Isaacs, Tracy (2011). Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
4. Individual Responsibility for (and in) Collective Wrongs
The view developed so far—that collective intention, collective action, and collective moral responsibility operate at the level of collectives—suggests that individuals are not responsible for collective actions as such. Specifically, it suggests that, insofar as collective wrongdoing is the fault of a collective agent, not of an individual human agent, individuals are not blameworthy for it. If this is the case, then the two-level view might appear to result in a normative loss because it seems to absolve individuals of responsibility in collective wrongdoing.
The main purpose of this chapter is to address this concern. I address it in two ways.
1. First, I evaluate its accuracy. Perhaps under some conditions, individuals can be responsible for collective actions.
If agents may at times be responsible for the actions of others, then it is possible that in some circumstances an individual human agent might be morally responsible for a collective act even though the agent of that act in question is a collective agent, not the individual human agent whose responsibility is in question.
Exploring this possibility will in particular account for situations in which authority structures in organizations authorize individual human agents to act on behalf of the organization. It is tempting to think that the acts of, for example, heads of state, chief executive officers, and presidents of universities might be understood in this manner. I resist this conclusion, while at the same time taking seriously the idea that the authority conferred on individuals by the formal structures of an organization makes some individuals more responsible than others.
2. Second, I distinguish between responsibility for collective action and responsibility in collective action, and argue throughout that although individuals are not morally responsible, as individuals, for collective action, we have good reason to think they can be morally responsible in collective action. My task, then, is to provide an account of individual responsibility in the context of collective action.
Since I focus on moral responsibility, I attend only to the two kinds of collectives that qualify as agents: organizations and goal-oriented collectives.
Organizations are highly structured collectives with formal mechanisms for making decisions, articulating the collective’s goals and interests, and outlining the positions of individuals within the structure.
Goal-oriented collectives coalesce around [~을 중심으로 합치다, 제휴하다] action toward the achievement of a particular goal that the members jointly embrace and aspire to.
The intentional structures of these two types of collective agent are sufficiently different from each other to merit different treatment. Given this difference, in cases of collective wrongdoing the roles and responsibilities of individuals in organizations merit being analyzed differently from those of individuals in goal-oriented collectives. For this reason, I take up the two types separately here, just as I did when I discussed their intentional structures in chapter 1.
First, I address responsibility in organizations. I explore the strong intuition that leaders in organizations are responsible as individuals for the actions of the organizations because their actions just are the actions of the organization. I argue that this intuition is close to but does not hit the mark. We look to the leaders not because their acts are the acts of the organization, but rather because the organization empowers them to act in ways that they would not be able to but for their roles in the structure.
Second, I address responsibility in goal-oriented collectives. I argue that individual contributors to the intentional actions of goal-oriented collectives are responsible for their contributions. I maintain further that their contributions need to be understood in the context of the collective action of which they are parts.
Before I get to that discussion, I want to provide two bits of background. The first is about the distinction between collective wrongdoing and collective or cumulative harm. The second concerns an account of action description that is pertinent to my analysis. I address both in the following section.
4.1 Background
1. collective wrongdoing and collective harm
When a collective agent performs a collective action that violates a moral principle, then that action constitutes a collective wrongdoing. The agent, except where it has a defensible excuse, is blameworthy for that action.
Most wrongdoing also constitutes harm. I am not just wronged but also harmed when you steal from me, murder me, or discriminate against me on the basis of the color of my skin.
However, many harms involve no wrongdoing. When I’m injured in a mudslide, I am harmed but not wronged. If someone slices her finger with a paring knife, she suffers harm but is not wronged.
In the collective case, the cumulative impact of parallel individual actions may result in collective harm that is not the result of collective wrongdoing, that is, of the wrongdoing of a collective agent. For example, humanity’s environmental impact on the world is surely harmful. However, it would be a conceptual stretch to claim that it is the work of a collective agent.
I draw particular attention to the difference between collective wrongdoing and collective or cumulative harms, because running these together creates confusion when we are attempting to decipher the relationship between individual responsibility and collective wrongdoing. In situations in which collective agency is absent, moral responsibility, if present at all, resides only at the level of individuals. Many cases of cumulative harm have this character—the harm itself occurs only because of the actions of a number of people. Individual contributions to it, taken on their own, might involve no or negligible harm. Environmental harm such as that which has resulted in climate change might be viewed in this way. In the following chapters, I’ll talk about the collective and individual responses required in these sorts of cases. For the time being, my goal is only to highlight the distinction between wrongdoing and harm so that it will not confuse my discussion of individual moral responsibility in collective wrongdoing.
2.
