Abstract
Some instances of right and wrongdoing appear to be of a distinctly collective kind. When, for example, one group commits genocide against another, the genocide is collective in the sense that the wrongness of genocide seems morally distinct from the aggregation of individual murders that make up the genocide. The problem, which I refer to as the problem of collective wrongs, is that it is unclear how to assign blame for distinctly collective wrongdoing to individual contributors when none of those individual contributors is guilty of the wrongdoing in question. I offer Christopher Kutz’s Complicity Principle as an attractive starting point for solving the problem, and then argue that the principle ought to be expanded to include a broader and more appropriate range of cases. The view I ultimately defend is that individuals are blameworthy for collective harms insofar as they knowingly participate in those harms, and that said individuals remain blameworthy regardless of whether they succeed in making a causal contribution to those harms.
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Notes
While I focus on wrongdoing and blameworthy behaviour, I think my position would apply just as well to right action and praiseworthy behaviour.
When I refer to an individual as “blameworthy”, I mean only that she is responsible for having committed a wrong. I sometimes refer to actions themselves as blameworthy, by which I mean that an individual is responsible for the act and that the act is wrong.
The same sort of example, though used for a different purpose, can be found in Miller 2001.
While Bratman develops a view of collective intentionality he does not offer that view as a means of determining how moral responsibility should operate in collective contexts.
By “inherent mutual accountability collective action” Gilbert means the kind of collective action that she argues is partly constituted by the members involved having an obligation to one another to remain committed to a collective goal.
Obviously climate change is caused by more than just motorists, but for the sake of simplicity I will treat motorists as the only contributors.
It may be appropriate to extend the principle even further by claiming that individuals are responsible for what they ought to know are harmful contributions rather than merely for those contributions that they know are harmful. The principle could then allow us to hold responsible those individuals who are willfully or otherwise unjustifiably ignorant of the harms to which they contribute. However, to extend the principle in this way would give rise to many questions and concerns having to do with whether and to what extent individuals should be required to educate themselves about the numerous and often veiled consequences of their behaviour. Thus, while I believe the notion of individuals being responsible for what they ought to know they are doing has merit, for the purposes of this paper I will confine my view to the more restrictive claim that individual contributors must know that they are contributing.
I am borrowing this point from Alison Hills (2003).
References
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Tracy Isaacs for her support and insightful comments on several versions of this article. I would also like to thank Michael Milde, Samantha Brennan, Dennis Klimchuk, Sara Seck, Larry May, Rahul Kumar, and the referees for Ethical Theory and Moral Practice for offering helpful comments on the paper. This project received support from a doctoral fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a postdoctoral fellowship from Queen’s University’s Advisory Research Council.
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Lawson, B. Individual Complicity in Collective Wrongdoing. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 227–243 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9332-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9332-5