Collective Punishment and Responsibility

Collective Responsibility

Collective responsibility is to be contrasted with individual responsibility. Here, we shall be focusing on the debate concerning collective moral responsibility rather than any legal significance of the term because Western legal systems primarily regard individual humans as the proper subjects before the law. The philosophical debate surrounding the legitimate attribution of moral responsibility is premised on the notion that individual humans generally possess certain metaphysical characteristics in virtue of which they qualify as moral agents and may, thus, be legitimately attributed with moral responsibility. The debate concerning collective moral responsibility is then couched in terms of discussing whether or not a group of individuals can collectively possess the relevant characteristics of moral agency to be legitimately attributed with moral responsibility collectively.

It is generally accepted that there is an important difference between two types of collectives—an aggregate collective and a conglomerate collective. An aggregate collective (also called a random collective) consists of a group of individuals who together bring about a certain event through the aggregation of their individual efforts. For example, an angry mob of people may cause damage to a neighborhood through the aggregation of each individual's act of destruction. A conglomerate collective, on the other hand, is an [Page 342]organized group of people with an established decision procedure to make collective decisions. The members of a conglomerate collective work concertedly in the pursuit of a common goal. For example, the members of an orchestra each contribute their individual parts to the collective goal of playing a symphony in concert.

It is commonly accepted that there are three necessary conditions for moral agency: to have the ability to intend an action, the ability to perform an action, and to have the autonomy to choose an intentional action. With regard to the attribution of moral responsibility, it is generally acknowledged that an aggregate collective does not possess any of these characteristics as a collective unit, but being a mere aggregation of individual actions each member is distributed moral responsibility for the event in question. However, controversy surrounds whether or not a conglomerate collective can meet the conditions of moral agency. It has been argued (e.g., by Virginia Held) that the entire membership of a collective may be morally responsible as a unit. The idea is that the collective decision structure binds the members and obscures lines of responsibility to the individual members such that only a responsibility attribution to the collective whole is possible. It is the members collectively who are attributed responsibility, but because the structure obscures the lines of individual responsibility, the attribution of responsibility is not distributable to the individual members, but rather the members are held collectively responsible as a unit. The collective whole is considered to satisfy the conditions of moral agency in virtue of the actions of all the individual members (or vicariously by some of the members) who are moral agents, and thus, the collective is deemed to be the legitimate subject of moral responsibility attributions.

Another possibility that has been suggested (e.g., by Peter French) is that the organizational structure of a conglomerate collective might qualify as the principal, in a principal-agent relationship, where the collective's members act as agents on behalf of the organization. The idea is that the structure with its decision procedure and policies qualifies as the intention of the organization and then directs the members to act on its behalf. In this case, the moral responsibility attribution is meant to lodge with the collective's structure conceived as logically distinct from the members, and thus, the responsibility is not distributed to the members.

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