This paper explores the implications of Zeynep Tufekci’s capacities approach to social movements, which explains the strength of social movements in terms of their capacities. Tufekci emphasises that the capacities of contemporary social movements largely depend upon their uses of new digital technologies, and of social media in particular. We show that Tufekci’s approach has important implications for the structure of social movements, whether and what obligations they can have, and for how these obligations distribute to their members. In exploring (...) these implications, we develop a tripartite taxonomy of social movements. Each type of social movement in the taxonomy corresponds to a different type of group: social campaigns, social struggles, and social agitations. We show that all three types of social movement can bear obligations in virtue of their capacities. Finally, we argue that a surprising upshot of the obligations of social movements is that members of oppressed groups can have obligations to resist their own oppression in virtue of being members of social movements. (shrink)

What are the main conditions that any theory of human rights should satisfy to guide action? If agents must take action for a fairer world as human rights discourse suggests, this is a crucial question to reflect upon. In this paper, I make a proposal. I argue that any theory of (moral) human rights that guides action on the basis of correlative duties must satisfy three key conditions. The first condition is focused on the specification of act-types, the second concerns (...) the distribution of correlative duties, and the third is focused on the resolution of (resolvable) conflicts of human rights. I show that this proposal has substantive implications because it implies to reject, challenge and, in some cases, resist ideas that are commonly accepted in the literature on human rights. (shrink)

Some of the most pressing contemporary social problems result from the amalgamation of a mass of actions that are not intentionally coordinated. Although these essentially aggregative harms are foreseeable, it is unclear what moral duties individuals have with regards to them. This paper offers a new analysis of these problems and uses a nonideal contractualist approach to argue in favour of two kinds of duties for individuals. Collectivization duties that require individuals to act responsively with a view to ensuring that (...) there are effective governance agents that reliably, fairly, and efficiently prevent these outcomes in the long-term and duties of restraint that require individuals to avoid action of a kind that is likely to come together with other actions to cause serious EAH in the immediate future when restraint with regards to actions of this kind could help prevent the outcome from occurring. (shrink)

Some of the most invidious injustices are seemingly the results of impersonal workings of rigged social structures. Who bears responsibility for the injustices perpetrated through them? Iris Marion...

In Group Duties, Stephanie Collins proposes a ‘tripartite’ social ontology of groups as obligation-bearers. Producing a unified theory of group obligations that reflects our messy social reality is challenging and this ‘three-sizes-fit-all’ approach promises clarity but does not always keep that promise. I suggest considering the epistemic level as primary in determining collective obligations, allowing for more fluidity than the proposed tripartite ontology of collectives, coalitions and combinations.

Together we can achieve things that we could never do on our own. In fact, there are sheer endless opportunities for producing morally desirable outcomes together with others. Unsurprisingly, scholars have been finding the idea of collective moral obligations intriguing. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars on the nature of such obligations and on the extent to which their existence might force us to adjust existing theories of moral obligation. What interests me in this paper is the perspective of (...) the moral deliberating agent who faces a collective action problem, i.e. the type of reasoning she employs when deciding how to act. I hope to show that agents have collective obligations precisely when they are required to employ ‘we-reasoning’, a type of reasoning that differs from I-mode, best response reasoning, as I shall explain below. More precisely, two (or more) individual agents have a collective moral obligation to do x if x is an option for action that is only collectively available (more on that later) and each has sufficient reason to rank x highest out of the options available to them. (shrink)

