Isaacs, Tracy (2011). Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Collective Obligation, Individual Obligation, and Individual Moral Responsibility
I turn my attention to a more forward-looking relative of responsibility, namely, obligation.
Even if they are the result of the cumulative impact of human behavior, these harms are not the products of collective action. Nonetheless, they require collective solutions. I argue that the daunting task for individuals of knowing what their part as individuals is in ameliorating these seemingly insurmountable harms is made easier when we invoke the idea of a collective obligation.
The challenge, however, is that these are exactly the cases in which I have denied that a collective agent—either organization or goal-oriented collective—is morally responsible at the collective level. Thus, a signi cant part of the project of this chapter is to motivate the possibility of thinking in terms of collective obligation in the absence of an organization or a goal-oriented collective.
5.1 Organizational Obligation, Individual Obligation, and Individual Responsibility
so collective obligation is the obligation of a collective agent
Governments have an obligation to serve their citizens; corporations have an obligation to treat their employees fairly; universities have an obligation to serve their students’ educational needs; and so on. These collective entities—organizations—have structures and decision procedures in place, as well as de ned roles and hierarchies, that give them identities that are independent of the particular individuals who are their members at a given time.
individuals are required to fulfill the responsibilities of their respective roles within the organization
If we claim that collective obligations shape individual obligations, in that they help to de ne the roles of individuals within the organization, then paying the employees will be in the purview of the people in the payroll office...collective obligations dictate the requirements of individuals’ roles, and the individuals’ obligations in the organizational context are exhausted by the requirements of their roles.
some jobs are more well-defined than others... Contrast this with the roles of faculty members, department chairs, deans, and the president within the university structure. There is a lot of room for variation in how the occupants of these roles discharge the associated duties...The more responsibility one has within the collective, the less obvious the specifics are of what one is required to do and how one is required to do it. Moreover, the roles in which it is less clear and there is more latitude [자유] are precisely the roles that are likely to be most directly responsive to the collective’s obligations... In the context of collective obligation, individuals’ obligations intensify when they have more power and more room for personal choice with respect to how they ful ll their roles. Collective actions require the actions of individuals, and certain individuals are in a better position than others to direct the actions of the collective and to see that the collective’s intentional actions are consistent with its obligations as a collective. This is not to say that people in positions of lesser power cannot interfere in signi cant ways with the ful llment of collective obligations. Certainly, someone in the payroll o ce can wreak havoc. But the nature of their duties is clear, so deviations from them are also clear.
regardless of how well-defined someone’s role within an organization is, the dictates of the role do not exhaust what is required of individuals with respect to meeting the organization’s collective moral obligations. Consider, for example, the moral inadequacy of the Nazi concentration camp workers’ claims that they were “just doing their jobs.” Within the context of their roles, they may have been doing exactly what was expected of them. However, the collective within which they were functioning in their roles was not just failing to meet its collective moral obligations, it was positively violating them in a way that even relatively powerless participants could reasonably be expected to know.
When a collective has obligations that are not being met, this failure shapes and alters the obligations of individual members as members of the collective. Someone might question the idea that the collective obligation in this kind of case mediates the individual obligation in any way; perhaps it is more accurate to claim that the individuals in the Nazi case are violating obligations as individuals, simpliciter.
Two points are worth noting here. First, recall that we are discussing difficulties facing the claim that role related duties exhaust the range of individual obligations in organized collectives. The claim under discussion is that there is reason to think that they do not. Second, even if an individual’s actions would be wrong outside the collective context, the collective context in which they take place increases the range of morally relevant descriptions that apply to an individual’s action. Individual actions taken in the Holocaust as contributions to the collective action of genocide have an added moral dimension that is not captured without reference to the collective action. The further dimension adds gravity to the contributions individuals make.
In whistle-blowing cases, we see a similar shortcoming of the view that individual obligation in organizations is exhausted by roles. In these cases, the collective’s failure to fulfill its collective obligations creates a scenario in which individuals, as moral agents, are morally required to do something that goes beyond their usual duties in order to “help” the collective fulfill its obligations.
