ABSTRACTIn this article, I examine the extent to which military officers are morally responsible for the actions of others by virtue of shared membership in various groups. I argue that career military officers share membership in morally relevant groups that include their branch of service, Department of Defense and the entire Executive Branch of Government, and I outline the circumstances under which career officers bear moral culpability for the actions of members of this group. A number of implications arise from (...) these findings. The first and most important is that military officers have an interest in ensuring the moral rectitude of government agents specifically as it pertains to their official capacities. Additionally, military officers have a duty not only to be informed about problematic government policies but also to educate themselves on the pertinent legal jurisprudence or ethical considerations. Finally, the Constitutional Paradigm of Military Ethics may be an insufficient guide for the part.. (shrink)

Attributions of what we shall call normative responsibilities play a central role in everyday moral thinking. It is commonly thought, for example, that parents are responsible for the wellbeing of their children, and that this has important normative consequences. Depending on context, it might mean that parents are morally required to bring their children to the doctor, feed them well, attend to their emotional needs, or to see to it that someone else does. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that countries (...) that emit most greenhouse gases are responsible for preventing catastrophic climate change. This responsibility might imply that these countries are morally required to take necessary steps individually and jointly to come to an agreement on and implement a workable plan, and to avoid steps that worsen the situation. More trivially, the grading of your student’s essays might be your responsibility, as might making sure there is wine at tomorrow’s picnic, and you might thus be required to see to it that essays are competently graded and suitable wine brought to the picnic. -/- Though attributions of normative responsibilities are legion, such responsibilities have received surprisingly little philosophical attention compared to its normative relatives, obligations and reasons, and compared to retrospective responsibility. This chapter hopes to improve on this situation by taking on two main tasks. The first, attempted in section 1, is to spell out the general structure of normative responsibility, in particular the relation between normative responsibilities and corresponding obligations and demands. We suggest that normative responsibilities are constituted by normative requirements that the responsible agents care appropriately about how well things go in certain regards, and that obligations generally can be seen as straightforward upshots of requirements to care. -/- The second task, taken on in section 2, is to provide an overview of prominent sources of normative responsibility and its distribution among agents. Why would the children’s wellbeing be the parents’ responsibility? Why not the neighbor’s, or the state’s, or everyone’s? Here we discuss a range of possible sources, including agents’ abilities, costs involved in taking on the responsibility in question, retrospective responsibility for the situation, promises or contracts, and certain social relationships. (shrink)

I propose a minimal account of authorship that specifies the fundamental nature of the author-relation and its minimal domain composition in terms of a three-place causal-intentional relation holding between agents and sort-relative works. I contrast my account with the minimal account tacitly held by most authorship theories, which is a two-place relation holding between agents and works simpliciter. I claim that only my view can ground productive and informative principled distincitons between collective production and collective authorship.

Towards the end of her seminal work on the notion of representation Hanna Pitkin makes the following observation:At the end of the Second World War and during the Nuremberg trials there was much speculation about the war guilt of the German people. [...] Many people might argue the responsibility of the German people even though a Nazi government was not representative. We might agree, however, that in the case of a representative government the responsibility would be more clear-cut.2As Pitkin suggests (...) in this quotation, there is a common underlying assumption, both in academic writings and in popular perceptions of democracy, that a people living under a democratic government is ultimately responsible for that .. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new family of cases where agents are jointly morally responsible for outcomes over which they have no individual control, a family that resists standard ways of understanding outcome responsibility. First, the agents in these cases do not individually facilitate the outcomes and would not seem individually responsible for them if the other agents were replaced by non-agential causes. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility as overlapping individual responsibility; the responsibility in question is essentially joint. Second, (...) the agents involved in these cases are not aware of each other's existence and do not form a social group. This undermines attempts to understand joint responsibility in terms of actual or possible joint action or joint intentions, or in terms of other social ties. Instead, it is argued that intuitions about joint responsibility are best understood given the Explanation Hypothesis, according to which a group of agents are seen as jointly responsible for outcomes that are suitably explained by their motivational structures: something bad happened because they didn’t care enough; something good happened because their dedication was extraordinary. One important consequence of the proposed account is that responsibility for outcomes of collective action is a deeply normative matter. (shrink)