The topic of my thesis is individual and collective responsibility for collectively caused systemic harms, with climate change as the case study. Can an individual be responsible for these harms, and if so, how? Furthermore, what does it mean to say that a collective is responsible? A related question, and the second main theme, is how ignorance and knowledge affect our responsibility. -/- My aim is to show that despite the various complexities involved, an individual can have responsibility to address (...) climate change. I argue that climate change is not a problem just for states and international bodies, but also for individuals. There are three possible sources of moral responsibility for individuals in relation to climate change harms: direct responsibility (individuals qua individuals), shared responsibility as members (individuals qua members of collective agents), and shared responsibility as constituents (individuals qua constituents of unorganised collectives). -/- Accounts that deny individual responsibility fail to either take our interdependent reality seriously or fail to understand marginal participation (or in the case direct responsibility, fail to appreciate the nature of the climate change phenomenon). Individuals can be complicit in climate change harms, either as members of collective agents (e.g. as citizens of states or employees of a corporation) or as constituents of unorganised collectives (e.g. as consumers or polluters). -/- Although I focus on individual complicity, I do not deny the obligations of collective agents. However, nation-states, governments, and international bodies are not the only relevant collective agents in climate ethics: other collective agents, such as corporations, matter also and can have obligations concerning making sure that their activities are as carbon-neutral as possible. In addition, those corporations that have engaged in lobbying against climate regulation through creating and disseminating misleading information have acquired themselves additional obligations to mitigate climate change and compensate for the harm they have caused. Even so, the ethical claims can only be understood by individual members of these collective agents because only they can feel the pull of moral claims. I suggest that we could distinguish between what one must possess in order to be capable of making moral claims (i.e. moral agency conditions), and what it means to have the ability to exhibit such claims through one’s conduct. -/- Individual direct responsibility is to not to increase the probable risk of serious harm to other people, at least as long as we can do so at a less than significant cost to ourselves. It is limited to relatively wealthy individuals. Offsetting is not a reliable way to meet this duty; we need to look at the emissions from our lifestyle choices (within the available infrastructure). Shared responsibility qua members of collective agents is the key individual responsibility, and it presses especially on those occupying key positions within key collective agents. Saying that, our shared responsibility qua constituents of unorganised collectives has the potential to be decisive in whether some action is taken or not, either through a set of actions that can signal certain acceptance or support, or as a form of political support from the grass roots. (shrink)

It is commonly taken for granted that questions of feasibility are highly relevant to our normative thinking – and perhaps especially our normative thinking about politics. But what exactly does this preoccupation with feasibility amount to, and in what forms if any is it warranted? This article aims to provide a critical introduction to, and clearer characterization of, the feasibility issue. I begin by discussing the question of how feasibility is to be understood. I then turn to the question of (...) feasibility’s role, suggesting that there are two quite different kinds of role questions that may be at play, though they are often run together: a question about feasibility’s normative significance; and a question about its proper use in informing our normative thinking. Finally, I consider how the feasibility issue differs from certain other related issues: the demandingness issue; the issue of whether “ought” implies “can;” and the “ideal versus non-ideal theory” issue. (shrink)

We argue that individuals who have access to vaccines and for whom vaccination is not medically contraindicated have a moral obligation to contribute to the realisation of herd immunity by being vaccinated. Contrary to what some have claimed, we argue that this individual moral obligation exists in spite of the fact that each individual vaccination does not significantly affect vaccination coverage rates and therefore does not significantly contribute to herd immunity. Establishing the existence of a moral obligation to be vaccinated (...) despite the negligible contribution each vaccination can make to the realisation of herd immunity is important because such moral obligation would strengthen the justification for coercive vaccination policies. We show that two types of arguments—namely a utilitarian argument based on Parfit’s Principle of Group Beneficence and a contractualist argument—can ground an individual moral obligation to be vaccinated, in spite of the imperceptible contribution that any single vaccination makes to vaccine coverage rates. We add a further argument for a moral obligation to be vaccinated that does not require embracing problematic comprehensive moral theories such as utilitarianism or contractualism. The argument is based on a “duty of easy rescue” applied to collectives, which grounds a collective moral obligation to realise herd immunity, and on a principle of fairness in the distribution of the burdens that must be borne to realise herd immunity. (shrink)

A standard objection to socioeconomic human rights is that they are not claimable as human rights: their correlative duties are not owed to each human, independently of specific institutional arrangements, in an enforceable manner. I consider recent responses to this ‘claimability objection,’ and argue that none succeeds. There are no human rights to socioeconomic goods. But all is not lost: there are, I suggest, human rights to ‘socioeconomic consideration’. I propose a detailed structure for these rights and their correlative duties, (...) while remaining neutral on substantive moral debates. I argue that socioeconomic-consideration human rights are satisfactorily claimable and sufficiently practical. (shrink)