Once again, we see that claiming that individuals’ obligations within a collective are defined only by their roles is not enough to account for circumstances of collective moral failure. When the collective is acting as it ought, individuals who are performing their role-related duties as specified by their job descriptions are doing their part in making sure that the collective meets its moral obligations. Further action is required only when something goes wrong.
This may lead some to say that whistle-blowing, or doing anything that takes one beyond the dictates of one’s role to ensure that collective moral obligations are fulfilled, is supererogatory [도덕적으로 칭찬받을만 하나 필수적이지는 않음]. That is, some might claim that actions of this kind are morally laudable, but not required, because they go beyond moral obligation and enter into the realm of the heroic. One reason for not making this claim is that by continuing to do one’s job in conditions of collective moral failing, one knowingly contributes to morally wrongful collective action. These contributions themselves are morally wrong. It is morally required, not supererogatory, to cease acting in a morally wrong way. Thus, we may conclude that collective moral obligations sometimes alter the obligations of individual members of organizations beyond the dictates of the members’ organizational roles.
Goal-oriented collectives are less structured than organizations. But they, too, are moral agents, subject to praise and blame, and they, too, can have moral obligations. Some of these obligations might be directly related to the goal; others might be more general. For example, the goal-oriented collective whose goal is to destroy a population group because of its ethnicity in fact has a moral obligation collectively not to pursue that goal. Collective agents are as bound by moral principles as human agents are. Violating these principles leaves the agents subject to blame. Moreover, these collective obligations in turn shape the individual moral requirements of the collective’s members. For example, agents who are acting as members of goal-oriented collectives are constrained at the individual level not to contribute to morally reprehensible collective goals [목표지향적 집단은 그 목표로 인해 존재하는 것이기 때문에, 그러한 집단은 단순히 특정한 윤리적 의무를 지니는 것이 아니라, 존재 자체만으로 부도덕하지 않은가?]
It might seem obvious and facile to say that individuals, qua individuals, are obligated not to participate in morally reprehensible collective goals. My specific claim is that the individual obligation is significantly mediated by the collective obligation not to engage in the collective wrongdoing. This points us back to the earlier discussion about the moral qualities that individual behavior inherits when it is undertaken as part of a collective endeavor. Individuals’ actions in these collective undertakings do not have the moral character they have in the absence of the larger collective scheme of which they are a part. The obligations of the collective do not distribute to individuals, but they do constrain the obligations of individuals, suggesting particular courses of actions individuals may permissibly take (or are not permitted to take) in the service of the collective ends.
It is not simply the case that my small part gains significance because it is part of a collective effort that raises $20 million for cancer research. There is the further point that the collective framework itself helps narrow down my range of options, thus enabling me to take effective action against a daunting and individually insoluble problem.
5.2 Mapping and Clarity
But the idea of a collective obligation without a collective agent who is so obligated appears to be a stretch. The rest of this chapter is an attempt to argue that when collective action solutions come into focus and potential collective agents with relatively clear identities emerge as the subjects of those actions, then we may understand individual obligations as we did above, namely, as owing from collective obligations that those potential agents would have.
The arrest and repair of environmental degradation, responding to the dangers of global warming, famine relief and global poverty, emergency aid and assistance in rebuilding after natural disasters—these all require mobilization at the collective level. The scale of the problems mandates large-scale solutions. Collective solutions map easily onto challenges of this kind. Individual solutions fall short, not just because they are akin to attempting to put out a blazing house with a toy water pistol but also because the scale of the issues makes it di cult for an individual to know where to begin to address them. We saw this in the cancer research example. From the standpoint of the individual, these problems are insurmountable. Yet from the standpoint of collective action, we might be able to tackle them. What is needed to address these challenges successfully is for individuals to see themselves as playing a part in collective action solutions. At the level of collective action, there is more clarity concerning what might help.
