Abstract
Many important harms result in large part from our collective omissions, such as harms from our omissions to stop climate change and famines. Accounting for responsibility for collective omissions turns out to be particularly challenging. It is hard to see how an individual contributes anything to a collective omission to prevent harm if she couldn’t have made a difference to that harm on her own. Some groups are able to prevent such harms, but it is highly contentious whether groups can be loci of responsibility. This paper takes an existing and plausible framework of moral responsibility—one based on abilities—and scales it up to accommodate responsibility for collective omissions. This centrally involves identifying what the relevant collective abilities are and how they work. One significant benefit of this approach is that we can do this while remaining neutral on the debates about collective agency and collective responsibility by showing how individualist and collectivist versions of the theory work. Finally, I explore several further upshots of the scaled-up ability-based account, including that degrees of responsibility can be cashed out in terms of strengths of the relevant abilities, which has both theoretical and applied implications.
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Notes
Since praise is often more complicated than blame and since the collective omissions people are interested in typically involve harm and blame—such as the harm from and blame for collectively omitting to stop climate change—I focus on blame here.
For actual-sequence theories of responsibility, see, e.g., Fischer and Ravizza (1998) , Sartorio (2016). For Strawsonian and communication-based theories, see, e.g., McKenna (2012). For ledger theories, see, e.g., Zimmerman (1988). For ability-based theories, see, e.g., Clarke (2014, 1994), Metz (Forthcoming), and Nelkin and Rickless (2017).
Some hold that omissions can be causes (see, e.g., Hall 2004; Lewis 2004, 1986; Paul and Hall 2013; Schaffer 2000; Thomson 2003), while others hold that omissions cannot be causes but can be ‘quasi-causes’ (see Dowe 2001), and still others hold that omissions can only be parts of causal explanations (see, e.g., Beebee 2004; Varzi 2007).
Fischer (2004: 157–158), for instance, holds that moral responsibility is the ‘gateway’ to moral blameworthiness, where further conditions must be met for an agent who is morally responsible for a behavior to be blameworthy for it. For those in this vein who think that moral responsibility does not automatically entail blameworthiness and further conditions must first be met—such as the absence of valid excuses—shift my talk of blameworthiness to talk of moral responsibility for harm.
For instance, actual-sequence views of control such as Fischer and Ravizza’s (1998) cash out this control in terms of reasons-responsiveness. According to their moderate reasons-responsiveness account, morally responsible agents, or more precisely, their mechanisms in action, must be strongly receptive to reasons and weakly reactive to them. Note, though, that this reasons-responsiveness crucially depends on the agent’s abilities. Whether an agent’s mechanism in action is sufficiently receptive to reasons depends on her abilities to recognize and assess her reasons, and whether her mechanism is sufficiently reactive to reasons depends on her abilities to choose and act on the basis of those reasons.
I leave it open whether there are additional conditions for responsibility.
Although as I argue in Metz (Forthcoming), the relevant abilities might be simple abilities plus the opportunity to exercise them rather than general abilities plus the opportunity to exercise them.
This includes both classic compatibilists and classical incompatibilists (see, e.g., McKenna and Pereboom 2016). I remain neutral on whether the ability to do otherwise is compatible with determinism and so remain neutral on the free will debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists.
For further defenses of using the Principle of Alternative Possibilities for omissions, see, e.g., Fischer (2017), Fischer and Ravizza (1998), Metz (Forthcoming), and Sartorio (2017, 2005). Note, also, that asymmetrical abilities views like Nelkin (2008) and Wolf’s (1990) – which hold being blameworthy for a behavior requires the ability to do otherwise whereas being praiseworthy for a behavior does not—are compatible with this paper’s claim that blameworthiness for omissions requires the ability to do otherwise.
