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Phenomenal consciousness, collective mentality, and collective moral responsibility

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Abstract

Are corporations and other complex groups ever morally responsible in ways that do not reduce to the moral responsibility of their members? Christian List, Phillip Pettit, Kendy Hess, and David Copp have recently defended the idea that they can be. For them, complex groups (sometimes called collectives) can be irreducibly morally responsible because they satisfy the conditions for morally responsible agency; and this view is made more plausible by the claim (made by Theiner) that collectives can have minds. In this paper I give a new argument that they are wrong. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind (what Uriah Kriegel calls “the phenomenal intentionality research program”) and moral theory (David Shoemaker’s tripartite theory of moral responsibility), I argue that for something to have a mind, it must be phenomenally conscious, and that the fact that collectives lack phenomenal consciousness implies that they are incapable of accountability, an important form of moral responsibility.

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Notes

  1. Like most participants in this discussion, I am using “moral responsibility” to refer to what has sometimes been called “backwards-looking” moral responsibility—roughly, being able to be morally accountable for something one has done (or failed to do). I am not addressing the question of “forward-looking moral responsibility,” which is roughly the ability to be morally obligated to do/not do something. There are interesting questions about the relationship between moral responsibility and moral obligation, but I won't pursue them here. And, as I note below, the sort of moral responsibility at issue here is really non-reducible moral responsibility: moral responsibility which is not had derivatively in some way by virtue of someone else's moral responsibility. So, for example, one might think that a group can be morally responsible for some group action by virtue of the fact that its members are individually responsible for that action. In this case, the group would be morally responsible in a reductive way. I will set aside reducible moral responsibility for this discussion, but only use the adjective “irreducible” to modify the term “moral responsibility” when it seems important to remind the reader of the distinction. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the need to say more about what I mean here.).

  2. By “collective” I mean any group that might plausibly be thought to be irreducibly morally responsible. Some use the term “corporate agent,” rather than “collective;” I don't mean for anything to hang on my terminological choice.

  3. Hess (2013) provides an excellent defense of this notion. List and Pettit (2011) provide a defense and extensive discussion of the sorts of “deliberative dilemma” cases that can be used to make a kind of non-reductionism about collective actions plausible (see particularly chapters 1–3). And Copp (2006) also defends the idea that our understanding of agency extends agency to some groups; on page 220 he challenges those who disagree to provide a “solid rationale” for rejecting this view. This paper is an attempt to do so.

  4. Although rare, cases where a group might be guilty despite the fact than none of the individuals involved seem responsible exist. Here's an example: In 1979, an Air New Zealand Limited flight from Auckland to McMurdo Station crashed into Mt. Erebus, killing everyone on board. The pilot would almost certainly have avoided the mountain if he had been informed that the plane’s autopilot route had been altered. Pilots were typically told about changes to their route orally, and informally, shortly before takeoff, but for some reason this was not done. Subsequent investigation found that no single individual had responsibility for informing the pilot. Furthermore, informal arrangements for notifying pilots were standard practice among airlines at the time. Investigators concluded that neither the employees on duty nor those who had designed the informal notification system could be held responsible for the crash. One might think that the airline is responsible, but that this was not true of any individual (either within the airline at the time, or even those who designed the airline's communications system). I owe this example to Phillips (1995, p 564 ff).

  5. Non-reductive moral responsibility has also been called non-distributive moral responsibility. Like most writing on this, I will assume that if collectives bear irreducible moral responsibility for their actions, it is because they are morally responsible agents who are related to those actions in the right way. For a recent (but, I think, unsuccessful) attempt to get collective non-reductive responsibility without collective agents, see Chant (2015).

  6. E.g. Theiner (2014).

  7. See Shoemaker (2015).

  8. In saying these notions of moral responsibility are connected to affective responses in a “broadly Strawsonian way,” I mean that, for any of the three senses of moral responsibility, having one of them implies being an apt target for a certain set of affective responses. I do not mean to imply that being morally responsible in any of these senses metaphysically depends on our responses; that is a separate question (one I touch on when discussing premise 2).

