Attributionist Group Agent Responsibility

Abstract

A number of philosophers have recently argued that group agents can be morally responsible for their actions in virtue of having a certain kind of structured decision-making procedure which is responsive to reasons. However, accounts of group agent blameworthiness face some objections. One is that group agents cannot be responsible for wrongdoing because they are unable to experience certain kinds of emotional responses (Thompson, 2018). Another is that group agents who regularly commit wrongdoing due to certain structural impediments will always be excused for their wrongdoing. This paper demonstrates such problems can be avoided by adopting an Attributionist theory of group moral responsibility. On this approach, though group agents lack certain capacities, their ability to deny that certain facts provide moral reasons to act in certain ways is sufficient to mean they hold objectionable attitudes towards us, and those attitudes are sufficient to make group agents blameworthy.