Consider the first kind of case in which one person needs assistance, only one assistant is required, and more than one person is available to help. Though it involves more than one bystander, this case does not demand collective action. As described, only one individual is needed to assist, making it a case of an individual obligation that a number of di erent people could ful ll. Individual obligation maps neatly onto the situation for each, but only conditionally so. The presence of other potential rescuers a ects the obligation of each by making it conditional; if another bystander ful lls the moral obligation to save the drowning child, the others are no longer required to act. However, if no one steps forward to save the child, and the child ends up drowning, then each fails to meet an individual moral obligation. As long as the condition is not met, each person’s moral obligation is unambiguous: rescue the drowning child unless someone else does.
Consider now a case that requires collective action:
Coordinated Bystander Case: Four bystanders are relaxing on the riverbank when six children on a raft run into trouble when they and their raft end up in rapids. They are hurtling helplessly toward a dangerous waterfall downriver and are unlikely to survive if they go over it. Nothing any of the four bystanders can do as an individual will make a di erence, but there is an obvious course of coordinated action they could take to divert the raft into calmer waters. This measure would pose little risk to the bystanders and would save all of the children
But first, let me restate my point that though as individuals, the bystanders in this last case cannot see a solution, the collective solution is clear. Global warming, poverty, hunger—these global challenges mirror this kind of bystander case. As we’ve seen, the range of possible actions one might take as an individual is daunting, and in the end none appears to have potential to make a difference. However, from a collective point of view, the map reads more clearly. For example, if collectively we want to reduce carbon emissions in order to slow or stop global warming, then we must change our collective behavior. Collectively, there are solutions. Moreover, these collective solutions—particularly if they can be understood as collective obligations of sorts—can help to define and narrow down the range of contributions individual participants might take. The trouble is, of course, that the referent of the “we” is not obvious, and furthermore it remains unclear how this solution that we (collectively) could engage in might involve me (individually).
5.3 Random Collections and Putative Groups
Random collections of people, for example the bystanders beside the river, the audience at an orchestral performance, the lunch crowd at the diner last Friday, are not unified by anything beyond happenstance. Peter French has noted of these kinds of collections that “although there may be exceptions, members usually are together in that place at that time because of each individual’s pursuit of his own ends.” But some slight change in circumstance, for example the plight of the children on the raft, can create the conditions under which a random group reconfigures itself into a goal-oriented collective capable of intentional action as a collective. The individuals on the beach can come together with the purpose of saving the children. When a random collection does not spring into action to form itself into a goal-oriented collective or an organization, then it is what Larry May calls a “putative group,” [명목상 집단] and its failure is a case of collective inaction. When existing collective agents decide not to act in circumstances that demand action, their failures are collective omissions, outcomes of decision procedures.
The idea of a putative group suggests that there may be room to establish collective obligation in the absence of collective agency— potential collective agency may provide grounds for collective obligation, either actual or also putative obligation, following May’s terminology. If so, then, as I shall claim, those obligations might have the same mediating effect that they do in cases of actual collective agency, insofar as they can shape and order individuals’ roles.
May claims that where putative groups fail to act, we can hold them responsible for failure to organize as a group that could take action. That means they fail to develop a decision procedure or a sense of solidarity (what I have been thinking of in terms of coalescing around a particular goal) that would enable them collectively to act. I find this idea attractive because it gives some support to the possibility of collective obligation in the absence of an existing collective agent, and this, in turn, helps to shed light on moral possibilities for individuals who might see themselves becoming more effective agents when they join forces with others. Though the idea is attractive, the nature of the failure warrants further attention.
