There are many cases in which people collectively cause some morally significant outcome (such as a harmful or beneficial outcome) but no individual act seems to make a difference. The problem in such cases is that it seems each person can argue, ‘it makes no difference whether or not I do X, so I have no reason to do it.’ The challenge is to say where this argument goes wrong. My approach begins from the observation that underlying the problem and (...) motivating the typical responses to it is a standard, intuitive assumption. The assumption is that if an act will not make a difference with respect to an outcome, then it cannot play a sig- nificant, non-superfluous role in bringing that outcome about. In other words, helping to bring about an outcome requires making a difference. I argue that the key to solving the problem is to reject this assumption. I develop an account of what it is to help to bring about an outcome, where this does not require making a difference, and I use this explain our reasons for action in the problem cases. This account also yields an error theory that explains why the standard assumption is so tempting, even though it is mistaken. (shrink)

This paper examines three views of what an omission or an instance of refraining is. The view advanced is that in many cases, an omission is simply an absence of an action of some type. However, generally one’s not doing a certain thing counts as an omission only if there is some norm, standard, or ideal that calls for one’s doing that thing.

This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthiness, as distinct from her scope of blameworthiness. (...) We suggest that an agent mostly controls her degree of blameworthiness—but even here, luck constrains what possible degrees of blameworthiness are open to her. (shrink)

Coady understands political violence to include war as well as terrorism, interventionism, revolution and the violence of mercenaries. His discussion ranges widely over the concept of violence, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and ethical issues surrounding mercenaries. Some of this has appeared in print before, but much of it is new.Although war is but one form of political violence, in his view, much of his concern is with the just war tradition. Contrary to some contemporary just war theorists, who question (...) whether war is presumptively wrong, he takes the just war tradition to counsel against war unless strict conditions are met. He thinks that these conditions can be met, but apparently only rarely. He follows many contemporary writers, however, in seeing the just war tradition as an alternative to the traditions of realism and pacifism, both of which he examines critically.Coady's discussion of terrorism is particularly timely. He rejects the tendency to view …. (shrink)

It is argued that intentionally omitting requires having an intention with relevant content. And the intention must play a causal role with respect to one’s subsequent thought and conduct. Even if omissions cannot be caused, an account of intentional omission must be causal. There is a causal role for one’s reasons as well when one intentionally omits to do something.

Most reductionist accounts of intentional joint action include a condition that it must be common knowledge between participants that they have certain intentions and beliefs that cause and coordinate the joint action. However, this condition has typically simply been taken for granted rather than argued for. The condition is not necessary for ensuring that participants are jointly responsible for the action in which each participates, nor for ensuring that each treats the others as partners rather than as social tools. It (...) is thus something of a mystery why the condition is so widely accepted. By rejecting three arguments that could potentially support it, I argue that reductionists should get rid of the condition. I show that two of the arguments fail. While the third argument is intuitively compelling, it builds on key premises that are unavailable to the reductionist. (shrink)

Omissions – any events, actions, or things that do not occur – are central to numerous debates in causation and ethics. This article surveys views on what omissions are, whether they are causally efficacious, and how they ground moral responsibility.

Philosophical theories of agency have focused primarily on actions and activities. But, besides acting, we often omit to do or refrain from doing certain things. How is this aspect of our agency to be conceived? This book offers a comprehensive account of omitting and refraining, addressing issues ranging from the nature of agency and moral responsibility to the metaphysics of absences and causation. Topics addressed include the role of intention in intentional omission, the connection between negligence and omission, the distinction (...) between doing and allowing, and the distinction in law between act and omission. (shrink)

Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions (...) that most of us will find very disturbing. (shrink)

Sometimes it seems intuitively plausible to hold loosely structured sets of individuals morally responsible for failing to act collectively. Virginia Held, Larry May, and Torbj rn T nnsj have all drawn this conclusion from thought experiments concerning small groups, although they apply the conclusion to large-scale omissions as well. On the other hand it is commonly assumed that (collective) agency is a necessary condition for (collective) responsibility. If that is true, then how can we hold sets of people responsible for (...) not having acted collectively? This paper argues that that loosely structured inactive groups sometimes meet this requirement if we employ a weak (but nonetheless non-reductionist) notion of collective agency. This notion can be defended on independent grounds. The resulting position on distribution of responsibility is more restrictive than Held's, May's or T nnsj 's, and this consequence seems intuitively attractive. (shrink)

A survey of various candidates shows that there is no defensible moral principle that shows that individuals have an obligation to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Many have been attracted to the idea that for something to be good there just have to be reasons to favour it. This view has come to be known as the buck-passing account of value. According to this account, for pleasure to be good there need to be reasons for us to desire and pursue it. Likewise for liberty and equality to be values there have to be reasons for us to promote and preserve them. Extensive discussion has focussed on (...) some of the problems that the buck-passing account faces, such as the 'wrong kind of reason' problem. Less attention, however, has been paid as to why we should accept the buck-passing account or what the theoretical pay-offs and other implications of accepting it are. The Normative and the Evaluative provides the first comprehensive motivation and defence of the buck-passing account of value. Richard Rowland argues that the buck-passing account explains several important features of the relationship between reasons and value, as well as the relationship between the different varieties of value, in a way that its competitors do not. He shows that alternatives to the buck-passing account are inconsistent with important views in normative ethics, uninformative, and at odds with the way in which we should see practical and epistemic normativity as related. In addition, he extends the buck-passing account to provide an account of moral properties as well as all other normative and deontic properties and concepts, such as fittingness and ought, in terms of reasons. (shrink)

