Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to lifelong severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. This problem is solvable, despite its magnitude.

In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collective obligations to refer to obligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collective obligations, in this sense; that such obligations can give rise to and explain obligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective obligations are not simply reducible (...) to individual obligations; and that collective obligations supervene on individual obligations, without being reducible to them. The sort of supervenience I have in mind here is what is sometimes called ‘global supervenience’. In other words, there cannot be two worlds which differ in respect of the collective obligations which exist in them without also differing in respect of the individual obligations which exist in them. (shrink)

Christopher Kutz has written an excellent book: part metaphysics, part ethical theory, and part legal philosophy. The aim of the book, as is clear from the title, is to examine and defend the idea of complicity, that is, the responsibility of individuals for their participation in collective harms. While there has not been a lot of philosophical work on this topic, there has been some good work, and Kutz is responsive to most of it. But basically, this book strikes out (...) on its own, building a conception of complicity from an analysis of collective action and individual intention. The cornerstone of the analysis is the idea that individuals should be responsible for what they participate in, regardless of whether the participation makes a causal difference for the outcome. (shrink)

Paradoxical results concerning judgment aggregation have recently been invoked to defend the thesis that a corporate agent can be morally responsible for a decision without any of its individual members bearing such responsibility. I contend that the arguments offered for this irreducibility thesis are inconclusive. They do not pay enough attention to how we evaluate individual moral responsibility, in particular not to the role that a flawed assessment of the normative reasons that bear on the issue to be decided on (...) play in this context. I go on to propose a method for distributing corporate responsibility to individual members within the judgment aggregation framework. (shrink)

I adapt an old example of Frank Jackson's, in order to show that it is not only possible that actions with different individual agents are sub-optimal when each is not, but that they are impermissible when each is not, and blameworthy when each is not.

My concern here is to motivate some theses in the philosophy of mind concerning the interpersonal character of intentions. I will do so by investigating aspects of shared agency. The main point will be that when acting together with others one must be able to act directly on the intention of another or others in a way that is relevantly similar to the manner in which an agent acts on his or her own intentions. What exactly this means will become (...) clearer once we understand what it is to act directly on one’s own intentions. But I take it to be a fundamental assumption of the prevailing individualism of the theory of action— one at the core of its conception of the separateness of individuals— that one person cannot act directly on another’s intention. I agree that there is an important way in which we are or can be separate and autonomous thinkers and agents. But the way the individualist tries to capture this separateness is misguided. (shrink)

The Herald of Free Enterprise, a ferry operating in the English Channel, sank on March 6, 1987, drowning nearly two hundred people. The official inquiry found that the company running the ferry was extremely sloppy, with poor routines of checking and management. “From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness.”1 But the courts did not penalize anyone in what might seem to be an appropriate measure, failing to identify individuals in the company or on (...) the ship itself who were seriously enough at fault. As one commentator put it, “The primary requirement of finding an individual who was liable . . . stood in the way of attaching any significance to the organizational sloppiness that had been found by the official inquiry.”2 In a case like this it can make good sense to hold that while the individuals involved may not bear a high degree of personal responsibility, together as a corporate enterprise they should carry full responsibility for what occurred. Although the members may not fully satisfy the conditions for being held personally responsible—although there are mitigating circumstances that excuse them in some mea-. (shrink)

According to Wringe 2006 we have good reasons for accepting the existence of Global Collective Obligations - in other words, collective obligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole. One such reason is that the existence of such obligations provides a plausible solution a problem which is sometimes thought to arise if we think that individuals have a right to have their basic needs satisfied. However, obligations of this sort would be of little interest – either theoretical or (...) practical – if they did not give rise, either directly or indirectly, to any kinds of reasons for individuals to behave in certain ways. -/- In this paper, I shall argue that in many situations, forward-looking global obligations give rise to an obligation on individuals to work towards bringing into existence and support an institutional system which will enable their obligations to be met. My argument for this conclusion involves two steps. In the first step, I address a general question about how collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations without being reducible to them, and which obligations they give rise to. Here I give a Kant-inspired argument, based on the principles that ‘ought implies can’ and that the content of the moral law is given by reflecting on how agents should legislate in a kingdom of ends, which is designed to show that collective obligations can give rise to individual obligations. In the second step I apply this principle to the case of global forward-looking obligations. (shrink)

In this article, the last in the symposium on world poverty and human rights, Pogge replies to his critics Mathias Risse, Alan Patten, Rowan Cruft, Norbert Anwander, and Debra Satz.

In this article, Satz critiques "both Pogge's use of the causal contribution principle as well as his attempt to derive all of our obligations to the global poor from the need to refrain from harming others.".

In this paper, I argue that a well-known objection to subsistence rights developed by Onora O'Neill - namely, that such rights would generate obligations without an obligation-bearer, can be answered if we take such rights to impose an obligation on the world's population, taken collectively.

forthcoming in Philosophy & Public Affairs [2008].