I now turn to a brief overview of action descriptions. It is an important part of my view that the moral rightness or wrongness, praiseworthiness or blameworthiness of individual actions in collective contexts derives from the relationship between the individual’s action and the collective action or situation. Acts of individual human agents may be described in ways that draw attention to the collective features of the situations in which they take place. Drawing on an earlier example, running a race may have no moral content when considered in isolation, but when it is part of a large fundraiser, we highlight its moral contours whenever we describe it as such, for example, as raising money for cancer research. The view of action description on which I depend is familiar from Donald Davidson’s influential work. Davidson claims that the same act particular or token may be described in multiple ways, that is, it might instantiate more than one act-type. Different descriptions provide different information about the same act. Thus, to use Davidson’s example, consider a case in which I flip a switch. Flipping the switch may have a number of consequences. If by doing so I alert a burglar, turn on the light, open the electrical current, wake up the neighbors, and so on, then my act may be redescribed in these di erent ways. In much the same way as when we describe one person in di erent ways—“the author of this book,” “the philosopher in Stevenson Hall 3138,” “the host of the Researching Women conference”—we may do the same where acts are concerned. A given act may be described as “a switch-ipping,” “an alerting of the burglar,” “a moving of my index nger,” or “a turning on of the lights.” With respect to action descriptions, Joel Feinberg called this expanding and contracting to include more or less information about consequences “the accordion effect.”
Normative facts may be among the information contained in a description of an action, especially when we invoke a description that falls into the category of what Bernard Williams calls “thick moral terms.” Thick moral terms, such as “stealing” and “murder,” have moral evaluations built into them or are at least suggestive of particular moral judgments. For example, when I flip the switch I might also detonate an explosive. When I detonate an explosive, I might also kill a rival. If I kill the rival intentionally, then the killing is a murder. When we describe it as such, we invoke a description with moral resonance: we recognize that acts warranting the description “murder” are wrong. That’s what makes “murder” a thick moral term. We do not describe accidental killings or justified killings in the same way. Though they result in death, they do not qualify as murders.
I draw attention to this theory of action descriptions and the accordion effect in order to introduce a simple point: the action of an individual may warrant descriptions that invoke collective content. In some situations, this collective content may, as in the individual case, make reference to act descriptions that guide us to moral judgments. I have made this point a number of times with respect to the redescription of running a race as “raising funds for cancer research.” Fundraising for cancer is clearly a laudable activity in both its individual and collective forms.
Recalling my discussion of the prevalence of our understanding of genocide as a mass atrocity, it is another scenario that draws attention to collective misdeeds. An individual act of murder, performed as a part of a larger initiative of genocide, has a distinct moral character that it would lack outside the genocidal context because in genocide it is performed with the aim of destroying a group. When we describe it as a contribution to genocide, we draw attention to that moral feature of it. I shall return to these points later in this chapter, when I discuss individual responsibility in the context of the intentional actions of goal oriented collective agents.
4.2 Individual Moral Responsibility in Organizational Wrongdoing
when individuals take part in collective wrongdoing, for what are they responsible—the collective wrong as such or something else, such as their contribution to it?
First, let me be clear that I understand collective wrongdoing as the wrongdoing of a collective agent, either an organization or a goal-oriented collective. If collective wrongdoing takes place in the absence of a collective excuse—understanding an excuse as a reason that justifies the behavior and alleviates blameworthiness—then the collective agent is blameworthy.
Given a two-level understanding of moral responsibility as operating at the level of individuals and the level of collectives, it is not clear how this evaluation of blameworthiness in a collective agent should inform our evaluation of the actions of individuals. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, some people worry that, having made an attribution of collective moral responsibility, we give up the possibility of meaningfully attributing moral responsibility to individuals. I maintain that we do not. To see why, let us begin with a case of collective wrongdoing involving an organization.
Case Study: The Canadian Red Cross is a large nonprofit organization whose major activities used to include taking, processing, and distributing blood donations for hospitals across the country. A public inquiry headed by Judge Horace Krever of the Ontario Court of Appeal revealed that a series of bad decisions made by Red Cross executives contributed to many unnecessary infections and deaths by way of the blood supply.
Hemophiliacs were the most vulnerable group, because they depend on regular transfusions of concentrated blood product in order to survive. The decisions with fatal consequences include (but are by no means limited to)
1. the decision not to screen blood donors or single out high-risk groups,
2. the decision not to switch hemophiliacs to a safer, nonconcentrated product, and
3. a general resistance to growing evidence in the early 1980s that AIDS was a blood-borne disease.
4. Moreover, when test kits that could detect HIV in blood became available, “bureaucratic niceties—meetings, budget approval, contracts, training, staffing— proceeded as if the purchase was for o ce supplies,” with the result that at least transfusion recipients became infected during the approvals process.
