On the Relation Between Collective Responsibility and Collective Duties

Abstract

There is good reason to think that moral responsibility as accountability is tied to the violation of moral demands. This lends intuitive support to Type-Symmetry in the collective realm: A type of responsibility entails the violation or unfulfillment of the same type of all-things-considered duty. For example, collective responsibility necessarily entails the violation of a collective duty. But Type-Symmetry is false. In this paper I argue that a non-agential group can be collectively responsible without thereby violating a collective duty. To show this I distinguish between four types of responsibility and duty in collective contexts: corporate, distributed, collective, shared. I set out two cases: one involves a non-reductive collective action that constitutes irreducible wrongdoing, the other involves a non-divisible consequence. I show that the violation of individual or shared duties both can lead to irreducible wrongdoing for which only the group is responsible. Finally, I explain why this conclusion does not upset any work on individual responsibility.

Group agents, moral competence and duty-bearers: the update argument

“…In my view, even non-agential groups can be collectively morally responsible in a non-distributive way for actions or outcomes (de Haan, 2021a ). Elsewhere, I argue that to accommodate our considered moral judgments concerning the (non-distributive) collective responsibility of non-agential groups we must let go of a strict moral agency condition on moral responsibility and replace this with a wrongdoing condition (de Haan, 2021b ). What matters is that the social object we attribute moral responsibility to is the originator of moral wrongdoing.…”

“… 8 Elsewhere, I argue that we need not postulate a group-level duty in order to explain why purposive groups can commit irreducibly collective moral wrongdoing (de Haan, 2021b ). …”