David Copp challenges the notion of holding putative groups responsible for failing to organize, on the grounds that developing the characteristics that make a group capable of collective action—for example decision procedures, a sense of solidarity, shared goals—is itself a collective action. If putative groups can develop these features without having them already, then it’s not clear to Copp why we should suppose that these are essential features of collective agency at all. I agree with Copp that there is something paradoxical in the idea of the development of collective agency. But the argument points to an infinite regress that commonsense tells us does not obtain. Where the argument missteps is in the assumption that the same features required for collective action are required for a group to develop into a collective agent. But even if we cannot always point to the exact moment when a collection of people becomes a collective agent, we know that transformations of this kind take place all the time. Take a simple case: nothing binds you and me together as a collective agent; but when we decide to go for a walk together, we become a goal-oriented collective. And recall the example of attendees at a sports event doing the wave. The wave is an excellent example of a collective action—its success requires that people intentionally participate together with others in the service of a common goal: to produce the wave effect throughout the stands, rolling neatly and predictably from one section to the next and continuing around until it peters out. No decision procedure is settled in advance, and no sense of solidarity or shared goal, at least with respect to wave production— exists at the outset. The collective goal arises through the persistence of a small group of people in one section whose enthusiasm catches on and draws others in to the collective effort. Successful waves abound. And so do unsuccessful attempts. It is clearly the case that for any typical sports audience, they could develop the enthusiasm to participate in a wave even if in a given instance they do not. If the capacity is there, then it seems correct to claim, at a minimum, that they failed to organize. Whether that failure constitutes a moral failure is, of course, a separate question that will turn on what they failed to do. But that it constitutes a failure of sorts is a reasonable claim.
We might still ask, however, whether the failure is collective or individual. According to my view of collective agency, we need to see this as a failure of individuals because it takes place in the absence of a collective agent. Nonetheless, in situations involving significant moral stakes, the obligations connected to putative groups have an important impact on the obligations of individuals to organize. I explain this claim in what follows.
Virginia Held also wonders about an in nite regress: “Can there be responsibility for not deciding upon a method to decide upon a method to decide upon a method … to act?” She responds to this concern by noting that different contexts require the adoption of different decision methods, ranging from allowing the most knowledgeable to decide to consensus, to a majority vote, to the more minimalist sort of implicit understanding required for a successful wave. As we have seen, the same features that may allow a group to organize itself as a group may not be suficient or appropriate for effective mobilization in response to a situation requiring collective action. Held is right to note this variance. Once a random collection becomes an effective agent, it is no longer a random collection—it is either an organization or a goal-oriented collective. There may be grey moments during which it is not clear what stage of transformation a given collection is at, but not to note a difference between random collections and collective agents would trivialize the idea of agency.
Held goes further than May because she believes not only that a random collection of persons—a putative group—can be considered responsible for not organizing, but that such potential collective agents can be held responsible for failing to take the required course of action. This further step strongly suggests the presence of collective obligation in some cases where a group is neither an organization nor a goal-oriented collective but instead putative.
Held invokes the idea of the reasonable person test to determine when this is appropriate: it is appropriate when the “action called for in a given situation is obvious to the reasonable person and when the expected outcome of the action is clearly favorable.” If, by contrast, “the action called for is not obvious to the reasonable person a random collection may not be held responsible for not performing the action in question, but, in some cases, may be held responsible for not forming itself into an organized group capable of deciding which action to take.” The main feature of Held’s view that I want to pick up on here is the idea that the course of action required of a random collection could, in some cases, be clear, at least to the reasonable person.
According to Held, when it is clear, then there is an obligation at the collective level for which the collective, putative though it may be, will be responsible if it does not fulfill it. The group as a group, not just the individuals as individuals, is responsible for its failure to take action. In cases such as these, argues Held, the responsibility of the group distributes among all of its members as well, because they failed as individuals to engage in the requisite [필요한] action for organizing into an effective agent and fulfilling the collective obligation. This analysis of the case suggests that the failure is at two levels. First, there is a failure to meet a collective obligation, and second, given the clarity of that obligation, there is a failure in each individual to join together with the others. The collective obligation exists in virtue of the clarity, by the standard of the reasonable person, of the collective action required. Where there is a lack of clarity at the collective level, what is lacking is a clear picture of what collective courses of action would effectively address the moral concern. I hesitate to attribute actual obligations to potential agents, but as I explain in what follows, a minor adjustment to Held’s analysis will address this concern.
