Abstract
Collectives are more or less structured groups of human beings. Responsibility-collectivism is the view that the moral responsibility of at least some such collectives is something over and above the combined moral responsibility of individual group members. This paper focuses on one of the key conditions of responsibility: the requirement of control. It is plausible that this requirement also applies to collective agents and so collective responsibility presupposes group-control. Responsibility-collectivists have often tried to unpack the idea of group-control as non-causal control. I argue that non-causal control is not an admissible basis for attributing responsibility. Only causal group-control is. This is because non-causal group control does not provide the right kind of information regarding the ancestry of a certain outcome. In the second half of the paper, I discuss the difficulties which arise for responsibility-collectivism if one understands group-control as causal group-control. One of these difficulties is whether causal group-control is consistent with ontological individualism. The second concerns the relationship of group-control and individual control. I argue that the first difficulty is manageable, but only at the price of having to accept a solution to the second difficulty which runs counter to the original aim of the responsibility-collectivist of characterizing irreducible collective responsibility as compatible with individual responsibility. Worse still, responsibility-collectivists may have to choose sides in other areas of social ontology as well. This further raises the price of this position.
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Notes
- 1.
The version of responsibility-collectivism I will focus on holds that it is the same kind of moral responsibility we attribute to collectives as to individuals. That is, roughly, retrospective desert-based responsibility implying blameworthiness and praiseworthiness and justifying certain normative responses such as punishment and Strawsonian reactive attitudes such as resentment and guilt. Pettit (2007a) and Shockley (2007) explicitly accept this condition.
- 2.
One feasible strategy available to the responsibility-individualist is to accept the first claim, but reject the second. Perhaps we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that collectively brought about harms can also sometimes be of a kind for which nobody is responsible, comparable to harms inflicted by nature, even though they are in some sense “man-made” (see Szigeti 2014).
- 3.
Responsibility for what, i.e., actions or outcomes of actions? When necessary to specify, I will focus on responsibility for outcomes for simplicity’s sake. Elsewhere I will follow Pettit (2007a) who does not distinguish between responsibility for actions and responsibility for outcomes. The distinction may be relevant to the requirement of control insofar as the necessity of causal control is widely held for outcome-responsibility (actions causing outcomes). By contrast, some libertarians (simple indeterminists) do not accept that agents need to cause the actions for which they are responsible (see Goetz 1988).
- 4.
Naturally, one can also argue against the collectivist position using the dependence of responsibility on agency as one’s point of departure. If no groups of human beings can be agents and moral responsibility presupposes agency, then individualism about responsibility would follow (for such responsibility-individualist arguments, see Miller and Mäkelä 2005; Haji 2006; McKenna 2006). Shockley (2007) denies that collective moral responsibility presupposes collective agency, but accepts the control-requirement.
- 5.
In this chapter, the unadorned term “collectivist” or “collectivism” is always to be read as short for responsibility-collectivism or responsibility-collectivist as I defined the position in the first paragraph.
- 6.
I say “at the very minimum” in order to accommodate the semi-compatibilist argument that control as defined above is all that is required in terms of control for the agent to be morally responsible, whereas regulative control associated with the ability to do otherwise is not (see Fischer and Ravizza 1998). Note that both kinds of control are described by semi-compatibilists as causal.
- 7.
I will define causal control in Sect. 6.5 below.
- 8.
More precisely, the physical realizations (which are property-instantiations) of the individual actions. I ignore that complication here.
- 9.
In addition, the responsibility-collectivist also needs to show that group-control is not just control by some other individual or aggregate of individuals. This task involves, among others, showing that when the group is in control the relevant individual actions implement some autonomous group attitude held by the group qua group. I will not discuss the difficulties associated with this issue in this paper (but see Szigeti (2014) and footnote 18 below).
- 10.
Having said that, it should be noted that, despite their insistence that “programming” is a strictly non-causal process, the language used by advocates of this theory is worryingly causal at times. They talk about the program or arrangement as “ensuring” or “making it probable” (Jackson and Pettit 1990, 114) that basic, causally efficacious factors will bring about the pertaining effect (for the same causal language, see also Jackson and Pettit 1992a, b).