  9. See Shoemaker (2015, chapters 1–3).

  10. For more discussion, see Shoemaker (2015, chapter 3), particularly pp 103–112.

  11. Pereboom (2014, p 128).

  12. This is probably especially true for readers who are incompatibilists about moral responsibility—that is, who think that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. After all, it is unlikely that collectives posses the sort of capabilities that incompatibilists usually think is required for moral responsibility.

  13. In addition to the considerations I discuss here, some positions in philosophy of mind and action theory support the possibility of CMR; see Theiner et al. (2010).

  14. This is related to the problem of a “responsibility deficit” when individuals are punished for certain kinds of collective action. The basic idea is that punishing all the relevant individuals isn't enough; there is some responsibility “left over.” See Braham and van Hees (2011) for a recent discussion of the idea.

  15. Note that, unlike Chalmers and many others, I am not committed to the view that “qualitative feels” lack representational or intentional content.

  16. Eric Scwitzgebel has suggested that, if materialism is true, then some collectives likely do enjoy phenomenal consciousness (Schwitzgebel 2015). But he isn't committed to the antecedent, and so doesn't endorse collective phenomenal consciousness. A referee has pointed to Schmid (2014) as a possible endorser of collective phenomenal consciousness. I am not sure I understand Schmid's position, but I do not think he is endorsing collective phenomenal consciousness. Even if he is, however, I take it that the considerations given in the next paragraph give us good reason not to accept such a view.

  17. One might think—some do, I believe—that collectives could possess phenomenal consciousness in fantastical scenarios, such as that envisioned by the Chinese Nation thought experiment, where the population of China acts in concert in such as way as to functionally mimic the activity of neurons. I take it, though, that exemplifying the sorts of states which would be required for phenomenal consciousness are vastly beyond the capabilities of any collective we are likely to create anytime soon. We can safely say, therefore, that actual and reasonably possible collectives are not capable of phenomenal consciousness. For simplicity, I leave this consideration aside in the text.

  18. Their view here is similar to Dennett's; but it is worth noting that unlike Dennett's interpretivism, Horgan and Kriegel's interpretivism is not universal: some states (phenomenally conscious ones) are not dependent upon any observer's interpretation. This allows them to avoid some problems with Dennett's view; see Horgan and Kriegel (2008, p 355).

  19. In particular, the sort that support “cognitive, broadly inferential connections between the relevant states and phenomenally intentional states” (Horgan and Kriegel 2008, p 356). One this view, it is vague whether some states are mental or not, when those states are somewhat causally connected in the right way to phenomenally conscious states, but not strongly; see Horgan and Kreigel (2008, pp 355–6). Figuring out precisely what sorts of causal relationships would support such connections would be a major project of its own, but the details do not matter for our purposes; see Sect. 3.1, though, for discussion of an objection that this view—however the details are filled in—opens the door for collectives to have minds. I tentatively endorse their view on what sorts of relationships make non-phenomenally conscious things mental states. My endorsement carries a caveat: I am interpreting the causal integration at issue to include not only states which have actually had close causal relations, but also which would under the right circumstances; so a new brain state in an unconscious human could be causally related to phenomenally conscious states even before the human gained consciousness. It isn't clear to me whether Horgan and Kriegel use the term “causal integration” this liberally or not.

  20. This is not meant as a sufficient condition; perhaps it takes more than the capacity for phenomenally conscious states to be a mind. It is a necessary condition, one compatible with a number of different views about what minds are (e.g. properties of animals, immaterial substances, etc.).

  21. Note that this does not necessarily imply that zombies lack intentionality, nor that zombies are genuinely possible or fully conceivable; and so everything I have said is consistent with physicalism, and indeed with the thesis that all phenomenal states are identical to states with certain functional properties. The idea is just that if (per impossible?) zombies existed, then they would not have minds.