Due to their non-hierarchical structure, socio-technical networks are prone to the occurrence of the problem of many hands. In the present paper an approach is introduced in which people’s opinions on responsibility are empirically traced. The approach is based on the Rawlsian concept of Wide Reflective Equilibrium (WRE) in which people’s considered judgments on a case are reflectively weighed against moral principles and background theories, ideally leading to a state of equilibrium. Application of the method to a hypothetical case with (...) an artificially constructed network showed that it is possible to uncover the relevant data to assess a consensus amongst people in terms of their individual WRE. It appeared that the moral background theories people endorse are not predictive for their actual distribution of responsibilities but that they indicate ways of reasoning and justifying outcomes. Two ways of ascribing responsibilities were discerned, corresponding to two requirements of a desirable responsibility distribution: fairness and completeness. Applying the method triggered learning effects, both with regard to conceptual clarification and moral considerations, and in the sense that it led to some convergence of opinions. It is recommended to apply the method to a real engineering case in order to see whether this approach leads to an overlapping consensus on a responsibility distribution which is justifiable to all and in which no responsibilities are left unfulfilled, therewith trying to contribute to the solution of the problem of many hands. (shrink)

Is being responsible good enough? Stone (1975) argued that we need corporate moral responsibility because neither law nor market is adequate to forestall harmful effects of business activities. However, it is not possible for businesses to become responsible for all forms of foreseeable, preventable harm that they produce. This is illustrated here by cases from insurance, television programming, automobiles and weapons production. Reflection on these examples leads to the formulation of a new conception of unintended harms as moral externalities of (...) business activities. Although one might argue that these (negative) moral external effects are outweighed by the desirable end products of business activities, three reasons not to accept the results of such a moral subtraction(or double effect) argument are presented. Instead, the article concludes by offering four techniques for a qualitative, ethical analysis of produced artefacts and their consequences; intended not to displace but to supplement the study of moral responsibility in business. (shrink)

When software is written and then utilized in complex computer systems, problems often occur. Sometimes these problems cause a system to malfunction, and in some instances such malfunctions cause harm. Should any of the persons involved in creating the software be blamed and punished when a computer system failure leads to persons being harmed? In order to decide whether such blame and punishment are appropriate, we need to first consider if the people are “morally responsible”. Should any of the people (...) involved in creating the software be held morally responsible, as individuals, for the harm caused by a computer system failure?This article provides one view of moral responsibility and then discusses some barriers to holding people morally responsible. Next, it provides information about the Therac-25, a computer-controlled medical linear accelerator, and its computer systems failures that led to deaths and injuries. Finally it investigates whether two key people involved in the Therac-25 case could reasonably be considered to have some degree of moral responsibility for the deaths and injuries. The conclusions about whether or not these people were morally responsible necessarily rest upon a certain amount of speculation about what they knew and what they did. These limitations, however, should not cause us to conclude that discussions of moral responsibility are fruitless. In some cases, determinations of moral responsibility may be made and in others the investigation is still worthwhile, as the article demonstrates. (shrink)

Collective apologies on behalf of governments to historically mistreated minorities have become more common. It is unclear, however, how we should respond to these apologies and other practices that invoke collective responsibility for oppression (chapter 1). I review the current literature on collective responsibility to better understand the obstacles facing an account of collective responsibility for oppression (chapter 2). I then argue that we can make sense of these practices by holding powerful organized collectives (chapter 3) and privileged disorganized collectives (...) (chapter 4) responsible for oppression. These practices then can be what I call “morally legitimate” if they are confessions of self-blame, and this self-blame contains an element of collective-self protest (chapter 5). (shrink)

In this article, we focus on the attribution of moral responsibility for the actions of autonomous weapons systems (AWS). To do so, we suggest that the responsibility gap can be closed if human agents can take meaningful moral responsibility for the actions of AWS. This is a moral responsibility attributed to individuals in a justified and fair way and which is accepted by individuals as an assessment of their own moral character. We argue that, given the unpredictability of AWS, meaningful (...) moral responsibly can only be discharged by human agents who are willing to take a moral gambit: they decide to design/develop/deploy AWS despite the uncertainty about the effects an AWS may produce, hoping that unintended and unwanted or unforeseen outcomes may never occurs, but also accepting to be held responsible if such outcomes will occur. We argue that, while a moral gambit is permissible for the use of non-lethal AWS, this is not the case for the actions of lethal autonomous weapon systems. (shrink)

