Isaacs, Tracy (2011). Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2 Collective Moral Responsibility
In the previous chapter, I distinguished between two kinds of collectives capable of intentional action—organizations and goal-oriented collectives. I gave an account of their respective intentional structures as a means of giving substance to the claim that collectives’ intentional actions flow from their intentions. The normative picture that follows from this account is quite simple. If, as I have claimed, we may understand collective action as operating at a different level from individual action, then we may understand collective moral responsibility as different from individual responsibility and as being justified by appeal to collective intentions and the actions to which they give rise. Collective moral responsibility is not, therefore, a function of the moral responsibility of individuals. Instead, it is a function of the agency of collectives. The goal of this chapter is to explain, motivate, and defend my account of collective moral responsibility. I begin with my understanding of what collective moral responsibility is.
2.1 What Is Collective Moral Responsibility?
Moral responsibility is the blameworthiness or praiseworthiness that we attribute to agents for their actions. Agents warrant praise when they do the right thing, blame when they do the wrong thing. Collective moral responsibility is the blameworthiness and praiseworthiness of collectives for their actions. No differently from human moral agents, collectives warrant praise when they do the right thing, blame when they do the wrong thing. The responsibility of collectives is not the blameworthiness and praiseworthiness of their members, though collectives’ responsibility does not rule out that some or even all of the members might be blameworthy or praiseworthy for the part they play in collective action. This view of collective moral responsibility requires that collectives be agents capable of intentional action. Chapter 1 explained how we ought to understand the intentions and actions of collectives; their actions can and should be understood in a way that distinguishes them from the actions of their members and from mere events, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. They are distinctive, insofar as they operate at a different level. Collectives exhibit agency because they are capable of intentional action.
The first reason, therefore, that we should take seriously the idea of collective moral responsibility is that organizations and goal-oriented collectives have intentional structures that legitimate the attribution of moral agency to them. These intentional structures do not require that collectives possess minds, brains, or heads in which to form their intentions. They do require us to acknowledge that, for all their dependency on individual agents, the intentions and actions of collectives are different from those of their members.
In what follows, I offer two additional reasons to take the idea of collective moral responsibility seriously. The first reason is action-theoretic; the second is a normative implication of the first.
2.2 Why We Need Collective Moral Responsibility
Some actions have an inherent collectivity, insofar as they can only be performed collectively. These would include playing a symphony, getting married, and doing the wave at a sports event. They require, respectively, an orchestra, a couple, and a crowd in an arena or stadium.
Other collective actions are in fact but not necessarily collective. Some people argue that genocide is like this because, hypothetically, one person could carry out a genocide. By the same token, moving a grand piano might be this kind of act—it is generally a collective endeavor because average or even above average human strength is not up to the task. But we can imagine a hypothetical case in which someone has superhuman strength that enables her or him to lift a grand piano. In addition, a range of everyday activities, such as going for a walk, making dinner, or working in the garden might seem to fall under the category of actions that individuals can perform alone or together with others.
Earlier, I talked about di erent kinds of collective actions. Some actions have an inherent collectivity, insofar as they can only be performed collectively. These would include playing a symphony, getting married, and doing the wave at a sports event. They require, respectively, an orchestra, a couple, and a crowd in an arena or stadium. Other collective actions are in fact but not necessarily collective. Some people argue that genocide is like this because, hypothetically, one person could carry out a genocide. By the same token, moving a grand piano might be this kind of act—it is generally a collective endeavor because average or even above average human strength is not up to the task. But we can imagine a hypothetical case in which someone has superhuman strength that enables her or him to lift a grand piano. In addition, a range of everyday activities, such as going for a walk, making dinner, or working in the garden might seem to fall under the category of actions that individuals can perform alone or together with others. My own view is that, for any action x, doing x together is an inherently collective act. I spend no time defending that view because, in the end, I do not think there is an important distinction between inherently and only incidentally collective acts.When performed, a collective act is the act of a collective whether it is so necessarily or not. For that reason, I do not draw a sharp theoretical line between these categories of collective action. What does matter is that, whether inherently collective or not, some actions are performed by collectives, not by single individuals. Of these acts, at least some of them have moral dimensions and may be evaluated—even ought to be evaluated—in moral terms as right or wrong. To this extent, they are objects of moral responsibility and the agents who perform them may be blameworthy or praiseworthy. In the case of collective actions, it is collective agents who are blameworthy or praiseworthy. The individuals who contribute to the outcome do not—actually cannot—perform or intend the whole act even if they may share the collective goal and contribute to its achievement. The collective intends and performs the action. Therefore, in relation to the act as a whole—that is, in relation to the collective act—only the collective as such is morally responsible.
Here, I want only to establish a claim that is the simple normative counterpart of my claim that collective intentional action takes place at a di erent level from individual actions. Normatively speaking, the different levels of intentional action support different levels of moral responsibility. Attending only to the level of individual action would constitute a loss and leave us incapable of drawing conclusions about moral responsibility at the collective level, sometimes in cases of extreme moral signi cance. Let me say more about this claim, for not everyone will countenance the view that failing to address responsibility at the collective level constitutes a loss.