There are countless circumstances under which random individuals COULD act together to prevent something morally bad from happening or to remedy a morally bad situation. But when OUGHT individuals to act together in order to bring about a morally important outcome? Building on Philip Pettit’s and David Schweikard’s account of joint action, I will put forward the notion of joint duties: duties to perform an action together that individuals in so-called random or unstructured groups can jointly hold. I will show (...) how this account of joint duties is preferable to one which defends individual duties to cooperate. I then discuss the limits of joint duties and the ways in which one can fail to comply with them. It will become apparent that the circumstances under which individuals in random collectives acquire such joint duties are rare. (shrink)

RESUMO Em geral, podemos encontrar na literatura (tanto na popular quanto na acadêmica) atribuições de deveres coletivos complexos a coletivos não estruturados extensos de indivíduos. Por “deveres coletivos complexos”, quero dizer deveres coletivos que, de maneira plausível, exigem que os membros individuais de um coletivo não estruturado extenso empreguem tipos diferentes de ações contributivas para alcançarem um objetivo coletivo - por exemplo, o suposto dever coletivo universal de acabar com a pobreza mundial. Neste artigo, defendo que esses deveres não orientam (...) a ação. O motivo é por que eles não passam no que chamo de “teste de orientação de ação”. Esse teste pressupõe a crença intuitiva de que um dever moral orienta a ação apenas se, para o portador do dever, estiver claro o tipo de ação que ele deve praticar após a atribuição do dever. Deveres coletivos complexos atribuídos a coletivos não estruturados extensos não passam nesse teste porque, embora cada portador do dever (ou seja, cada membro do coletivo) receba orientação sobre o fim que se deve atingir em conjunto, não está claro para esses agentes o tipo de ação que cada um deles deve por em prática. (shrink)

“Coalition of the willing” is a phrase that we hear invoked with frequency in world politics. Significantly, it is generally accompanied by claims to moral responsibility. Yet the label commonly used to connote a temporary, purpose-driven, self-selected collection of states sits uneasily alongside these assertions of moral responsibility.This article explores how the informal nature of such associations should inform judgments of moral responsibility. I begin by briefly recounting what I call a model of institutional moral agency in order to explain (...) why it seems theoretically and practically problematic to talk about the moral responsibilities of informal associations. I then focus on coalitions of the willing as prominent, and challenging, examples of such associations, before raising misgivings about my own rather stark distinction if it means that accounts of moral responsibility must be reduced to the members—or potential members—of such coalitions in a way that neglects the moral significance of their acting together. Prompted by these concerns, I explore arguments by Virginia Held and Larry May about moral responsibility in relation to informal associations and identify insights that can be taken from these positions to refine our expectations and evaluations of the actions associated with such collectivities. Finally, I consider the particular implications of these insights in relation to the widely espoused duty to intervene to rescue vulnerable populations. (shrink)

Is it justified to hold that an agent S has a (moral) right to P if the duty-bearer is not specified? There is an intense ongoing debate on this question. There are two positions in the literature. On the one hand, O´Neill´s much-discussed account of rights holds that it is justified to say that an agent S has a right to P if and only if the duty-bearer is sufficiently determined – i.e. if and only if it is clear against (...) whom S may claim her right to P (O’Neill 1986, 1988, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2016). Call this, the ‘claimability condition’. On the other hand, interest-based theorists argue that it can be justified to say that an agent S has a right to P even if the duty-bearer is not sufficiently determined (Caney 2007; Griffin, 2008; Raz 1988; Tasioulas 2007; see also: Etinson, 2013; Ypi 2010). Who (if anyone) is correct in this fundamental discussion about the very nature of rights? In this paper, I provide an answer to this crucial question. Neither O´Neill nor interest-based theorists provide good reasons to justify their positions. However, I argue, the claimability condition is an existence condition of rights justified on the basis of their action-guiding character. The reason is that if the duty-bearer is not specified, the content of the right (its correlative obligation) does not sufficiently guide what the agent should do because it is indeterminate who is required to act (or refrain from acting). (shrink)

