The following Review Essay, inspired by Tracy Isaacs’ new book, Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts, connects the philosophical literature on group agency with recent trends in international criminal law. Part I of the Essay sketches out the relevant philosophical positions, including collectivist and individualist accounts of group agency. Particular attention is paid to Kornhauser and Sager’s development of the doctrinal paradox, Philip Pettit’s deployment of the paradox towards a general argument for group rationality, and Michael Bratman’s account of shared or (...) joint intentions. Part II then analyzes, with cautious support, Isaacs’ two-level solution, which entails both individual and collective moral responsibility. Under this view, collective moral agency is a real phenomenon, though the existence of the collective neither obviates nor eliminates the moral responsibility of the individuals from which it is composed. My own evaluation of the proposed solution concentrates on Davidson’s Principle of Charity and whether behavior interpretation requires viewing such agents in particular ways so as to maximize rationality. By analogy to the distinctive rationality of long-term plans, where the rationality of an individual act can only be understood relative to its place in the rationally justified long-term plan of a single individual, I also consider the rationality of individual acts whose rationality can only be understood relative to the group endeavors of which they are a part. Finally, Part III traces some implications of the two-level solution for legal doctrine, in particular the role of collective organizations in the recent jurisprudence of the International Criminal Court. For example, I note that the ICC has recently become more and more focused on the role played by goal-oriented collectives, especially with regard to the plan or policy requirement for crimes against humanity and, in the context of modes of liability, indirect liability for crimes committed through an organization. (shrink)

Courts purport to abandon ordinary meaning only when words in a statute accommodate more than one meaning; to look to surrounding words, legislative history, and then public policy considerations, only if those previous efforts fail. The canon of statutory construction, “a word is known by its associates,” generally means nearest associates, or near as possible. An analogous language philosophy principle counsels increasing search radius only as needed. Dimensional extension advances the sequence to broader domains of information. Such incrementalist restrictions should (...) require consistent justification of each broadening step by the inadequacy of preceding steps. But courts don’t do this, and shouldn’t. This essay references the legal debate between “textualists” and non-textualists and its philosophical parallel between minimalists and pragmatists. It illustrates court departures from the incrementalist model, and concludes that when judges choose broad evidentiary contexts in seeking statutory meaning, they need no more justification than when they choose narrower ones. (shrink)