The lingering question is whether they are correct in this conclusion. I offer three reasons for thinking they are incorrect and that there would indeed be a normative loss. First, it is a metaphysical fact that the collectives in question perform as agents, and for this reason they count as responsible. With respect to this reason, the normative loss amounts to a failure to account for a normative reality: the moral responsibility of a certain type of moral agent, namely, collective moral agents.
The two further reasons address this response. Second, as outlined above, if the individuals and the collective perform different acts, and if the individuals’ acts and the collective’s acts are both morally signi cant, then the collective act is not adequately accounted for by individual assessments of moral responsibility. Returning to the example above, raising $20 million for charity is a moral act of a di erent magnitude from contributing $200.
Finally, the third response to the objection that there is no normative loss invites us to think more carefully about the way individual acts in collective contexts come by their moral features. An individual’s participation in running a race would have no moral quality in the absence of the fundraising context or some similarly morally compelling circumstance. That is to say, the act derives its morally salient features from the fundraising context itself. We might admire people who complete the Boston Marathon, but their race lacks the moral features of those participating in the Terry Fox Run or the Run for the Cure. Taking part in a massive coordinated e ort to raise money for a worthy cause adds a moral dimension to an act that might otherwise have none. The participants’ acts have the additional feature of being “a part of that,” where “that” is an undeniably praiseworthy collective effort. In these cases, we cannot fully capture the moral signi cance of individuals’ actions until we see them in the context of the collective action and its signi cance. Morally speaking, the collective act—whether inherently or incidentally collective—is more fundamental than the acts of the individuals, insofar as the moral weight of the collective act de nes the moral dimensions of the acts of individuals. The claim being made here is that in moral terms, individuals’ contributions to collective acts inherit relevant moral features from the collective action context in which they occur, not the other way around. Thus, the moral assessment of the collective level of action as blameworthy or praiseworthy gives rise to the normative evaluation of individual contributions.
Let us look at one more example, that of genocide. If there is a commonsense understanding of genocide, it would be its characterization as a large-scale atrocity with many victims and involving a great many perpetrators. That is, a successful, nearly successful, or even realistically attempted genocide is perpetrated against a group and carried out by organizations or goal-oriented collectives. Given this understanding of genocide, an individual does not fully perpetrate a genocide even if he contributes to it. We nd the only exceptions in dreamt-up cases in which the mere push of a button would wipe out the target group or in which the relevant group has only a handful of members. In this “ordinary” concept of genocide, we imagine it as a mass atrocity committed by a number of perpetrators over a period of time. We can point to particular genocides, for example, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, which constitute collective atrocities whose moral magnitude is simply not captured by isolating the contributions, no matter how great, of any one participant. Rather, in much the same way that raising $20 million is of a di erent moral order from contributing $200, perpetrating a genocide involving millions of victims is of a di erent moral order from a lesser contribution performed in the context of the whole. Genocide—that is, the destruction of an entire group—is the collective goal toward which the collective aims. As argued above, the act of the individual, intentionally performed as a contribution to the particular whole, derives its moral signi cance and morally relevant description—for example, “contribution to genocide”—from its intentional performance.
I have now provided examples of praiseworthy and blameworthy collective actions and argued that we cannot appreciate the moral magnitude of the collective acts without a normative view at the collective level. In sum, I believe that an overly individualistic account of collective agency does not take the collective view seriously enough. It sidesteps the fact of collective agency, it inadequately captures moral responsibility for collective actions as such—actions whose moral magnitude is frequently of a di erent order from that of the individual acts that contribute to them—and it does not allow a satisfactory explanation of the way individual acts in morally signi cant collective action contexts acquire their moral qualities. The best way to address these concerns, I maintain, is to uphold the distinction between the individual level and the collective level of moral responsibility
2.3 Objections and Replies
1. Collective moral responsibility holds some people responsible for the actions of others
2. Collective moral responsibility punishes innocent individuals
3. Collective moral responsibility precludes individual moral responsibility in collective action situations
4. Collective moral responsibility rei es social structures and other abstract entities
5. Collective moral responsibility requires collective intentions, but collectives cannot have intentions because intentions are mental states, and collectives lack consciousness
6. There is no interesting sense of collective moral responsibility
1-2. Any plausible account of collective moral responsibility will not hold some people responsible for the actions of others. It would be disingenuous to stop there, however; the concerns underpinning the worry are legitimate and worth considering...H. D. Lewis considers the idea of collective moral responsibility to be “barbarous” because he believes that if a collective is responsible, then all of its members must also be responsible...Lewis is entirely correct to claim that there is no necessary connection between being a member of a blameworthy collective and having participated in the wrongdoing. In some cases, many may be innocent.
I advocate a more nuanced view that emphasizes the importance of distinguishing questions of collective moral responsibility from questions of individual moral responsibility in cases of collective action...It does not follow from a collective’s being morally responsible that any given member played a part...a collective can be responsible without all of its members being responsible.
