moral patients as individuals (cf.…”

“…Schwitzgebel (2015) and Silver (2019) suggest this explicitly. A number of other authors suggest that corporations may have phenomenal states that are experienced via their members (Collins, 2022; Schmid, 2014; Tuomela, 2006). And List (2018) and Huebner (2013) deny that corporations actually have phenomenal consciousness, yet remain open to that possibility if corporations were to exhibit sufficient complexity.…”

“…One way to make corporate phenomenology more intelligible is by suggesting that it is experienced by the members of the corporate agent, but still such that it belongs to the corporate entity. The members are the loci of the group experiences: they could experience things as pluralities, in the we‐mode, or as members of groups taking up the group's point of view (Collins, 2022; Schmid, 2014; Tuomela, 2006). However, in these cases the collectives are not conscious in the right way: it is still their members who fundamentally have conscious experiences.…”

“…Much recent work on corporate agency sees corporate agents treated as having rather robust ontological and moral standing (e.g. Björnsson & Hess, 2017; Collins, 2022; French, 1979; Gilbert, 1989; List & Pettit, 2011; Tollefsen, 2015; Tuomela, 2013). Many think they display the same kinds of mental states, rationality and self‐awareness as individual agents – or functional analogues thereof – so they count as agents in general and moral agents in particular.…”