Isaacs, Tracy (2011). Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
My main interest in collective action contexts is normative. I advocate a two-level theory of moral responsibility in which there is moral responsibility at both the individual and the collective levels. The normative conclusions I wish to establish rest on the claim that intentional action also operates on two levels, the individual and the collective. I understand intentional collective action as the intentional action of collective agents. In this chapter, I outline my view of collective agency by distinguishing between two types of collective agents—organizations and goal-oriented collectives—and giving an account of their respective intentional structures. My purpose is to establish that collectives may have intentions and are capable of intentional action.
Where moral agency is concerned, we can roughly distinguish between two species of views, those of the individualists and those of the collectivists.
| Individualists | Collectivists |
| Individualists believe that agency and responsibility are ascribable only to individual human agents and that claims about collective agency and collective responsibility are reducible to claims about the agency and responsibility of individuals. | Collectivists subscribe to a less reductionist and more holistic view, arguing that claims about collective agency and responsibility do not reduce to claims about the agency and responsibility of individuals. |
For both action-theoretic and normative reasons, I claim that collective agency and collective moral responsibility operate at a different and indispensable ontological and explanatory level from individual agency and individual moral responsibility. According to my view, claims about collective moral responsibility neither entail nor are derivable from claims about individual moral responsibility. Furthermore, collective intentions, from which the agency of collectives derives, are not simply collections of individual intentions, and collective actions are not simply collections of individual actions. Collective actions are the products of the intentions of collectives. My goal in this chapter is to explain my account of collective agency. I begin with a brief discussion of types of collectives.
1.1 Types of Collectives
1. organizations Highly structured collectives, which I call organizations, are the most obvious and least contestable candidates for moral agency. Corporations, nonprofit groups, nations, universities, departments of philosophy, and professional sports teams are all examples of organizations. Of the four examples I outlined in my introduction, only one—the Canadian Red Cross—clearly falls into this category. The perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda, contributors to global warming, and participants in oppression are not clearly members of organized groups. If the Rwandan genocide was perpetrated by a collective, it was not a collective we can rightly call an organization. The reason we cannot is that although there was a common goal and a coordinated effort, there was not an organizational structure of the sort possessed by the collective that perpetrated the Holocaust.
2. a goal-oriented collective A different kind of collective from an organization, one that fits the profile of the collective that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide, coalesces [더 큰 덩어리로 합치다] around action toward the achievement of a particular joint goal. I call this kind of collective a goal-oriented collective. It is important that the goal be a joint goal, the obtaining of which requires, or at least is pursued through, collective action. Goal-oriented collectives do not need to be as enormous as the one that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide. Two people going for a walk together, three people painting a house together, a thousand people doing the wave at a sports event, or tens of thousands of people “Running for the Cure” all constitute goal-oriented collectives.
3. a collective lacking a specific goal Global warming might be best construed as a harmful cumulative consequence of noncoordinated parallel actions. As such, it might well generate collective and individual obligations. I argue as much in chapter 5. But as a consequence of parallel actions, we have no moral or ontological reasons on the basis of which to attribute it to a collective entity.
In the case of oppression, it is tempting to attribute its existence to the behavior of privileged social groups, the members of which are usually beneficiaries of practices of discrimination against others. For example, some like to condemn wealthy white North Americans, especially men, for systemic injustice against the poor or women or members of nonwhite racial groups. I hesitate to identify these kinds of groups as agents. There are compelling arguments, well-represented in feminist scholarship, detailing the importance of recognizing the complex network of privilege and disadvantage at work in oppressive social contexts—we are all members of a multiplicity of social groups, some of which define our privilege, others of which yield disadvantage. Identities are, above all, intersectional. Carving out social groups on the basis of categories that typically delineate privilege and disadvantage is not, therefore, an especially helpful way of isolating collective entities. For this reason, I do not address social groups as such in my analysis of collective responsibility and collective agency.
My view does not, however, require that they not exist. It is consistent with my view that within types of collectives we might include the rough category of aggregates. Aggregates are collections of people that are grouped together because they share some common characteristic. We can think of social groups as a subcategory within aggregates. Later on, I return to this idea of aggregates when I consider what sorts of collective obligations might exist for addressing seemingly insurmountable global problems such as global warming, oppression, poverty, and starvation.