At this point, the individualist would be perfectly reasonable to ask about the relationship between a morally responsible collective and its members. Does being a member of a collective that is, for example, blameworthy have no normative implications at the individual level? Most of us have a strong intuition that when a collective is responsible at least some of its members are also responsible. The intuition stems from our understanding of collective action as involving the acts of individuals. As outlined in the previous chapter, we have every reason to think the actions of individuals contribute to and are in large part constitutive of the acts of collectives. Respecting the intuition does not, however, require a distributive understanding of collective action.
First, even on a two-level view of moral responsibility, it makes sense to think that where a collective is responsible at least some of its members are. Some of them intentionally contribute to the collective’s act and share in the collective’s goal. Second, an often overlooked fact is that the collective and its members are not responsible for the same act. Whereas a collective is responsible for the collective act, individual members are responsible for their contributions, and the degree of their responsibility will depend, in part, on the extent to which they share in the collective’s goals and act with a view to participating in bringing those goals about. not hold true for membership in organizations, particularly in large organizations and particularly for people occupying lower level roles in the organizational hierarchy. None of these observations undermines the claim that simply being a member of a morally responsible collective does not automatically implicate a person in what that collective does even if it might give us reasons to subject the person’s actions to close moral scrutiny. The preceding discussion responds to the objection that collective moral responsibility holds innocent individuals responsible for the deeds of others.
one might worry that it is not possible to punish a collective without punishing its members. If a collective entity such as a nation or a corporation is punished, there may be negative e ects on the innocent as well as on the guilty members of the collective... But it would be wrong to think of all suffering as a form of punishment. If we think of punishment as a retributive response to a transgression, thereby meted out to the guilty party as a matter of desert, it would be a category mistake to claim that the innocent who su er when we punish the guilty are punished for the crimes of the guilty.
Think about the case of an individual murderer whose family may su er if the murderer is punished. That the family members su er does not mean they are being punished for someone else’s crime or that it is unjust to punish the murderer... where collective punishment is concerned, the costs are always going to be borne by innocent members and the collective as such will feel nothing. There is just no getting around it. As the famous line about corporations goes: they have “no souls to damn and no bodies to kick.”... Moreover, much as it makes sense to minimize the su ering of innocents, it bears repeating that the su ering of innocents as a result of either individual or collective punishment does not, itself, constitute the punishment of innocents.
3. if collective moral responsibility does not condemn every member of the collective, then it precludes us from attributing responsibility to any individuals at all... “that is what is wrong with collective responsibility. Precisely because it will not reduce, it precludes you from getting at anybody—all you can do is wave ags and write poems.”... analyzing the actions of individuals as contributions to a larger collective act with moral dimensions is the best way to capture the particular moral features of these individual contributions.
4. The fourth individualist reason for rejecting collective responsibility is related to the third concern that it does not allow us to “get at” individuals... Moreover, this analysis makes no room for systemic injustices or for collective actions. In the case under discussion, there may be no direct or even indirect wrongdoing that is traceable to the “others [who] are also to blame.”... in some cases individuals are not to blame, and understanding the nature of their excusable wrongdoing requires making a moral comment about the nature of a society or culture as a whole... Organizations, as I have de ned them, are highly structured collectives with identities that are independent of their members, and they are not as di cult to identify and de ne as social forces or social structures.
5. collective moral responsibility requires collective intentions, and that intentions are mental states
6. there is no sense of moral responsibility at the collective level that doesn’t just reduce to moral responsibility at the level of individuals... we have a commonsense distinction between the collective atrocity 12 13 14 of genocide and contributions to genocide or acts of genocide at the individual level. Individuals do not perform the collective act even if their actions contribute to it. Moreover, actions for which collectives are responsible ow from collective intentions... What makes it irreducible is that the relations between the intentions of individuals, their respective commitment to the collective goal, and their understanding of themselves as acting together with others who share the goal in order to bring the goal about are essential features of collective intentions.
Aggregating individual intentions does not take seriously the interrelations between the intentions of individuals. Indeed, I argued in the previous chapter that individuals are unable to intend to perform collective actions.
Instead of claiming that in the absence of individual contributions there is no genocide, I highlight the point that in the absence of the context of genocide the individual contributions do not have the moral character that they do.
we cannot adequately account for the respective blameworthiness and praiseworthiness of individual contributions... I do not claim that individual murders or individual acts understood by international law to be acts of genocide are not wrong. Instead, we should say that when they are parts of a collective act of genocide their wrongness is of a distinct kind.
2.4 Conclusion
First, collective acts with moral dimensions require analysis at the collective level because, as collective acts, they are not or cannot be performed by individuals. I deny that there is a theoretically signi cant distinction between acts that are inherently collective and those that are performable by individuals but, in a particular instance, are performed collectively.
Second, in order to account for the moral signi cance of individual participation in collective action situations, it is necessary rst to understand the moral nature of the collective action of which it is a part.