Collective Responsibility and Acting Together

Abstract

What is the moral significance of the contrast between acting together and strategic interaction? We argue that while collective moral responsibility is not uniquely tied to the former, the degree to which the participants in a shared intentional wrongdoing are blameworthy is normally higher than when agents bring about the same wrong as a result of strategic interaction. One argument for this claim focuses on the fact that shared intentions cause intended outcomes in a more robust manner than the intentions involved in strategic interaction. We argue, however, that this in itself is not significant. The significant difference is rather volitional: The parties to a shared intention are mutually implicated in each other's will in a distinct way. Since degree of blameworthiness depends on the quality of will an agent displays in her actions, this explains the higher degree of collective blameworthiness associated with shared intentional wrongdoing.

Merging Minds: The Conceptual and Ethical Impacts of Emerging Technologies for Collective Minds

“…While some have argued that this sort of phenomenal unity has a direct impact on the normativity of collective minds (Danaher, in Danaher & Nyholm [ 9 , 10 ], the authors of this paper see the moral significance of that phenomenology as an open question. One could make an argument similar to that of Blomberg and Hindriks [ 3 ] (as quoted in Sect. 3 of this paper), that whether or not we feel as if we are bringing about an outcome together with other agents or by the use of non-agents is irrelevant to our de facto responsibility for contributing to bringing about that outcome.…”

“…Conversely, one can share a collective responsibility for the collective effects of parallel actions which are not connected through shared intentions. Blomberg and Hindriks [ 3 ] showcase this distinction between collective action and collective responsibility quite well, as they argue that agents with shared intentions are more blameworthy for morally problematic actions than agents who only act in parallel – although both sets of agents have some collective responsibility for their actions. Interestingly, they use an example including robots to highlight one of their points:…”

“…Now, replace those other agents with non- agential contributing causal factors (say, advanced robotic devices), but keep my intention and contribution fixed. There seems to be no reason why I would be any less or more blameworthy in the former case than in the latter just because some of the contributing causal factors happen to be other intentional agents rather than advanced robotic devices” ([ 3 ], p 146).…”

“…But it is far from clear that there is a collective responsibility at play at all in the robotics case, or whether there could be if the robots were to achieve agency through the interaction with human agents. It is also notable that Blomberg and Hindriks [ 3 ] base their work on Bratman’s reductionist account, and in doing so presume that collective responsibility can be exhaustively explained by the responsibility of the individuals constituting that collective. But this would remain a point of dispute in the context of TCMs, and in particular MacroMinds.…”

Epistemic Complicity

“…Instead, despite Kutz's worries about causeless complicity, according to Lepora and Goodin making a certain kind of causal contribution to a principal wrongdoing is indeed a minimal condition on complicity. There are of course a wide range of competing views about the role for causation and participatory intentions in our understanding of complicity (Bazargan-Forward 2017; Blomberg and Hindriks 2020; French 2016; Gardner 2007; Katz 2023; Lepora and Goodin 2013, 2016; Petersson 2013). Given the complexity of this literature, I cannot hope to conclusively defend one sort of approach over another, nor do I regard doing so as necessary for my bigger-picture project of identifying mechanisms of vicarious responsibility in the epistemic domain.…”