4. a mereological sum The final type of collective entity, which I mention only to set aside, is the type that is nothing more than a mereological sum. A mereological sum is the notional composite of any random collection of things, not necessarily connected in time or space or in any principled way around any purpose and not organized by any structural features or common characteristics. I, my third-grade teacher, and the queen of Denmark are an example. There are no candidate features in a mereological sum of this kind to suggest agency, though of course it is possible that I, my third-grade teacher, and the queen of Denmark could come together as a goal-oriented collective.
Organizations and goal-oriented collectives share a common feature in virtue of which they have agency: a collective intentional structure that gives rise to collective intention and collective action. Their intentional structures qualify them as moral agents insofar as the structures enable them to act intentionally. It is worth noting that the claim that moral agency rests on the capacity to act intentionally does not require that agents are responsible only when exercising that capacity. Much as rational agents have the capacity to act rationally even when acting irrationally, moral agents are capable of acting intentionally even when they are not. Thus, while the capacity for intentional action is important to account for moral agency, the scope of moral agency goes beyond those cases in which agents are acting intentionally. This distinction is important for explaining how some agents are responsible for negligence or omissions. These sorts of cases often involve behavior that is not intentional.
1.2 The Intentional Structure of Organizations
Understanding the Canadian Red Cross as an organization, we can assume structures in which the organizational roles and authority structures are outlined and the organization’s policy—including its mission and goals, as well as procedures for making organizational decisions and for the organization taking action—is articulated. The most familiar articulation of this idea may be attributed to Peter French in his widely read account of corporate internal decision structures.
These structures yield a level of intentional action that is distinct from the intentional action of the individuals who perform their organizational roles. The collective level is distinct, insofar as the organization’s actions flow from its intentions. The individuals’ actions flow from their intentions, and their intentions are not constitutive of the intentions of the organization, even if the individuals’ actions are at least partly constitutive of the organizations’ actions. In the organization case, there is a sharp disconnect between the individuals’ and the collective’s intentions (much sharper than in the goal-oriented collective case, as will shortly be explained).
French: “when the corporate [organizational] act is consistent with, an instantiation or an implementation of corporate [organizational] policy, then it is proper to describe it as having been done for corporate [organizational] reasons, as having been caused by a corporate [organizational] desire coupled with a corporate [organizational] belief and so, in other words, as corporate [organizational] intentional.”
The most significant feature of this analysis is that in order to understand the organizational intention there is no need to refer to the intentions of individuals. The content of their intentions is entirely beside the point. If organizational decisions are taken in the form of votes on motions, for example, it may well be that individuals whose roles require them to participate in the decision cast their votes on the basis of personal reasons. Nonetheless, the decision is the organization’s intention, irrespective of individuals’ reasons for voting as they do. The collective action that follows is the product of the collective’s intention.
It is theoretically possible that an organization might intentionally pursue a course of action that is not the action that anyone in the organizational structure intended that the organization pursue [???]. Compromise is frequently the rule in group decision-making, mandating courses of action that would not be pursued if any one individual were in a position to make an executive decision. Even in cases in which an individual is authorized to make executive decisions, such that this individual’s decisions are the organization’s, the decisions she or he makes qua the organizational role are not always consistent with decisions that would reflect the pursuit of her or his personal interests.
The artistic director of the Stratford Theatre Festival might, for example, have carte blanche to select the full slate of plays for the next season. Assume she has a low opinion of Broadway musicals and would not include them at all if she were at liberty to stage only what she liked. Nonetheless, the festival intends to run at least two such productions each season. They always sell out, and it is part of the festival’s mission to o er a mix of Shakespearean productions and more accessible, crowd-pleasing works, recognizing that there is not always overlap between these two categories. The director’s executive decision is constrained by the goals and mandate of the organization that is the theatre company regardless of the personal tastes of the artistic director. The decision the artistic director makes may legitimately be redescribed as the festival’s decision. However, the director’s intentions at the individual level are not redescribable as those of the festival.
Many who work in institutional settings do not have any sense of investment in what the institution is about, yet as they perform their roles their actions contribute to the actions of the organization. Requiring commitment to a shared goal overstates what is required for collective action to take place in an organization. The policies, procedures, mission, role definition, and structures of authority are what produce intentional action in these settings. Particular members might be completely alienated from the collective goals—perhaps they perform their function just for the paycheck or because they enjoy exercising the specific skills required by their job—yet their actions within their roles might be constituents of the collective actions of the organization.