  22. See, in addition to the papers already cited, (Horgan 2013).

  23. And to have established that this response (discussed in Theiner 2014, p 309) is inadequate: that views of mind that require phenomenal consciousness are “suspiciously anthropocentric” on the grounds that they “match those we take to indicate a human mind.” The PIRP view of minds does not arbitrarily pick some features of human minds and privilege them; its focus on the phenomenal is motivated by general views about intentionality, and it is capable of delivering plausible results about a wide range of non-human cases.

  24. Of course, one could be a revisionist about moral responsibility, and think we should endorse CMR even though doing so doesn't accord with our pre-theoretic views about moral responsibility. In this case, any conceptual connections between our pre-theoretic notions might well be irrelevant. This would be a very interesting view, and perhaps one that deserves discussion; but as far as I can tell, it is not the view of the advocates of CMR, and I will set it aside.

  25. I’d like to thank Kate Ritchie for suggesting this objection to me.

  26. See Clark and Chalmers (1998) for an explication and defense of the extended mind that uses Otto as an example (on pp 12–13). This specific example has been criticized [see e.g. (Michaelian 2012)], but the details of these criticisms won’t matter for our purposes, and Otto still functions very well as a rough guide to the extended mind hypothesis.

  27. As noted earlier (see fn. 12), Horgan and Kriegel suspect that there is “no deep fact of the matter as to whether [such states] are mental or not”(Horgan and Kriegel 2008, p 16). But they are open to the possibility that the mentality of Otto’s notebook states are not indeterminate, and treating Otto’s notebook states this way sharpens the objection, so we can set this complication aside.

  28. Some of the language of this reconstruction is due to Kate Ritchie.

  29. I should point at that on the view I am defending, it is quite possible for something to be the instantiation of two different mental states held by two different minds. For example, we could imagine that Otto's notebook is used in just the same way by Ottolina. In that case, both Otto's and Ottolina's memories would be partially instantiated within the notebook. The same letters on the page partially instantiate different mental states with the same contents. If the extended mind hypothesis is correct, then something like this is probably often the case with collectives; a shared office calendar would be an obvious simple example.

  30. For discussion of this, see e.g. (Copp 2006) and Hess (2010, 2013).

  31. I think this is the rough idea behind many contemporary arguments for CMR; see, for example, the papers from the previous footnote.

  32. Here, as elsewhere, I am ignoring the positive analogue to agential anger, agential gratitude. This should not matter for the argument.

  33. Björnsson and Hess do not distinguish between answerability and accountability, talking instead about moral responsibility. As I noted in the introduction, I think that they intend for their account to cover everything one could plausibly think important to moral responsibility, including what I call accountability. But even if they do not, their work could be adapted to provide the objection considered here.

  34. Readers interested in arguments for this view of intentionality might be interested in Searle (1991, 1992), Horgan and Tienson (2002), and Kriegel (2003).

  35. This is a different issue from that of what makes something unconscious a mental state. Something could be intentional without being a mental state. So although some of the moves made to account for derivative intentionality are similar to the sorts of accounts discussed earlier about what makes unconscious things mental states, they have a different subject matter that could in principle require different stories.

  36. See Kriegel (2011, pp 189–206) for discussion. Kriegel also discusses elimanativism, which I will set aside as getting the extensionality of intentionality even more wrong than the first two views.

  37. One might think that we should abandon Kriegel's interpretivism for an account on which derived intentionality is held by virtue of whatever his ideal interpreter would use as a basis for their judgments. A key reason not to is explanatory simplicity: the basis on which the interpreter judges is far more complex (in Kriegel's term, “heterogenous”) than the judgments themselves, which arguably gives us reason to think that it is the judgment that is doing the explanatory work. See Kriegel (2011, pp 216–217) for more discussion. James Otis has suggested to me that actual observers might be able to do some or all of the work that Kriegel attributes to a possible, idealized observer. This is an interesting suggestion, but I do not think that whether it is correct or not will bear on my purposes in this paper.