Given that the distribution of infected blood through the 1980s is considered to be the worst public health disaster the country has ever experienced, it is a wonder that decisions at the time were taken with such leisure. The outcome of the inquiry into this dark time was that the Canadian Red Cross is no longer permitted to collect and distribute blood and blood products in Canada. Judge Krever also named particular individuals, whom he identified as “people in positions of responsibility who failed in their duties, oftentimes with fatal consequences.”
The scope of the Red Cross’s activities means that it had, at the time, many levels of roles and responsibility, a number of portfolios in addition to its responsibility for blood and blood products, and mechanisms for making decisions and carrying them out. It is thus a collective agent in the organizational sense, and we can understand the contamination of the blood supply as its (collective) moral failure.
What about the individuals involved? In what follows, I consider the means by which we might attribute responsibility to individuals in the context of collective moral failure and transgression. I do this by looking at involvement of two different kinds of individual.
First, people who are in executive roles that are defined by their authority to make or contribute to key organizational decisions are likely to be implicated in organizational wrongdoing.
Second, people who are employees whose positions are defined in task-oriented ways that simply carry out the business of the organization as required by its structures, policies, and decisions have far less influence and are less likely—albeit not entirely unlikely—to be implicated in organizational wrongdoing.
Note that the discussion that follows applies only to individual responsibility in organizational contexts; individual moral responsibility in the context of goal-oriented collectives warrants a somewhat different analysis because the structural features of the collective agent are different, thus issuing in a different relationship between the whole and the individuals within it.
Larry May: one way of holding individuals responsible for group wrongs is to establish that a collective entity, such as a state, is responsible, and then turn our attention to the individuals who play the most significant role(s) in the collective structure.
This model works well for organizations and speaks to the possibility of holding individuals, such as key decision-makers, responsible in the collective wrongdoing of the Red Cross. If, for example, the final decision about whether to pull or use a shipment of blood that was known to be contaminated was in the hands of one individual, then that individual’s decision to use the blood to make factor concentrate for the treatment of hemophiliacs may be redescribed as the decision of the Red Cross.
It is attractive and compelling to think that when such is the case, the individual is morally responsible for exactly what the Red Cross is morally responsible for: the intentional use of contaminated blood in the face of alternatives that would have reduced the risks. There are two ways such an analysis of the situation might gain currency. First, its strength might lie in the claim that the individual’s act just is the act of the organization. Second, the plausibility of the analysis might reside in the claim that an individual’s power is made possible by her or his role as defined by the organizational structures. I take them up in turn and argue that the second way has more promise.
Another way of putting it is that the intentions and actions of the individual may be redescribed as the intentions and actions of the collective—that is, something like the accordion e ect could be at work...When I switch on a light and also, in the same act, alert the burglar, then we may redescribe my act of switching on the light as “my alerting the burglar.” Both descriptions are descriptions of my own act. The same agent is the subject of each description. Now consider the redescription in the Red Cross case. The agent makes an executive decision to use the contaminated blood products. In our redescription, we redescribe his decision to do so as “the Red Cross’s decision to use the contaminated products.” This redescription is different from the typical redescription with the accordion effect, because the subject of the action changes, whereas the description of the act itself does not. Redescriptions typically give us more information about the consequences of the action, for example if by turning on the light I alerted the burglar, then my act had two consequences: the light went on and the burglar was alerted. The act expands and contracts, something like an accordion, depending on how it is described. In these cases, the same act token bears several descriptions. The relationship between my turning on the light and my alerting the burglar is an identity relationship. That is not the same as a case in which the executive’s act is redescribed as the act of the organization.
The individual’s authority to make the organization’s decisions depends entirely on her or his role and the structures that empower that role. The capacities of the individual combine with these other features of the organization to generate the organization’s intentional actions. What the individual does—for example, make a decision—is only partly constitutive of what the collective does. Its relationship to the collective act is not an identity relation.
What it does entail is that the individual’s actions in the role have the full force of an empowering organizational structure behind them and the individual has a moral obligation to take them with this in mind.
May suggests that we should think of the leaders as “setting” the intentions of the state.
When this happens, May is right to claim that it provides a strong reason for holding individuals responsible for organizational action. The reason is not an identity between the individual’s acts and the organizational acts, but rather the manner in which the organization’s intentional acts ow as consequences from the actions and decisions of the individual leader.
First, they are blameworthy for their personal contributions to a morally problematic collective goal. Second, they are blameworthy for their failure to do anything to stop the situation or, if they were completely powerless to stop it, for their failure to distance themselves appropriately from the wrongdoing, either by calling it into question or refusing to participate, even if such acts of distancing might result in their losing their jobs.