My goal in this section is to show how, even in the case of potential collective agents, collective obligations can help to yield more determinate moral requirements for individuals who are members of the collectives. Instead of claiming that putative groups can have actual obligations, I maintain that when the clarity condition is met concerning the required course of collective action, the putative group has a putative obligation. I believe further, however, that when the clarity condition is met with respect to the putative collective obligation, it has exactly the same ordering and mediating potential for individual action that an actual collective obligation would. In either case, it is a mechanism through which individual moral possibility becomes clearer. Thus, my modification of Held’s view does not in any way undermine the merits of her point and, more important for my present goals, does not compromise its aptness for supporting my more general claim concerning the relationship between collective obligation and individual obligation in the absence of actual collective agents.
For in giving shape to the individual obligations, collective obligation provides a framework for understanding the moral dimensions of individual contributions and individual failures. This point is an extension of the claim, developed earlier, that collective moral responsibility is necessary for an adequate understanding of individual responsibility in collective contexts. [그러면 그냥 indiviualist의 accounts를 채택하는게 훨씬 간명하지 않은가?]
Whether the individual contributes to collective action or collective inaction, the moral features of the individual’s contribution become salient only against the background of the moral features of the collective action or inaction. For example, although one individual taking a completely individualistic view of a large moral issue such as global warming could abdicate [책무를 다하지 못하다] responsibility as an individual by noting that she cannot make a difference, her failure to contribute to a collective effort that would make a difference is not so easily excused.
Mediated by a putative collective obligation in which she could participate, her failing is not that she did not solve the problem of global warming—that is something we could never expect her to do. Instead, her failure is that she did not do her part in a collective action that could solve global warming. Because a clear collective action to address this issue is possible and evident to the reasonable person, a putative collective obligation exists. More important, this putative collective obligation, as much as an actual collective obligation would be, is a starting point for bridging the apparent gap between seemingly inconsequential individual contributions and new understandings of the part they play in more powerful collective undertakings. To take us back the puzzle that preceded this section, they allow individuals to begin to see how a solution that we (collectively) could engage in can involve me (as an individual). They expand our moral options by providing a foothold for seeing what is possible. In this manner, they work on our moral imaginations, not in a fanciful way but in ways that point to achievable possibilities.
These putative collective agents can, when they meet the normative standard of being clear to the reasonable person, have putative collective obligations. Putative collective obligations perform the same function as actual collective obligations with respect to the role they play as mechanisms for making more determinate the possible actions individuals may take as participants in collective endeavors. In what follows, I consider a number of objections to this proposal.
First, some might question whether in the absence of a decision procedure, organizational structure, sense of solidarity, or shared goal a putative collective can be the subject of a moral obligation, even a putative one, that has a binding effect on potential individual members. Obligation seems appropriate only to agents, and these putative groups are, by hypothesis, not quite agents. If we allow that potential collective agents have obligations, then perhaps any mereological sum of agents has the potential to make a difference and so would have a putative collective obligation that governs the obligations of individuals who might become members of the organization or goal-oriented collective, should it materialize.
According to this objection, my view might be too broad because any conceivable collective action could be required of any conceivable collection of individuals. For example, there is likely some value-promoting action that the Queen of England, the colleague in the south-facing unit on the second floor, and my third-grade teacher could do together. Does this mean that this putative group has a putative collective obligation to form itself into a group and take action? In order to respond to this concern, it is necessary to reemphasize the clarity criterion Held proposes. It is not the case that any conceivable collective action solution yields even a putative collective obligation. Only when the course of action presenting itself is clear to the reasonable person is it accurate to think in terms of the collective obligations of putative groups. Clarity at the collective level is a prerequisite for collective obligation in these cases, and that clarity serves as a lens through which the obligations of individuals come into focus.
