Collective Responsibility and Professional Roles

Abstract

Every major profession has recognized the importance of publicly proclaiming its duty to use the skill and knowledge it possesses in a manner protective of the public's health and safety. Each profession claims that the foremost duty of professionals is to make sure that their activities do not cause unnecessary harm and injury. Today the practice of many professionals, particularly that of scientists and engineers, occurs within the context of large private or governmental organizations. In these organizations work is structured so that the contribution of any single professional toward the completion of a project or task is generally quite small. The products or services produced are normally the result of a collective effort. When these projects or services are defective so that the health or safety of the public is threatened or seriously harmed, the organization is considered responsible. But can this collective responsibility be apportioned to individual professionals who contributed to the collective effort that produced the dangerous products or services? In this paper we want to examine an argument that is often advanced to show that this collective responsibility cannot be apportioned to these individuals. This issue is of great practical importance because if professionals working as part of a collective are not morally responsible, and hence culpable for the harmful consequences produced by the collective, then we cannot expect them to answer for their past behavior or modify their future behavior in light of past events. The effect will be to insulate employed professionals from the consequences of their activities. Professional codes of ethics which entreat professionals to use their skills and knowledge so that no harm is done to the public's health and safety will, thus, be without much force in an organizational context. It is important, then, to ask if we can apportion collective moral responsibility for unsafe products or services to those professionals who as part of a collective enterprise produced these products or services. Philosophers have addressed this problem indirectly in discussions of the nature of collective entities, collective responsibility, and the roles