1.3 The Intentional Structure of Goal-Oriented Collectives
Recall that a goal-oriented collective is a collective whose members come together around the achievement of a particular goal. That goal might be long or short term. Its achievement might involve significant planning or virtually none. The collective might have very many members or just two. The perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide were a goal-oriented collective; you and I making dinner together are a goal oriented collective. In recent years, the majority of the philosophical literature about collective, joint, or shared intention and action has had what I am calling goal-oriented collectives as its focal point. One reason for this focus is the recognition that many cases of collective action that appear to merit moral analysis do not involve highly structured organizations. Another reason for this focus is that the relevant collective actions lend themselves quite readily to an individualist analysis. A number of theorists maintain, for example, that the relevant locus of analysis for these sorts of collective endeavors—from a two-person case of going for a walk together to a many-person case of genocide—is individual intention. Some individualists propose to locate the collectivity in the content of individual intention—in the commitment to a joint goal or the individual’s intention to participate in the collective action aimed at achieving the goal. Under this analysis, a collective intention is not the intention of a collective entity but rather an individual’s intention, albeit one with collective content. If the analysis stopped there, individual intentional agency would be the only real agency there is, and any meaningful attributions of moral responsibility would remain at the level of individuals. These accounts are instructive [유이한], but I do not believe the analysis should stop there. Rather, we should understand the collective intentions of goal-oriented collectives as the collectives’ intentions.
Seumas Miller: distinguishes between “the logical priority of individual actions over joint actions” and the, at times, explanatory priority of collective ends and interests. Collective ends might contribute causally to the formation of individual ends and motivations. Thus, Miller identifies himself as being “in some sense” a holist and notes, further, that his view is “collectivist in complexion” because it acknowledges that both individual and collective activity depend in significant ways on social forms. For all that, Miller’s theory is fundamentally individualist, insofar as the central analytical concept, the collective end, is an individualist notion; a collective end is a species of individual end that “exists only in the heads of individual agents.”
Raimo Tuomela: draws a distinction between conceptual and ontological issues, noting that his theory “is conceptually rather anti-individualistic, even if ontologically it is, if not individualistic, at least interrelationistic and eschews collective agents and actions in a literal ontological sense.” He maintains that “in this account, a group is viewed as a collectively constructed agent that can have goals, beliefs, and so on and that can act, although that is not literally true.” Of the three views I have noted as hybrid, Tuomela’s instantiates the most liberal blending of seemingly irreducibly collective notions (particularly joint intentions characterized by the “we-mode”) and the assertion that none of this elaborate apparatus should be taken as literal.
Tracy Isaacs: committed to a more collectivist than hybrid view; I see no reason to deny the reality of goal-oriented collectives as agents with intentional structures resulting in collective action. They are different, however, from organizations. My purpose is to render plausible the idea that goal-oriented collectives have intentions and intentional structures that transcend the intentions and intentional structures of their members.
We should think about goal-oriented collectives as unities of a special kind. Insofar as the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, we might consider them to be organic unities or organic wholes.
1. One reason for thinking this is simple physical possibility: together we can perform actions we cannot perform alone. I cannot go for a walk together alone. I cannot play street hockey alone. I cannot perform orchestral works alone. Only collectives can be the agents of these actions. Where goal-oriented collectives are concerned, their goals are fundamentally joint. For example, doing the wave at a sports event requires the cooperation of many others, all of whom share the goal.
2. Beyond physical possibility, we need also to recognize that pooling our resources does not just create possibilities for coordination. In many cases, our interactions take us places where no one of us would even think to go alone. For example, two people writing a paper together, as a group, might well end up with a conclusion that neither would have devised on her or his own. Their collective effort yields a result quite different from what they would have come up with independently of each other.
3. A more elusive but arguably significant feature of collectives is the quality of the “chemistry” among the members. Any teacher who has taught the same course several times knows that in some years it is a great success, whereas in others it falls at. This has less to do with any particular member of the class than with how the members combine. One year the class is energetic and enthusiastic. The following year’s group is lethargic and introverted. The goal is the same, but different collectives have di erent characters or personalities.