The introduction of Autonomous Military Systems (AMS) onto contemporary battlefields raises concerns that they will bring with them the possibility of a techno-responsibility gap, leaving insecurity about how to attribute responsibility in scenarios involving these systems. In this work I approach this problem in the domain of applied ethics with foundational conceptual work on autonomy and responsibility. I argue that concerns over the use of AMS can be assuaged by recognising the richly interrelated context in which these systems will most (...) likely be deployed. This will allow us to move beyond the solely individualist understandings of responsibility at work in most treatments of these cases, toward one that includes collective responsibility. This allows us to attribute collective responsibility to the collectives of which the AMS form a part, and to account for the distribution of burdens that follows from this attribution. I argue that this expansion of our responsibility practices will close at least some otherwise intractable techno-responsibility gaps. (shrink)

In recent years, collective agency and responsibility have received a great deal of attention. One exciting development concerns whether collective, non-distributive responsibility can be assigned to collective non-agents, such as crowds and nation-states. I focus on an underappreciated aspect of these arguments—namely, that they sometimes derive substantive ontological conclusions about the nature of collective agents from these responsibility attributions. I argue that this order of inference, whose form I represent in what I call the Spaghetti Western Argument, largely fails, even (...) if the cases described are all too common. I show that it does not generate a generalizable, reliable conclusion about the kind of entity that is the plausibly responsible party. In particular, a group may lack agency in a given instance, be non-distributively responsible in that same instance and yet be a collective agent across time. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the effect described in the literature as the Group Knobe Effect, which is an asymmetry in ascription of intentionality of negative and positive side-effects of an action performed by a group agent. We successfully replicate two studies originally conducted by Michael and Szigeti, who observed this effect and provide empirical evidence of the existence of two related effects—Group Epistemic and Doxastic Knobe Effects—which show analogous asymmetry with respect to knowledge and belief ascriptions. We explain how (...) the existence of the Group Knobe Effect and its epistemic and doxastic counterparts affects the philosophical debate on collective agency and intentionality and supports the intuitiveness of realism about collective agency among laypeople. We also critically assess the reasoning presented by Michael and Szigeti in favor of the realist-collectivist interpretation of their results. We argue that a thorough analysis of both their data and our new findings shows a rather wide range of differing intuitions among laypeople regarding the status of groups as agents. These results show that while some laypeople may have realist-collectivist intuitions, the contrary realist-distrubutivist intuitions are also widespread and the claim that the majority of laypeople hold collectivist intuitions regarding group agency is unjustified. (shrink)

Does a white philosopher have anything of value to offer to the philosophy of race and racism? If this philosophical subfield must embrace subjective experience, why should we value the perspective of white philosophers whose racial identity is often occluded by racial normativity and who lack substantive experiences of being on the receiving end of racism? Further, if we should be committed to experience, in what sense can the philosophy of race and racism be “objective”? What should that word mean?Tackling (...) this question first, “objective” should at least mean general, that the ideas of the literature can be coherently integrated. An objective take on racism brings together a plurality of perspectives. What’s wrong with just a plurality of satellite ideas? It implies a fragmented approach to ameliorating racism, where different specialists have different recommendations. How can racism, generally, be lessened? If major views of racism are unifiable, then we have a general method to ameliorate racism. This project might appear tone-deaf: a white philosopher unifying things by reducing ideas to some central notion. But this unity isn’t about reducing things but rather integrating them in a way that respects difference. Yet, there’s a reason we should be interested in the white perspective. Whites can speak about racism from a participatory perspective. If whites are knowledgeable, and believe themselves to have no implicit bias, they may suppose they’re “beyond” racism or no longer at risk for perpetuating it. I explore this idea in a psychologically realistic way via my notion of overlooking, where ameliorating racism from the white perspective is an ongoing project. I end by considering how racism is applicable to other philosophical ideas beyond its typical or circumscribed purview. Here, I re-frame responsibility, arguing that we needn’t be forced to choose between responsibility models divided into individual versus social camps. We ought to instead think of responsibility in terms of power, which provides a realistic lens by which persons and groups are held to account. In being more generally convincing, it might actually get folks to take responsibility where they might not otherwise—theory in service of praxis. (shrink)