The paper develops a responsibility-based account of professional ethics in banking. From this perspective, bankers have duties not only toward clients—the traditional focus of professional ethics—but also regarding the prevention of systemic harms to whole societies. When trying to fulfill these duties, bankers have to meet three challenges: epistemic challenges, motivational challenges, and a coordination challenge. These challenges can best be met by a combination of regulation and ethics that aligns responsibilities, recognition, and incentives and creates what Parsons has called (...) “integrated situations”. Professional associations play an important role for this purpose, especially as spaces in which peer recognition is earned. But financial incentives equally need to be brought in line, for example, through deferred bonuses or claw backs. Such measures can create a new culture of accountability in banking. (shrink)

Some harms are such that they cannot be prevented by a single individual because she lacks the requisite control. Because of this, no individual has the obligation to do so. It may be, however, that the harm can be prevented when several individuals combine their efforts. I argue that in many such situations each individual has a duty to join forces: to approach others, convince them to contribute, and subsequently make a coordinated effort to prevent the harm. A distinctive feature (...) of this proposal is that, in the first instance, it focuses on mobilizing others rather than on preventing the outcome. As it ultimately concerns a collective harm, the duty to join forces is irreducibly collective. Furthermore, once enough people have been mobilized, they have a collective obligation to prevent the harm that is irreducibly collective also because it applies to the collective as such. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that non-agent collectives, including what one might call the ‘global collective’ consisting of the world’s population taken as a whole, cannot be the bearers of non-distributive moral obligations on pain of violating the principle that ‘ought implies can’. I argue that one prominent line of argument for this conclusion fails because it illicitly relies on a formulation of the ‘ought implies can’ principle which is inapt for contexts which allow for the possibility of non-distributive plural predications (...) of agency, which are precisely the contexts in which we might expect non-agents to be obligation-bearers. (shrink)

Individualists claim that collective obligations are reducible to the individual obligations of the collective’s members. Collectivists deny this. We set out to discover who is right by way of a deontic logic of collective action that models collective actions, abilities, obligations, and their interrelations. On the basis of our formal analysis, we argue that when assessing the obligations of an individual agent, we need to distinguish individual obligations from member obligations. If a collective has a collective obligation to bring about (...) a particular state of affairs, then it might be that no individual in the collective has an individual obligation to bring about that state of affairs. What follows from a collective obligation is that each member of the collective has a member obligation to help ensure that the collective fulfills its collective obligation. In conclusion, we argue that our formal analysis supports collectivism. (shrink)

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the “Role-Ideal Model” is (...) that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles as parents, colleagues, employers, citizens, etc., because roles are the site where structure meets agency. In short, the Role-Ideal Model explains how individual action contributes to structural change, justifies demands for action from each particular agent, specifies what kinds of acts should be undertaken, moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice. (shrink)

Is the state a collective agent? Are citizens responsible for what their states do? If not citizens, then who, if anyone, is responsible for what the state does? Many different sub-disciplines of philosophy are relevant for answering these questions. We need to know what “the state” is, who or what it's composed of, and what relation the parts stand in to the whole. Once we know what it is, we need to know whether that thing is an agent, in particular (...) a moral agent capable of taking moral responsibility for its actions. We have to know what it takes for it to be capable of moral responsibility, e.g., what the functional equivalents in groups are of knowledge, intention, foreseeability, recklessness, and so on. And once we've established that it is an agent, and is responsible for what it does, we have to explain whether and in what way this implicates members, i.e., whether state responsibility distributes to the members of states, whoever they may be. Answers to these questions come from metaphysics, social ontology, action theory, epistemology, political theory, and ethics. In what follows, we'll give an outline of some different ways of answering these questions. (shrink)