4. In addition to these considerations, there are facts about identity and endurance through changes of membership. Many goal-oriented collectives—for example the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, the people who do the wave at a sports event, or the participants in the “Run for the Cure” fundraiser for breast cancer research—have the capacity to withstand signi cant changes in membership without their identities being compromised. If there is a strong wave going around the stands and I decide to sit it out when it comes to my section because I am playing with my new smart phone, there is no good argument for establishing that it is a different wave from the one it would have been if I had participated. The success of a particular instantiation of the wave phenomenon does not stand or fall with the participation of any particular contributor.
I make these points as a means of suggesting that goal-oriented collectives are in several ways more than the sum of their parts. This thesis does not require the absurd claim that the parts are irrelevant. It requires only that the manner in which the parts come together is as significant as the parts themselves. I do not believe this way of understanding this kind of collective amounts only to a useful fiction or should be thought of conceptually as merely a manner of speaking. It has metaphysical substance suficient to ground moral agency.
1.3.1 Collective Intention in Goal-Oriented Collectives
I favor an understanding of collective intention as a state of affairs consisting of a complex of appropriately constrained individual intentions, the relationships between them and to the joint goal, and the individuals’ understanding of themselves as standing in relation to others as members of a group in pursuit of a joint goal. Understood this way, the collective intention has independent standing that may, in some cases, constrain how individuals may legitimately participate in the collective activity. Michael Bratman suggests that a shared intention consists “primarily of a web of attitudes of the individual participants” and I concur with the gist of this idea. Nonetheless, our respective views rest on different sides of the individualist/collectivist divide. Bratman understands himself to be o ering a view that is “broadly individualistic in spirit.” I consider my account to be more collectivist, both in spirit and in substance.
The relations between individuals’ intentions and the way individuals understand themselves as standing in relation to others as members of a group are essential features of collective intentions, without which the collective action would not come about. Just as the collectives themselves ought to be understood along the lines of organic unities, so should their intentions be understood similarly. They flow from the collectivity of the collective. They are not simply aggregates of individual intentions. The way the individual intentions combine and the way members of groups understand themselves as members of groups give rise to collective intentions that, in turn, result in collective actions. It would be a mistake to think of 14 this view as reductionistic or as individualistic. It recognizes the collective level as a di erent, though dependent, level of action.
Furthermore, this view does not require that the intentions of goal-oriented collectives are collective mental states or states of consciousness, any more than the intentions of organizations are these things. Some deny collective intentions on the grounds that intentions must be mental states. If that were the case, then the very idea of collective intentions would require a collective mind to house them. For example, Miller claims that intentions must exist in the heads of agents. This gives him an easy way to deny the existence of truly collective intentions: since collectives do not have heads in which intentions may exist, there are no collective intentions. Alternatively, however, we may understand collective intentions as states of a airs, identi able in part by their functional roles. As long as they function at the collective level of action in the same way that individual intentions function at the level of individual action, then we may think of them as intentions.
The first element in the analysis of collective intentional action in goal-oriented collectives is the collective goal. The collective goal is simply the end at which the collective aims. The conception of a collective goal necessarily includes reference to its being intended, because there are no collective goals in the abstract, dissociated from the collective that intends to bring them about. For example, when we intend to make dinner together, our collective goal is to make dinner together; when the audience at the hockey game intends to do the wave, the collective goal is to do the wave; when a group of people intends to commit genocide, the collective goal is to destroy a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group because of their ethnicity, race, or religion; when we intend to dance the tango, our collective goal is to dance the tango; and so on. When we intend something collectively, there is an understanding that we, as a unity, intend to bring it about together. Some collective goals can only be brought about collectively; collectivity is inherent in our understanding of the nature of the action required to achieve them. In the foregoing list, only the goal of genocide is, potentially, not this kind of goal. Not only does international law include statutes according to which individuals may commit “acts of genocide” but also it is theoretically possible that one individual may successfully perpetrate a genocide—we can imagine cases in which a weapon of mass destruction could be deployed against a large target population or cases in which the group an individual intends to destroy has so few members that one person could conceivably destroy it. In fact, it matters little to my account whether a collective goal is inherently collective or only incidentally so. The important feature of it is that the members embrace it as the collective’s goal. In so doing, they understand their contributions in the context of the collective goal.
1.3.2 Can Individual Participants Intend Collective Actions?