Collective Regret and Collective Obligations without Collective Agents

We use a deontic logic of collective agency to study reducibility questions about collective agency and collective obligations. The logic that is at the basis of our study is a multi-modal logic in the tradition of stit (‘sees to it that’) logics of agency. Our full formal language has constants for collective and individual deontic admissibility, modalities for collective and individual agency, and modalities for collective and individual obligations. We classify its twenty-seven sublanguages in terms of their expressive power. This classification enables us to investigate reducibility relations between collective deontic admissibility, collective agency, and collective obligations, on the one hand, and individual deontic admissibility, individual agency, and individual obligations, on the other.

Several scholars have claimed or implied that the Paris Agreement imposes a collective obligation on states to keep global warming below 2°C, but what is a collective obligation from a legal point of view? The literature that asserts the existence of a collective obligation fails to address this question. In this article I argue two points. Firstly, while a legally binding collective obligation for states is not a theoretical impossibility, the Paris Agreement has not demonstrably created such an obligation; therefore, the collective obligation that appears in the treaty constitutes at most an objective of the Agreement, albeit a crucial one. Secondly, while state observance of the Agreement's apparent collective obligation (but, in fact, paramount objective) is necessary for the success of the treaty, the Agreement does not provide for a process to resolve the global mitigation burden into state-level ambition commitments to ensure that the paramount objective is met. While this is a significant failing of the Agreement, the provisions in the 2018 Paris Rulebook on the global stocktake are sufficiently loose to allow for this mechanism to play a role in the ‘individuation’ of the mitigation burden.

Theories of intergenerational obligations usually take the shape of theories of distributive (social) justice. The complexities involved in intergenerational obligations force theorists to simplify. In this article I unpack two popular simplifications: the inevitability of future generations, and the Hardinesque assumption that future individuals are a burden on society but a benefit to parents. The first assumption obscures the fact that future generations consist of individuals whose existence can be a matter of voluntary choice, implying that there are individuals who are responsible and accountable for that choice and for its consequences. The second assumption ignores the fact that the benefits and burdens of future individuals are complex, and different for different “beneficiaries” or “victims.” Introducing individual responsibility for procreation as a (crucially) relevant variable, and allowing a more sophisticated understanding of the impact of new individuals, generates grounds to prioritize the individual’s interest in responsibility for (creating and equipping) future individuals over any collective intergenerational obligation. I illustrate this by introducing a series of moral duties that take precedence over, and perhaps even void, possible collective redistributive duties.

In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of (moral) obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collective obligations to refer to obligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collective obligations, in this sense; that such obligations can give rise to and explain obligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective obligations are not simply reducible to individual obligations; and that collective obligations supervene on individual obligations, without being reducible to them. The sort of supervenience I have in mind here is what is sometimes called ‘global supervenience’. In other words, there cannot be two worlds which differ in respect of the collective obligations which exist in them without also differing in respect of the individual obligations which exist in them.

This article focuses on an important duality in the modern welfare state: the will to help our fellow citizens through institutionalized welfare policies, and the danger of violating individual liberty and integrity. Individual rights of self‐determination and integrity are important values of the liberal constitutional government (the Rechtstaat). Our collective ethical obligation to help those in need is an important value of the welfare state. With respect to compulsory intervention towards adult and under‐age substance abusers, the possible tensions between these values are particularly visible. The legal foundation for such efforts in Norwegian social law is discussed with regard to different ethical and moral principles. The main questions are how compulsory interventions are justified and how different principles are weighted in positive law. The ethical principles of collective obligation and the moral principle of individual rights are differently balanced in the Child Care Service Act and the Social Service Act. Both acts, however, expose the problematic combination of solving social problems by the use of force and securing individual autonomy and integrity.

Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice brings new voices and new approaches to under-developed areas in the philosophical literature on collectives and collective action. The essays in this volume introduce and explore a range of topics that fall under the more general concept of collectivity, including collective ontology, collective action, collective obligation, and collective responsibility. A number of the chapters link collectivity directly to significant issues of social justice. The volume addresses a variety of questions including the ontology and taxonomy of social groups and other collective entities, ethical frameworks for understanding the nature and extent of individual and collective moral obligations, and applications of these conceptual explorations to oppressive social practices like mass incarceration, climate change, and global poverty. The essays draw on a variety of approaches and disciplines, including feminist and continental approaches and work in legal theory and geography, as well as more traditional philosophical contributions.

Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice brings new voices and new approaches to under-developed areas in the philosophical literature on collectives and collective action. The essays in this volume introduce and explore a range of topics that fall under the more general concept of collectivity, including collective ontology, collective action, collective obligation, and collective responsibility. A number of the chapters link collectivity directly to significant issues of social justice. The volume addresses a variety of questions including the ontology and taxonomy of social groups and other collective entities, ethical frameworks for understanding the nature and extent of individual and collective moral obligations, and applications of these conceptual explorations to oppressive social practices like mass incarceration, climate change, and global poverty. The essays draw on a variety of approaches and disciplines, including feminist and continental approaches and work in legal theory and geography, as well as more traditional philosophical contributions.

In this paper I develop an account of member obligation: the obligations that fall on the members of an obligated collective in virtue of that collective obligation. I use this account to argue that unorganized collections of individuals can constitute obligated agents. I argue first that, to know when a collective obligation entails obligations on that collective’s members, we have to know not just what it would take for each member to do their part in satisfying the collective obligation, but also what they should do if they cannot do their part because others will not do theirs. I go on to argue (contra recent proposals) that it is not good enough for members in this situation to reasonably believe that others will not do their part. Rather, for a member of an obligated collective to permissibly escape doing her part in a collective obligation, she must both reasonably doubt that others will do their part and stand ready to act in case others do as well. This necessary condition for collective obligation points the way to plausible sufficient conditions – conditions that, I argue, allow unstructured collectives to bear obligations. For (a) if a collective’s members are individually obligated to be ready to do their part, in a given collective action, and (b) if that individual readiness makes it sufficiently likely that the collective will in fact act, then it is hard to see what could block an attribution of collective obligation. In particular, in that case there ought to be no additional objection that there is no existing, organized “agent” on which the obligation might fall. For agents are, simply, things that can act. To be able to act is just to be able to succeed by trying. Unstructured collectives try to do something, I argue, when each member acts on their willingness to do their part in that thing if others do theirs; sometimes they succeed, producing a collective action. Some unstructured collectives, therefore, can succeed by trying; therefore, they can act; therefore they are agents.

One view of obligations under the WTO Agreement is that they are bilateral, that is, they involve legal obligations between two countries. This is premised on the idea that the object of WTO obligations is 'trade'. According to this view, the WTO Agreement can be considered a 'bundle of bilateral relations' and WTO obligations should be analysed pursuant to rules concerning bilateral obligations under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and the Articles on State Responsibility. This article takes a different position. It posits that WTO obligations are more appropriately regarded as collective because their principal object is the protection of collective expectations about the trade-related behaviour of governments. These form a common interest over and above the interests of WTO Member States individually. At the same time, while expectations may be the treaty's primary concern, they are not its sole concern. The treaty gives some flexibility to governments to deal with situations actually encountered in the pattern of trade. These two functions - the protection of expectations and the adjustment to realities - combine to produce law in a third mode, something that can be termed a law of interdependence. This is the tendency of the WTO Agreement to promote interaction among producers and consumers in different countries, and thereby to spin an indissoluble web of economic relations that goes beyond the interests of WTO Members individually. For this reason, the WTO Agreement can be thought of as a collective undertaking and WTO obligations are more appropriately analysed under VCLT and ASR rules on collective obligations.

Individualists claim that collective obligations are reducible to the individual obligations of the collective’s members. Collectivists deny this. We set out to discover who is right by way of a deontic logic of collective action that models collective actions, abilities, obligations, and their interrelations. On the basis of our formal analysis, we argue that when assessing the obligations of an individual agent, we need to distinguish individual obligations from member obligations. If a collective has a collective obligation to bring about a particular state of affairs, then it might be that no individual in the collective has an individual obligation to bring about that state of affairs. What follows from a collective obligation is that each member of the collective has a member obligation to help ensure that the collective fulfills its collective obligation. In conclusion, we argue that our formal analysis supports collectivism.