This article endorses a familiar, albeit controversial, argument for the existence of group-based reasons for action, but then rejects two doctrines which other advocates of such reasons usually accept. One such doctrine is the willingness requirement, which says that a group-based reason exists only if (sufficient) other members of the group in question are willing to cooperate. Thus the paper argues that there is sometimes a reason, which derives from the rationality of some group action, to play one's part unilaterally (...) in that group action. This seems implausible only because we tend wrongly to accept a second doctrine, monism about the unit of agency. Monism claims that, for any given deliberative problem, there is only one unit of agency to which reasons attach. If we are monists who believe in group-based reasons, the willingness requirement will seem necessary in order to avoid recklessness. We should reject monism, and if we do so we can recognise genuine conflict between individual-based and group-based reasons, and in doing so we can explain, without endorsing the willingness requirement, why we should not act recklessly. (shrink)

Imagine you and your friend Pierre agreed on meeting each other at a café, but he does not show up. What is the difference between a friend’s not showing up meeting? and any other person not coming? In some sense, all people who did not come show the same kind of behaviour, but most people would be willing to say that the absence of a friend who you expected to see is different in kind. In this paper, I will spell (...) out this difference by investigating laypeople’s conceptualisation of absences of actions in four experiments. In languages such as German, French, Italian, or Polish, people consider a friend’s not coming an omission. Any other person’s not coming, in contrast, is not considered an omission at all, but just a mere nothing. This use of the term omission differs from the usage in English, where ‘omission’ refers to all kinds of absences. In addition, ‘omission’ is not even an everyday term, but invented by philosophers for the sake of philosophical investigation. In other languages, ‘omission’ is part of an everyday vocabulary. Finally, I will discuss how this folk concept of omission could be made fruitful for philosophical questions. (shrink)

The familiar complaint that some ambitious proposal is infeasible naturally invites the following response: Once upon a time, the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women seemed infeasible, yet these things were actually achieved. Presumably, then, many of those things that seem infeasible in our own time may well be achieved too and, thus, turn out to have been perfectly feasible after all. The Appeal to History, as we call it, is a bad argument. It is not true that (...) if some desirable state of affairs was actually achieved, then it was feasible that it was achieved. “Actual” does not imply “feasible,” as we put it. Here is our objection. “Feasible” implies “not counterfactually fluky.” But “actual” does not imply “not counterfactually fluky.” So, “actual” does not imply “feasible.” While something like the Flukiness Objection is sometimes hinted at in the context of the related literature on abilities, it has not been developed in any detail, and both premises are inadequately motivated. We offer a novel articulation of the Flukiness Objection that is both more precise and better motivated. Our conclusions have important implications, not only for the admissible use of history in normative argument, but also by potentially circumscribing the normative claims that are applicable to us. (shrink)

Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are – for good reasons – conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases. This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to (...) reduce their individual carbon footprint. To this end it will examine three kinds of arguments that have been brought forward against individuals having such duties: the view that individual emissions cause no harm; the view that individual mitigation efforts would have no morally significant effect; and the view that lifestyle changes would be overly-demanding. The paper shows how all three arguments fail to convince. While collective endeavours may be most efficient and effective in bringing about significant changes, there are still good reasons to contribute individually to reducing emission. After all, for most people the choice is between reducing one’s individual emissions and not doing anything. The author hopes this paper shows that one should not opt for the latter. (shrink)

In moral and political philosophy, collective obligations are promising “gap-stoppers” when we find that we need to assert some obligation, but can not plausibly ascribe this obligation to individual agents. Most notably, Bill Wringe and Jesse Tomalty discuss whether the obligations that correspond to socio-economic human rights are held by states or even by humankind at large. The present paper aims to provide a missing piece for these discussions, namely an account of the conditions under which obligations can apply to (...) loose collections of agents that do not qualify as collective agents in their own right. I first explain the notion of joint obligations of loose collections of agents as opposed to collective obligations of collections of agents that are collective agents in their own right, and argue that the conditions under which agents can jointly have obligations are the conditions under which they are jointly able to do what is required. I then build on Virginia Held’s seminal work on the moral responsibility of “random collections” to develop such conditions for joint ability. My discussion shows that collections of individuals can more easily be subject to moral obligations than previously assumed. It also shows that putative joint obligations need to be carefully time-indexed, and that it is largely an empirical question whether a given collection can be subject to a moral obligation to perform a given joint action at a particular time. (shrink)

