Collective Moral Responsibility: An Individualist Account

Abstract

In this chapter I elaborate and defend an individualist account of collective moral responsibility, that is, one which ascribes moral responsibility only to individual human beings, as opposed to collective entities. On this view collective entities, for example, social groups and organizations, have collective moral responsibility only in the sense that the individual human persons who constitute such entities have individual moral responsibility, either individually or jointly; collective entities as such do not have moral responsibility. Note that individualism in this sense is entirely different from the view that collective entities are reducible to individual human persons—an ontological claim that I reject. I begin by outlining my individualist account of collective moral responsibility. However, the burden of the paper is my attempt to extend this account to enable it to accommodate a variety of different species of collective moral responsibility.