One may have to add a condition that the agent was aware or should have been aware of her abilities and obligations in order to cover cases of culpable negligence and unwitting omissions. In these cases, an agent is able to do something that she ought to do, but she isn’t aware that she is not performing the omitted act – such as forgetting to buy milk on the way home from work. This ‘should have been aware’ condition allows for agents to still be directly responsible for their culpable negligence and unwitting omissions. For one ability-based view that holds that agents can be directly blameworthy for unwitting omissions, see Clarke (2017). A different strategy to handle such cases is to use a tracing component: an agent’s indirect blameworthiness for omitting to do something traces back to an earlier behavior that she is directly responsible for. However, this paper is about direct responsibility, not indirect responsibility (for instance, the responsibility in Frankfurt-style cases is direct, not indirect), and tracing strategies face apparent counterexamples (see, e.g., Sher 2009 and Vargas 2005), so a tracing strategy is not pursued here. More broadly, to avoid the controversies about unwitting omissions, this paper focuses on cases in which agents lack good epistemic excuses. Additionally, as we will see in the final section, addressing ignorance and epistemic excuses is an important policy consideration when addressing harm from collective omissions, and awareness campaigns take on an extra moral importance precisely because they can dispel epistemic excuses. For further discussion of the problem of unwitting omissions and various proposed resolutions, see, e.g., Clarke (2014), Nelkin and Rickless (2017), Sher (2017), and Smith (2017).
Many in the moral responsibility literature hold that moral responsibility comes in degrees (see, e.g., Coates and Swenson 2013; Nelkin 2016; Tierney 2019). If responsibility does not involve degrees, we could still say that in cases of collective omissions, not everyone seems responsible for the same failures.
For further discussion of these particular types of abilities, see, e.g., Mele (2003) and Metz (Forthcoming).
Higher degrees of success sometimes track more control, but robustness and control are not purely statistical matters. The best basketball players make around 40% of their three-point shots, but they still possess and exercise robust abilities to make those shots – they ‘have what it takes’ to have control over making those shots. In contrast, I can flip ‘heads’ on a coin about 50% of the time, but I exercise virtually no control over whether I flip ‘heads’ and my ability to flip ‘heads’ is weak. For further discussion of abilities and control, see, e.g., Clarke (2015), Mele (2017, 2003). There is much room for future research on these issues, and I expect the literature on this topic to keep growing in future years.
My analysis of degrees of responsibility based on strength of abilities is in principle compatible with quality of will approaches – an agent displays a worse quality of will or a worse lack of due regard when she omits to help in virtue of having stronger abilities to help that she omits to exercise, holding fixed the degree of her awareness of her abilities.
Nelkin (2016), for instance, offers a ‘rational abilities’ account, which bases degrees of moral responsibility on degrees of difficulty (which in turn depend on degrees of effort and sacrifice). Nonetheless, I believe my account is compatible with hers since difficulty seems to track strength of abilities and sacrifice seems closely related to levels of obligation.
Collectivists might point out, for instance, that blaming a country for omitting to help with a famine goes beyond and is not reducible to blaming its leader—similarly to how blaming a team for failing to score goes beyond blaming an individual player for her contribution to that failure.
One exception is Kaiserman (2016), who argues that causation does not come in degrees, but causal contributions can.
This also means that the epistemic condition is more important for responsibility for omissions than for actions. For further discussion of this and related issues, see Metz (Forthcoming).
Note that what exactly we are collectively able to do is a disjunctive, not conjunctive, set: a group with $1 million is able to give Charity A $1 million or Charity B $1 million (or split the donation), but not both. So, the group is responsible for omitting to give Charity A or Charity B $1 million – not for omitting to give Charity A $1 million and for omitting to give Charity B $1 million. For further discussion of responsibility for disjunctions, see Sartorio (2006).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Carolina Sartorio, Michael McKenna, Kay Chronister, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on this paper.
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Metz, J. An ability-based theory of responsibility for collective omissions. Philos Stud 178, 2665–2685 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01568-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01568-y