When several agents together produce suboptimal outcomes, yet no individual could have made a difference for the better, Act Consequentialism counterintuitively judges that all involved agents act rightly. I address this problem by supplementing Act Consequentialism with a requirement of modal robustness: Agents not only ought to produce best consequences in the actual world, but they also ought to be such that they would act optimally in certain counterfactual scenarios. I interpret this Modally Robust Act Consequentialism as Act Consequentialism plus (...) a requirement of moral virtue, namely, to reliably act rightly and to act rightly for the right reasons. (shrink)

University of Cologne, Germany Joint action and group agency have emerged as focuses of attention in recent social theory and philosophy but they have rarely been connected with one another. The argument of this article is that whereas joint action involves people acting together to achieve any sort of result, group agency requires them to act together for the achievement of one result in particular: the construction of a centre of attitude and agency that satisfies the usual constraints of consistency (...) and rationality in adequate measure. The main discovery in the recent theory of group agency is that this result is not easily achieved; no regular voting procedure will ensure, for example, that a group of individually consistent agents will display consistency in group judgments. Key Words: groups • group agents • collective agents • joint action • joint intention. (shrink)

This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...) whether or not I act in this way, so there’s no point in doing otherwise.‘ The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some of the main responses available to the problem and to highlight central issues that arise for each type of response. In the final section, I explain what I take to be the most promising strategy and discuss the form that this strategy should take. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that individual moral obligations and responsibility entail shared (or joint) moral obligations and responsibility. However, whether individual epistemic obligations and responsibility entail shared epistemic obligations and responsibility is rarely discussed. Instead, most discussions of doxastic responsibility focus on individuals considered in isolation. In contrast to this standard approach, I maintain that focusing exclusively on individuals in isolation leads to a profoundly incomplete picture of what we're epistemically obligated to do and when we deserve epistemic blame. First, (...) I argue that we have epistemic obligations to perform actions of the sort that can be performed in conjunction with other people, and that consequently, we are often jointly blameworthy when we violate shared epistemic obligations. Second, I argue that shared responsibility is especially important to doxastic responsibility thanks to the fact that we don't have the same kind of direct control over our beliefs that we have over our actions. In particular, I argue that there are many cases in which a particular individual who holds some problematic belief only deserves epistemic blame in virtue of belonging to a group all the members of which are jointly blameworthy for violating some shared epistemic obligation. (shrink)

Are individuals responsible for the consequences of actions taken by their community? What about their community's inaction or its attitudes? In this innovative book, Larry May departs from the traditional Western view that moral responsibility is limited to the consequences of overt individual action. Drawing on the insights of Arendt, Jaspers, and Sartre, he argues that even when individuals are not direct participants, they share responsibility for various harms perpetrated by their communities.

Joint action is a growing field of research, spanning across the cognitive, behavioral, and brain sciences as well as receiving considerable attention amongst philosophers. I argue that there has been a significant oversight within this field concerning the possibility that many joint actions are driven, at least in part, by agents' social motivations rather than merely by their shared intentions. Social motivations are not directly related to the (joint) target goal of the action. Instead, when agents are mutually socially motivated (...) in joint action this is because they find acting with others rewarding in its own right. Moreover the involvement of social motivation in joint action typically enables individuals to achieve the long-term benefits associated with being part of a social bond. I argue that taking social motivations into account better prepares us for explaining a broader range of joint actions, including those that are of an antagonistic, competitive, or explorative character. Finally, I show that recognizing the importance of social motivations entails that joint actions (in general) should be understood as having the two primary functions of (1) achieving the intended target outcome of an action, and (2) attaining the benefits related to being part of a social bond. (shrink)

Are individuals responsible for the consequences of actions taken by their community? What about their community's inaction or its attitudes? In this innovative book, Larry May departs from the traditional Western view that moral responsibility is limited to the consequences of overt individual action. Drawing on the insights of Arendt, Jaspers, and Sartre, he argues that even when individuals are not direct participants, they share responsibility for various harms perpetrated by their communities.

Political violence in the form of wars, insurgencies, terrorism and violent rebellion constitutes a major human challenge. C. A. J. Coady brings a philosophical and ethical perspective as he places the problems of war and political violence in the frame of reflective ethics. In this book, Coady re-examines a range of urgent problems pertinent to political violence against the background of a contemporary approach to just war thinking. The problems examined include: the right to make war and conduct war, terrorism, (...) revolution, humanitarianism, mercenary warriors, the ideal of peace and the right way to end war. Coady attempts to vindicate the contemporary relevance of the just war tradition to current problems without applying the tradition in a merely mechanical or uncritical fashion. (shrink)

Human beings act together in characteristic ways that matter to us a great deal. This book explores the conceptual, metaphysical and normative foundations of such sociality. It argues that appeal to the planning structures involved in our individual, temporally extended agency provides substantial resources for understanding these foundations of our sociality.

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individuals that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sciences. (...) Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them, and that a proper approach to the social sciences, law, morality, and politics must take account of this fact. Unlike some earlier defences of group agency, their account is entirely unmysterious in character and, despite not being technically difficult, is grounded in cutting-edge work in social choice theory, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)