Moral responsibility for outcomes in corporate settings can be ascribed either to the individual members, the corporation, or both. In the latter case, the relationship between individual and corporate responsibility has been approached as inversely proportional, such that an increase in individual responsibility leads to a corresponding decrease in corporate responsibility and vice versa. In this article, we develop a non-proportionate approach, where, under specific conditions, individual and corporate moral responsibilities interact dynamically, leading to a mutual enhancement of responsibility: the (...) more the corporation is responsible, the more the individuals become responsible and vice versa. We develop this mutually enhancing approach in terms of normative ascriptions of responsibility, while leaving aside empirical implications in terms of mutual awareness of responsibility between individuals and corporations. We explore conceptually the conditions and mechanisms that generate this mutual enhancement and also discuss the implications for research and practice. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that when democratic states act wrongly, they should bear the costs of the harm they cause. However, since states are collective agents, their financial burdens pass on to their individual citizens. This fact raises important questions about the proper distribution of the state’s collective responsibility for its unjust policies. This article identifies two opposing models for sharing this collective responsibility in democracies: first, in proportion to citizens’ personal association with the unjust policy; second, by giving each (...) citizen an equal share of the costs. Proportional distribution is compatible with the principle of fairness. And yet, both in the literature and in political praxis we find many supporters for the equal sharing of the costs of unjust policies in democracies. How can equal distribution be defended on normative grounds? This article develops a defense that is grounded in citizens’ associative obligations. I argue that, at least in some democracies, one of the intrinsic values of the civic bond revolves around the joint formation and execution of worthy political goals. This social good generates the political associative obligation to accept an equal distribution of the costs of unjust policies. (shrink)

This essay discusses the nature of collective responsibility and explores various controversies associated with its possibility and normative value.

BackgroundPatient advocacy organizations (PAOs) have an increasing influence on health policy and biomedical research, therefore, questions about the specific character of their responsibility arise: Can PAOs bear moral responsibility and, if so, to whom are they responsible, for what and on which normative basis? Although the concept of responsibility in healthcare is strongly discussed, PAOs particularly have rarely been systematically analyzed as morally responsible agents. The aim of the current paper is to analyze the character of PAOs’ responsibility to provide (...) guidance to themselves and to other stakeholders in healthcare.MethodsResponsibility is presented as a concept with four reference points: (1) The subject, (2) the object, (3) the addressee and (4) the underlying normative standard. This four-point relationship is applied to PAOs and the dimensions of collectivity and prospectivity are analyzed in each reference point.ResultsUnderstood as collectives, PAOs are, in principle, capable of intentionality and able to act and, thus, fulfill one prerequisite for the attribution of moral responsibility. Given their common mission to represent those affected, PAOs can be seen as responsible for patients’ representation and advocacy, primarily towards a certain group but secondarily in a broader social context. Various legal and political statements and the bioethical principles of justice, beneficence and empowerment can be used as a normative basis for attributing responsibility to PAOs.ConclusionsThe understanding of responsibility as a four-point relation incorporating collective and forward-looking dimensions helps one to understand the PAOs’ roles and responsibilities better. The analysis, thus, provides a basis for the debate about PAOs’ contribution and cooperation in the healthcare sector. (shrink)

The paper explores the possibility of collectives forgiving and being forgiven. The first half of the paper articulates and amends Hannah Arendt’s account of forgiveness of and by individuals. The second half raises several objections to the possibility of extending this account to forgiveness of and by collectives. In reply, I argue that collectives can have emotions, be guilty, and meet other necessary conditions for forgiving or being forgiven. However, I explain why, even though collective forgiveness is possible, it may, (...) nonetheless, prove dissatisfying. (shrink)

