Abstract

My dissertation treats the modern conflict between our essentially individualistic understanding of the moral agent and the increasing social consolidation of individuals within bureaucratic and corporate structures. Serious harms brought about through collective acts generally involve only distant or marginally effective individual contributors. Such harms are largely excluded from our moral and political self-understanding because our post-Kantian framework for assigning responsibility is both essentially local and individualist. ;Existing philosophical accounts of collective responsibility are based on a paradigm of whole-hearted commitment to a localized group effort; but these analyses cannot accommodate the complex psychology of complicity. A full philosophical understanding of both the causal and the moral relations of membership and collective action can reestablish individual responsibility for its effects, grounding accountability in the intentions of members to play a part in a group effort. This analytic approach thus preserves a strong, independent basis for assigning liability while accommodating differences among various levels of psychological identification, choice, and power. I propose an ethics of collective action that reattaches individuals to their collective deeds, thus relocating social groups within our moral landscape. The final part of my dissertation applies this ethics to problems in the civil and criminal law of conspiracy and corporations