This paper is concerned with a recent, clever, and novel argument for the need for genuine collectives in our ontology of agents to accommodate the kinds of normative judgments we make about them. The argument appears in a new paper by David Copp, "On the Agency of Certain Collective Entities: An Argument from 'Normative Autonomy'" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility, XXX, 2006, pp. 194-221; henceforth ‘ACE’), and is developed in Copp’s paper for this special journal issue, (...) “The Collective Moral Autonomy Thesis” (henceforth ‘CAT’). The argument goes as follows. -/- (1) We correctly assign blame (or obligations) to collectives in circumstances in which it would be a mistake to assign any (relevantly related) blame (or obligations) to their members. (2) If (1), then collectives are genuine agents over and above their members. (3) Therefore, collectives are genuine agents over and above their members. -/- Following Copp, I call (1) the Collective Moral Autonomy Thesis (CMA). Copp argues for CMA primarily by appeal to cases, but also offers two general arguments for it. In the cases that Copp describes, we are to judge that a collective act is blameworthy, though each member of the group that acts is blameless because he is merely following procedures appropriate for his participation, or because there are excusing factors, or because of overriding personal duties. -/- I argue that the case for CMA has not been made. In particular, I argue that, in each case in which we feel inclined to hold a group responsible for something but not its members, it is because -/- 1. we have accepted a false dilemma, that when no one agent is fully responsible for the action of a group of which he is a member, the only entity that could be responsible is the group as such, or 2. we have directed our attention to the wrong individual or individuals, or 3. we have become confused about the commitments of the individuals, or 4. we have mistaken ameliorating for excusing factors, or 5. we have mistaken moral blameworthiness and all-in rational blameworthiness, or 6. a combination of these things. (shrink)

Two partners plan to rob a bank. The first recruits a driver while the second purchases a shotgun from a gun dealer. The driver knows he’s taking part in a robbery, although not a bank robbery. The gun dealer should have checked his customer’s police record before the sale, but failed to do so. The bank is robbed, a guard is killed, and the robbers escape, only to be caught later. “They committed bank robbery,” a prosecutor will say. But does (...) “they” include the gun dealer, whose lax standards made the robbery possible? “They conspired to rob the bank”—but does “they” here include the driver, who didn’t know it was a bank they were robbing? “They killed a bank guard”—but does it matter which robber inside the bank pulled the trigger? (shrink)

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)

The objective of this paper is to explain why certain authors - both popular and academic - are making a mistake when they attribute obligations to uncoordinated groups of persons, and to argue that it is particularly unhelpful to make this mistake given the prevalence of individuals faced with the difficult question of what morality requires of them in a situation in which there's a good they can bring about together with others, but not alone. I'll defend two alternatives to (...) attributing obligations to uncoordinated groups. The first solution has us build better people, who will coordinate their actions willingly and spontaneously when the occasion arises. The second solution has us build better groups, so that when the occasion arises, there is a framework in place for coordinating members into action. (shrink)

Moderate holists like French, Copp :369–388, 2007), Hess, Isaacs and List and Pettit argue that certain collectives qualify as moral agents in their own right, often pointing to the corporation as an example of a collective likely to qualify. A common objection is that corporations cannot qualify as moral agents because they lack free will. The concern is that corporations are effectively puppets, dancing on strings controlled by external forces. The article begins by briefly presenting a novel account of corporate (...) moral agency and then demonstrates that, on this account, qualifying corporations do possess free will. Such entities possess and act from their own “actional springs”, in Haji’s :292–308, 2006) phrase, and from their own reasons-responsive mechanisms. When they do so, they act freely and are morally responsible for what they do. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the manner in which analyses of the action of single agents have been pressed into service for constructing accounts of collective action. Specifically, I argue that the best analogy to collective action is a class of individual action that Carl Ginet has called 'aggregate action.' Furthermore, once we use aggregate action as a model of collective action, then we see that existing accounts of collective action have failed to accommodate an important class of (what I (...) shall call) 'unintentional collective actions.'. (shrink)

Worldwide, human lives are rapidly improving. Education, health-care, technology, and political participation are becoming ever more universal, empowering human beings everywhere to enjoy security, economic sufficiency, equal citizenship, and a life in dignity. To be sure, there are some specially difficult areas disfavoured by climate, geography, local diseases, unenlightened cultures or political tyranny. Here progress is slow, and there may be set-backs. But the affluent states and many international organizations are working steadily to extend the blessings of modernity through trade (...) and generous development assistance, and it won't be long until the last pockets of severe oppression and poverty are gone. Heavily promoted by Western governments and media, this comforting view of the world is widely shared, at least among the affluent. Pogge's new book presents an alternative view: Poverty and oppression persist on a massive scale; political and economic inequalities are rising dramatically both intra-nationally and globally. The affluent states and the international organizations they control knowingly contribute greatly to these evils - selfishly promoting rules and policies harmful to the poor while hypocritically pretending to set and promote ambitious development goals. Pogge's case studies include the $1/day poverty measurement exercise, the cosmetic statistics behind the first Millennium Development Goal, the War on Terror, and the proposed relaxation of the constraints on humanitarian intervention. A powerful moral analysis that shows what Western states would do if they really cared about the values they profess. (shrink)

I argue that our traditional conception of the duties imposed by human rights is unable to acknowledge the nature of many contemporary human rights violations. The traditional conception is based on a broadly deontological view according to which human rights impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions . I argue that given this conception of the nature of the duties imposed by human rights, not only claims to (...) aid, but in addition, claims against many of the most serious and prevalent contemporary active harms will not count as genuine human rights claims. These harms increasingly result from extremely complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. Institutional structures can have just as central a role to play in specifying and allocating responsibility for fulfilling many of the negative duties imposed by human rights as the positive duties. These structures can therefore be equally important in the realisation of both kinds of rights. Before the necessary institutional reforms have taken place, both kinds of rights are equally genuine, and ground the imperative of justice to reform existing social institutions. (shrink)