Climate change and many environmental problems are caused by the accumulated effects of repeated actions by multiple individuals. Instead of relying on collective responsibility, I argue for a non-atomistic individual responsibility towards such environmental problems, encompassing omissions, ways of life, and consequences mediated by other agents. I suggest that the degree of causal responsibility of the agent must be balanced with the degree of capacity-responsibility determined by the availability of doable alternatives. Then, the more an agent has powers as a (...) group member, the more she is responsible to design the social structure and the infrastructures of the group towards sustainability. Finally, one can hold another agent responsible only if the accused is not in a vulnerable position and if she is capable to take reparative and adaptive actions. (shrink)

[Opening paragraph:] Ontological realism or holism about social groups is the thesis that groups are composite material particulars. Social groups are entities over which we quantify in the set of our best descriptions and explanations of the social world. The realist explains that a group considered in its own right can be causally responsible for the production of events or states of affairs. We do more than just describe and furnish explanations of the phenomena of the social world. In our (...) ordinary discourse and in the arenas of policy formation, legislation and the administration of laws we make moral judgments of groups and seek to direct action toward them. Granted realism about groups the concern of the present paper is the sense in or extent to which we can talk literally of a group as such being morally responsible, and, in particular, of whether it is apt to make responsibility judgments of large groups such as nations. That is, whether a group considered as an entity in its own right can be the appropriate bearer of the full-blown ascription of moral responsibility. For when we talk of individuals being collectively responsible we seem to just pick out as the responsible party them as a group—the individual members regarded jointly or collectively as one unit. (shrink)

There seems to be popular consensus that multinational corporations (MNCs) should take responsibility for both the intended and unintended consequences of their operations. However, within the discipline of ethics, reflection on the responsibilities of MNCs continues to be highly controversial. In this article, we reflect on one of the more contentious issues in this debate, namely, the moral responsibility of MNCs for the unintended consequences of their operations. It is argued that at least two questions need to be addressed, namely, (...) whether or not MNCs can be held morally responsible for anything and - should this be the case - what it actually means to hold the MNCs responsible. (shrink)

There is a growing concern for the proper role of science within democratic societies, which has led to the development of new science policies for the implementation of social responsibility in research. Although the very expression ‘social responsibility of science’ may be interpreted in different ways, many of these emerging policy frameworks define it, at least in part, as a form of anticipative reflection about the potential impacts of research in society. What remains a rather under-discussed issue is the definition (...) of the bearer of the social responsibility of science. In other words, it is not clear who is supposed to engage in such an anticipative reflection, whether individual researchers or research groups. In the past few years, philosophers of science have begun to use qualitative research methods to fill the gaps between normative models of the organisation of ideal scientific communities and the reality of actual scientific practices. In this article, I follow this approach to discuss the issue of the collective dimension of the social responsibility of science. I rely on a qualitative study conducted on an interdisciplinary research group and I describe how group dynamics position individuals and distribute duties and roles, including social responsibility. Qualitative descriptions of the distribution of duties within actual research groups should inform the formulation of general prescriptive theories on the collective responsibility of science. (shrink)

There is a lively debate over who is to blame for the harms arising from unhealthy behaviours, like overeating and excessive drinking. In this paper, I argue that given how demanding the conditions required for moral responsibility actually are, we cannot be highly confident that anyone is ever morally responsible. I also adduce evidence that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs: it undermines public support for the measures that are likely to have the most impact on these (...) harms. I claim that these two facts—the fact that we cannot be highly confident that anyone is morally responsible and the fact that holding people responsible for their unhealthy behaviours has costs—interact. Together they give us a powerful reason for believing, or acting as if we believed, that ordinary people are not in fact responsible for their unhealthy behaviours. (shrink)

There are puzzle cases that forfeiture theory has trouble handling, such as the issue of what happens to the rights of two qualitatively identical people who simultaneously launch unprovoked attacks against the other. Each person either has or lacks the right to defend against the other. If one attacker has the right, then the other does not and vice versa. Yet the two are qualitatively identical so it is impossible for one to have the right if the other does not. (...) The Problem of Symmetrical Attackers is a problem for non-consequentialism because the most plausible non-consequentialist theories assume that people have rights and can lose them by forfeiting them or waiving them. This article considers whether consequentialism can get around this problem. (shrink)

I question the adequacy of Margaret Gilbert''s account of collectivefeelings of guilt as collective judgments which do not necessarilyhave any phenomenological components. I question whether joint commitment theory in its present form helps us to understand orresolve social conflicts.