Another possible objection is that these putative groups do not have any feature that allows us to recognize them as obligation-holding collectives. Decision procedures, organizational structures, and joint goals help to identify collective agents. The presence of a collective intention could contribute the requisite unifying feature, but in cases of inaction and putative groups, intentional collective action exists only as a potentiality. The collectives have not acknowledged themselves as collectives capable of acting together to achieve a jointly held goal or developed the structure required for forming collective intentions on which they might act.
In response, I draw attention to two points. First, note that if the putative collective obligation becomes actual, the relevant obligation will be that of an organization or a goal-oriented collective. If the individuals who are potential members mobilize to act, the putative collective will transform into an actual one. And second, once again let us note the clarity condition. At the collective level, it must be clear what the potential collective agent will be and what it will do. Think of the Coordinated Bystander Case, where it is perfectly clear that the putative and (we hope) soon-to-be goal-oriented collective consists of the four individuals on the bank. The claim I have made throughout this chapter is that there is much more clarity between obligation and circumstance at the collective level than there is between individual obligation and circumstance when the only reasonable course of action is collective. In at least some cases, the identity of the putative collective will be clear. In others, it might not be as clear, and in still others, it won’t be clear at all. Where the clarity condition is not met, there is no putative collective obligation through which to understand individual contributions.
Note, too, that in the middle ground between an obvious putative collective agent and none at all, we might invoke the idea of identifiable groups or collections of people whose connections to one another are loose— not nearly tight enough to ground any assumption of agency but not so unrelated that they share no significant features.
Groups of this kind fall short with respect to agency because they lack an organizational structure or common goals that would provide a framework for intentional collective action. Nonetheless, they can be loosely identi ed in a way that is at least comparable to the way we identify random collections, for example the audience at the symphony. A uent Westerners, for example, could t this category. In chapter 1, I maintained that it’s not helpful to hold groups such as a uent Westerners or privileged white men responsible for social problems such as poverty and oppression, on the grounds that these injustices and inequities are systemic and the explanations for their persistence require a more complex analysis than simply blaming one social group. Add to this their lack of an organizational structure or shared goal, and their lack of intentional agency seems apparent. At the same time, however, they are not simply mereological sums of completely unrelated people. In that respect, they are perhaps one step closer to potentially mobilizing as e ective agents. And in fact, on occasion, they do. For example, a uent Westerners were in a position, through collective action, to assist the victims of the 2004 tsunami. Indeed, they rose to the occasion, banded together, and did make a di erence. We witnessed the same thing after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. When individuals contributed, they did so as part of a collective venture; had they not, the average a uent Westerner would have felt the futility of her or his relatively small o ering in the face of such vast destruction. Locating it as something done together with others, it takes on a heightened moral signi cance. Assume that if a uent North Americans mobilized as a group to donate a percentage of their wealth to humanitarian aid organizations, there would be a signi cant reduction in global poverty, disease, and hunger. Here we have an identi able group—a putative collective agent—and a clear course of action. It may not be clear who all of the members of the group are, but at the collective level, both the group and the action are identifiable.
5.4 Conclusion
This chapter is meant to shed some light on the way that collective obligation can create possibilities for understanding obligation at the individual level when we are faced with challenges such as global warming, environmental degradation, widespread poverty, and malnutrition. These sorts of issues di er from situations created by organizations and goal-oriented collectives because they are not the products of collective agents. With respect to solutions, however, they mandate collective action. From an individual action perspective, these issues seem insurmountable. In the terms I have outlined, there is no direct mapping between individual obligation and the world circumstances in question. What do we do, then, when we recognize that when viewed from a collective perspective, these challenges demand collective solutions? When a clear collective solution emerges, I have argued that collective obligation can render individual obligations more determinate. In cases where the collective that might address the problem is putative rather than actual and the course of action this putative collective might take is clear, then the putative collective obligations associated with the solution have the same mediating role as actual collective obligations. Seen through the lens of collective obligation, even as a feature of a putative collective agent, individual actions and their impact as part of something larger become clearer. And while it is not the case that all seemingly insurmountable problems may be addressed in this manner, this account provides a starting point for how we might approach them.