- 11.
In the following, I will mostly talk about higher-order/lower-order properties, not events. It will be assumed that the problem and possible solutions would be about the same for higher-order/lower-order events as well.
- 12.
- 13.
Furthermore, the collectivist argues that there are good reasons why the group should exercise such control over its members. Group-control may be required to ensure both the diachronic and synchronic rationality of collective behaviour (List and Pettit 2002, 2011; Pettit 2003, 2007b; List 2006). Of course, collectivists also acknowledge that groups can also fail to perform their functions or can even fall apart completely.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
In general, the collectivist is to avoid circularity. It cannot be argued that what distinguishes a collective profile as in the above example from genuine group-control is that group-control is exercised by the collective as an agent (pace Pettit 2007b). Collectivists themselves accept that for a collective to qualify as an agent it already has to possess group-control.
- 17.
It is worth noting as well that the “program” does not even make a counterfactual contribution in the sense of making sure that a Frankfurtian back-up plan would be executed. It is not the case that should this individual fail to comply, the program would ensure that the program is nevertheless implemented by making someone else do it. So if individual agent I1 fails to perform her task and some other individual agent I2 steps in and performs the action instead, then that will be once again I2’s choice given that program is causally inefficacious.
- 18.
Including the condition, extensively discussed by responsibility-collectivists (see esp. List and Pettit 2011), that the group has to be able to hold autonomous judgments which can come apart from judgments of individual members. I have argued elsewhere (Szigeti 2014) that it does not follow from the possibility of group judgments being autonomous in this sense that the group qua group is responsible for them. This because either some individual or nobody is responsible for these collective judgments. By contrast, my point here is that even if group judgments can be autonomous in this sense, this does not mean that the group controls individual actions when individuals implement those judgments.
- 19.
As noted earlier, simple indeterminist libertarians question the requirement of causal control for the agent-action as opposed to the action-outcome relationship. However, it seems that they too would accept the requirement of causal control for the action-outcome relationship.
- 20.
Admittedly, Sartorio denies that moral responsibility entails causal responsibility. I am not sure whether she would also deny the requirement of causal control as defined above.
- 21.
Which is not surprising since, as noted above, the “programming account” is a general proposal for distinguishing the causal relevance of higher-level properties from the causal efficacy of lower-level ones.
- 22.
- 23.
Note that in terms of this definition the causal relata for Lewis are events, whereas in the rest of the paper I talk about properties, or better property-instantiations, as causal relata. I believe we can ignore this difference for the purposes of this paper.
- 24.
Whereby C and E are propositions referring to the occurrence of the corresponding events or the instantiations of properties.
- 25.
Whereby the truth of counterfactuals is interpreted, as is standard practice, in terms of a similarity relation between possible worlds.
- 26.
Many have argued that the exclusion principle should not be treated as an a priori claim (see esp. List and Menzies 2009), and that whether exclusion holds or not is to be determined by empirical characteristics of the relevant systems.
- 27.
But not because they overdetermine the effect. Overdetermination presupposes fully independent property instantiations or events as causes. The underlying rationale of the “non-competition scenario”, as we will see shortly, is that supervenient properties are not wholly distinct from their realizers.
- 28.
Whereby PH and EH are propositions referring to the instantiations of higher-level properties, while PL and EL are propositions referring to the instantiations of lower-level properties.
- 29.
- 30.
- 31.
This is also admitted by those who think that multiple realizability entails downward exclusion. See, for example, List and Spiekermann (2012, 17): “[…] realization-sensitive causal relations are fully reducible to a lower level of description”.
- 32.
The position Pettit and Schweikard call individualism is to be distinguished from responsibility-individualism. The latter view says that only individuals can be the addressees of ascription of responsibility. It is thus opposed to responsibility-collectivism. This section explores the relationship between individualism in Pettit’s and Schweikard’s sense and responsibility-individualism.
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Szigeti, A. (2014). Collective Responsibility and Group-Control. In: Zahle, J., Collin, F. (eds) Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate. Synthese Library, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05344-8_6
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