Responsibility for states' actions: Normative issues at the intersection of collective agency and state responsibility

Philosophy Compass 12 (11):e12456 (2017)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Is the state a collective agent? Are citizens responsible for what their states do? If not citizens, then who, if anyone, is responsible for what the state does? Many different sub-disciplines of philosophy are relevant for answering these questions. We need to know what “the state” is, who or what it's composed of, and what relation the parts stand in to the whole. Once we know what it is, we need to know whether that thing is an agent, in particular a moral agent capable of taking moral responsibility for its actions. We have to know what it takes for it to be capable of moral responsibility, e.g., what the functional equivalents in groups are of knowledge, intention, foreseeability, recklessness, and so on. And once we've established that it is an agent, and is responsible for what it does, we have to explain whether and in what way this implicates members, i.e., whether state responsibility distributes to the members of states, whoever they may be. Answers to these questions come from metaphysics, social ontology, action theory, epistemology, political theory, and ethics. In what follows, we'll give an outline of some different ways of answering these questions.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 84,292

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Collective responsibility.Steven Sverdlik - 1987 - Philosophical Studies 51 (1):61 - 76.
Collective Responsibility.R. S. Downie - 1969 - Philosophy 44 (167):66 - 69.
Extended cognition, personal responsibility, and relational autonomy.Mason Cash - 2010 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4):645-671.
Moral Responsibility.Christopher Cowley - 2013 - Bristol, CT: Routledge.
Collective Responsibility: Organizations as Organic Entities.Robert Albin - 2016 - Open Journal of Philosophy 6 (4):392-405.
Collective responsibility and qualifying actions.Gregory Mellema - 2006 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30 (1):168–175.
Collective responsibility and an agent meaning theory.Michael Mckenna - 2006 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30 (1):16–34.
Agency as difference-making: causal foundations of moral responsibility.Johannes Himmelreich - 2015 - Dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-09-14

Downloads
77 (#176,988)

6 months
2 (#332,731)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author Profiles

Holly Lawford-Smith
University of Melbourne
Stephanie Collins
Monash University

Citations of this work

Are ‘the affluent’ responsible for global poverty?Holly Lawford-Smith - 2019 - Ethics and Global Politics 12 (1):61-67.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Famine, affluence, and morality.Peter Singer - 1972 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (3):229-243.
Shared intention.Michael E. Bratman - 1993 - Ethics 104 (1):97-113.
Modelling collective belief.Margaret Gilbert - 1987 - Synthese 73 (1):185-204.
Collectives' Duties and Collectivisation Duties.Stephanie Collins - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (2):231-248.
Essentially Shared Obligations.Gunnar Björnsson - 2014 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1):103-120.

View all 26 references / Add more references