  38. Tollefsen (2002) has an interpretivist theory along these lines, although it is not developed within a PIRP framework.

  39. One might think that contemporary work on the intentional states of collectives in particular, such as List and Pettit (2011) and Hess (2014), provides an alternative to the view that these states are response dependent properties. Perhaps this is true, but I am skeptical. Specific accounts of how particular entities (such as collectives) have intentional states need to fit into overall general views about the nature of intentionality (it is implausible to think that each domain of derived intentionality has its own account with no overall theory that provides a general account). And general views of the sources of intentionality that are offered or supposed by List, Pettit, and Hess make no mention of phenomenal intentionality, and fit far better in a NERP framework than a PIRP one. (Recall that PIRP views of intentionality ground non-phenomenal intentionality in phenomenal intentionality, while NERP views do not.) List and Pettit's functionalist views of intentionality, for example, do not leave any role to be played by phenomenal consciousness. Hess, as best I can tell, assumes a broadly functionalist view as well. So, on PIRP, these theories are incomplete, since they lack an account of how collective intentionality is grounded in phenomenal intentionality; and the most plausible ways I know of completing them seem to me (for reasons described in the text) to make them response-dependent properties. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I address these theories here.

  40. For a helpful recent discussion of the difficulties with metaphysical Strawsonianism, see McKenna (2012, pp 31–55). Typical discussions of metaphysical Strawsonianism (including McKenna's) put the view in terms of moral responsibility, rather than accountability, but I think that the point is most convincing when it is accountability in particular we are considering, due to accountability's inherently confrontational nature (it would be strange if the intentionality of behavior warranting such confrontation were most fundamentally grounded in our practice of confrontation rather than in the agent itself).

  41. One might be concerned that this is in tension with my earlier defense, which relied on Shoemaker's theory; Shoemaker himself seems to be a metaphysical Strawsonian. But that is not essential to his theory, and I do not believe anything I have claimed is inconsistent with rejecting that view. For Shoemaker's discussion of metaphysical Strawsonianism as detachable from the rest of his views, see Shoemaker (2015, pp 20–21).

  42. One area of recent concern for moral responsibility theory has been responsibility for actions stemming from our unconscious mental states. (Actions stemming from implicit bias are one example.) It is controversial whether and how these states play a role in our moral responsibility, and so one natural question to ask about the argument I just gave is whether it is compatible with thinking that individuals are responsible for such actions. One might think that what I have said implies that we cannot be accountable for such behavior, because it implies that our unconscious mental states are only intentional in a response dependent way. I am not sure, however. I do not have the space to give this a full discussion, but I think that our unconscious mental states may play roles in our moral responsibility for other reasons than their intentionality. It may be, for example, that the moral relevance of implicit racism has to do with its effects on our behavior, combined with our negligance or inability in our phenomenally conscious control over such effects, and not from any intentionality the implicitly racist states may possess. One might also hold a mixed view about derivative intentionality, on which some states—those suitably connected to phenomenal consciousness—are intentional by virtue of those causal connections, while others—including those had by collectives—are intentional by virtue of what an ideal observer would say about them. Of course, motivating such a disjunctive view might be a challenge, but the possibility of such a view makes me hesitant to draw conclusions about ordinary individual unconscious states from my argument in the text above.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Brett Sherman, Bill FitzPatrick, Kate Ritchie, Dustin Crummett, Bill Rowley, Kelly Annesley, James Otis, Hayley Clatterbuck, an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies, and an audience at the Pacific APA for helpful feedback and discussion.

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Baddorf, M. Phenomenal consciousness, collective mentality, and collective moral responsibility. Philos Stud 174, 2769–2786 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0809-x

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