Many of the items that humans consume are produced in ways that involve serious harms to persons. Familiar examples include the harms involved in the extraction and trade of conflict minerals (e.g. coltan, diamonds), the acquisition and import of non- fair trade produce (e.g. coffee, chocolate, bananas, rice), and the manufacture of goods in sweatshops (e.g. clothing, sporting equipment). In addition, consumption of certain goods (significantly fossil fuels and the products of the agricultural industry) involves harm to the environment, to (...) future persons, and to current persons in low-lying and developing countries, by way of their impacts on climate change. When it comes to such large-scale harms, it's easy for the individual to feel helpless. Even if she sincerely wishes things were otherwise, she may wonder what she could possibly do to make them so. In this paper I briefly explore several promising avenues for generating duties in individuals to consume ethically, and develop one in particular: that an individual ought to signal her commitments to others, as a first step in collectivizing to act against unjust global labour practices. (shrink)

Many corporations are large, powerful, and wealthy. There are massive shortfalls of global justice, with hundreds of millions of people in the world living below the threshold of extreme poverty, and billions more living not far above that threshold. Where injustice and needs shortfalls must be remediated, we often look towards agents’ capabilities to determine who ought to bear the costs of rectifying the situation. The combination of these three claims grounds what I call a ‘linkage-based’ account of why corporations (...) have demanding positive duties to the global poor. In this paper, I put forward a distinctive linkage-based account of corporations’ positive duties centred on the idea of dependence and the importance of meeting agents’ core needs. In addition to outlining and defending this account, I will show that we can utilise its basic conceptual components to make headway on questions that have received insufficient attention in the business ethics literature; specifically, we can say something substantive about the weighting of needy agents’ competing claims to assistance, and about the limits to the demands that can be lodged against corporations on the basis of others' unmet needs. Having integrated considerations of duties' grounding, their comparative weight, and the limits of their demandingness into a single account of corporate positive duty, I conclude by discussing a challenge to attributing to corporations duties owed to the worst-off amongst the global poor. (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that relying on the testimony of others in normative questions is in some way problematic. In this paper, I consider whether we should be troubled by deference in democratic politics. I argue that deference is less problematic in impure cases of political deference, and most non-ideal cases of political deference are impure. To establish the second point, I rely on empirical research from political psychology. I also outline two principled reasons why we should expect political deference (...) to be untroubling: political problems are difficult and require a division of epistemic labour; furthermore, there is value in exercising epistemic solidarity with those one shares an identity or interests with. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

According to Kirk Ludwig, only primitive actions are actions in a primary and non-derivative sense of the term ‘action’. Ludwig takes this to imply that the notion of collective action is a façon de parler – useful perhaps, but secondary and derivative. I argue that, on the contrary, collective actions are actions in the primary and non-derivative sense. First, this is because some primitive actions are collective actions. Secondly, individual and collective composites of primitive actions are also actions in the (...) primary and non-derivative sense. Hence, individual action and collective action are ontologically on a par. Ludwig also exaggerates the contrast between individual and collective action by introducing a “sole agency requirement” in his account of the semantics of singular action sentences. However, sole agency is merely typically pragmatically implicated by singular action sentences, not entailed by them. If I say, “I turned on the light”, after we each flipped one of two switches that together turned on the light, then I might be misleading the audience, but what I say is true. Finally, I argue that, contra Ludwig, individuals often have “I-intentions” to bring about an event that can be satisfied even if there are co-agents who bring about the event in the same way. (shrink)

Two crucial distinctions regarding political competence must be made. First, the mere probability that you will make a morally right decision (reliability) is distinct from your ability to skillfully make a decision (competence). Empirical and normative accounts have focused primarily on reliability, but competence is more important if we take central normative commitments seriously. Second, the competence you have on your own (direct competence) is distinct from the competence you have in contributing to some collective enterprise (contributory competence). Direct competence (...) is likely to be extremely demanding in a democratic context, so we should move to a contributory account of competence. (shrink)

Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment – as is arguably the case (...) with Christian List and Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency – face the so-called “problem of the first belief” that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for group agents. This paper introduces three possible solutions to the problem and discusses the effects that these solutions have in regard to the possibility of attributing moral responsibility to groups. (shrink)

In Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements, Monique Deveaux criticizes and reframes the traditional, moral (and often individualistic) response to poverty in favor of a political and collective one that centers the role of the poor and poor-led groups in the anti-poverty agenda. I have two aims in this review, a supportive one and a more critical one. On the supportive side, I examine the advances Deveaux makes by 1) expanding the category of agents of justice; 2) putting the poor (...) at the center of an effective response to poverty; and 3) changing the emphasis from individual duties to a collective response. On the critical side, I revisit Deveaux’s critique of the traditional approach and argue that she unnecessarily shifts the moral burden away from the affluent whose complicity and capacity remain important grounds of obligation. In conclusion, I consider some remaining challenges that are (helpfully) exposed by Deveaux’s account. (shrink)

Responsible Research and Innovation provides a framework for judging the ethical qualities of innovation processes, however guidance for researchers on how to implement such practices is limited. Exploring RRI in the context of nanotechnology, this paper examines how the dispersed and interdisciplinary nature of the nanotechnology field somewhat hampers the abilities of individual researchers to control the innovation process. The ad-hoc nature of the field of nanotechnology, with its fluid boundaries and elusive membership, has thus far failed to establish a (...) strong collective agent, such as a professional organization, through which researchers could collectively steer technological development in light of social and environmental needs. In this case, individual researchers cannot innovate responsibly purely by themselves, but there is also no structural framework to ensure that responsible development of nanotechnologies takes place. We argue that, in such a case, individual researchers have a duty to collectivize. In short, researchers in situations where it is challenging for individual agents to achieve the goals of RRI are compelled to develop organizations to facilitate RRI. In this paper we establish and discuss the criteria under which individual researchers have this duty to collectivize. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the moral responsibili- ties that companies have with regard to the development of their sector, especially when there are path dependences that can lead sectors on more or less morally accept- able paths, e.g., with regard to market access for disad- vantaged groups. The interdependencies between companies in a sector are underexplored in the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Reflections on the normative status of profit-seeking and on the normative bases of CSR, however, provide (...) us with reasons for seeing sector-related responsibilities as an important component of CSR. Based on a case study of a financial institution, I analyze various morally relevant ways in which the strategic decisions of companies relate to those of other companies in their sector. I argue that companies have a co-responsibility to contribute to the development of the moral dimensions of their sectors, especially when they deal with vulnerable customers. (shrink)

This paper reviews Veli Mitova’s recent article, “The collective epistemic reasons of social-identity groups,” which proposes and defends a collectivist account of epistemic reasons for social-identity groups. The paper first discusses what makes a collectivist account appealing in the context of moral obligations, a context from which Mitova apparently draws inspiration for her collectivist account of epistemic reasons. The paper then considers two issues that may make a collectivist account of epistemic reasons lose much of the theoretical advantage that a (...) collectivist account of moral obligations has over its individualist competitor: (1) epistemic reasons need to be internally possessed and (2) the individual inability that motivates a collectivist account of moral obligations is of a special kind. (shrink)

Principles of distributive justice bind macro-level institutional agents, like the state. But what does justice require in non-ideal circumstances, where institutional agents are unjust or do not exist in the first place? Many answer by invoking Rawls's natural duty ‘to further just arrangements not yet established’, treating it as a ‘normative bridge’ between institutional demands of distributive justice and individual responsibilities in non-ideal circumstances. I argue that this response strategy is unsuccessful. I show that the more unjust the status quo (...) is due to non-compliance, the less demanding the natural duty of justice becomes. I conclude that, in non-ideal circumstances, the bulk of the normative work is done by another natural duty: that of beneficence. This conclusion has significant implications for how we conceptualize our political responsibilities in non-ideal circumstances, and cautions us against the tendency – common in contemporary political theory – to answer all high-stakes normative questions under the rubric of justice. (shrink)