Multi-Agent Systems are computational systems in which a collection of autonomous agents interact to achieve a certain task, for example to fulfil an obligation directed to the whole group, i.e., a collective obligation. Since, such a collective obligation is beyond the capacity of an individual agent, the agents have to communicate, cooperate, coordinate and negotiate with each other, to achieve the collective task: the fulfilment of the obligation. In this paper we discuss and formalise collective aspects of obligations and commitments. Collective obligations are analysed and formalised in a deontic logic framework. The notions of individual and collective commitment are defined to specify which individual has the responsibility to fulfill an ‘internal’ obligation as part of the collective obligation. In distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) theories of organisations, it is emphasized that ‘commitment’ is a crucial notion to analyse a collective activity or the structure of an organisation. In this paper we give a first attempt to formalise the notion of commitment to determine which plan has to be followed to achieve a joint goal, i.e. the fulfillment of a collective obligation by using several concepts as commitment, delegation and authority-relation.

The 2015 Paris Agreement’s defining obligation for states is a “collective” one. The treaty aims at a specific quantifiable and measurable outcome, namely the containment of global average warming below a 2°C ceiling. Achievement of this outcome is the key collective obligation of parties to the Paris Agreement. A notion of collective obligation exists in international law, however the obligation created by the Paris Agreement is a collective one in a new sense. States are legally obliged as a collective to achieve the containment outcome, and if they fail to do so they are legally liable, again as a collective. In the collective logic of the Paris Agreement, a state must set its mitigation ambition so that it is a fair contribution compared with the effort of other states and leads to mitigation that, in combination with that of other states, ensures that global average warming does not exceed 2°C. Alas, in setting their mitigation ambition, states have been perpetuating a practice dating to the beginning of the Kyoto Protocol whereby each state declares a mitigation target and proceeds to measure its progress against it without consideration of comparative effort or aggregate result. The Paris Agreement contains no clear process to end this isolationist and decidedly bottom-up practice. There is thus a discontinuity in the treaty between global aim and state action, aggravating the risk that the Agreement’s collective obligation on the 2°C ceiling will be breached. The Agreement’s Global Stocktake process is the only element of the new regime which might conceivably be used to oversee the 2°C collective obligation.

In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Dietz argues that what I have called the ‘institutional critique of effective altruism’ is best understood as grounded in the claim that ‘EA relies on an overly individualistic approach to ethics, neglecting the importance of our collective obligations’. In this reply, I argue that Dietz's view does not represent a plausible interpretation of the institutional critiques offered by others, primarily because, unlike Dietz, they appear to believe that their critiques provide reasons to reject the EA view about the content of our individual obligations. I also argue that EA's identity as a social movement provides grounds for denying Dietz's claim that it is objectionably incomplete.

A collective obligation is an obligation directed to a group of agents so that the group, as a whole, is obliged to achieve a given task. The problem investigated here is the impact of collective obligations to individual obligations, i.e. obligations directed to single agents of the group. The groups we consider do not have any particular hierarchical structure nor have an institutionalized representative agent. In this case, we claim that the derivation of individual obligations from collective obligations depends on several parameters among which the ability of the agents (i.e. what they can do) and their own personal commitments (i.e. what they are determined to do). As for checking if these obligations are fulfilled or not, we need to know what are the actual actions performed by the agents. This present paper addresses these questions in the rather general case when the collective obligations are conditional ones.

An important, though oft neglected, distinction between multilateral treaty obligations separates obligations of a bilateral nature from those of the collective or erga omnes partes type. Multilateral obligations of the bilateral type can be reduced to a compilation of bilateral, state-to-state relations. They can be compared to contracts. Collective obligations, in contrast, cannot be divided into bilateral components. They are concluded in pursuit of a collective interest that transcends the individual interests of the contracting parties. The standard example of such obligations are those arising under a human rights treaty. In domestic law, collective obligations can be compared to criminal law statutes or even domestic constitutions. This essay examines the origins of the distinction between bilateral and collective obligations, as well as its major consequences, both in the law of treaties and the law on state responsibility. On that basis, a wider typology of multilateral treaty obligations is suggested. In the exercise, obligations arising under the World Trade Organization are used as a case study. The argument is made that WTO obligations remain essentially of the bilateral type; they are not collective in nature.