Collective Harm Research Articles

Participation and Collective Harm

Abstract Many global problems nowadays are collective action problems. It is only because many people act in some way that certain problems arise (e.g., climate harms). But when can one be said to participate in such groups in the first place? As Derek Parfit asked, “When we appeal to what groups together do, whom should we count as members of these groups?” As Julia Nefsky has shown, this problem has proven to be notoriously tricky, and without any adequate solution. We present a solution. The proposed account not only overcomes a number of problems for participation-based views, according to which it is morally problematic to participate in such groups at all, but also helps make precise a prominent alternative view, according to which one should help bring about better outcomes.

Beyond mitigation: building a case for collective rights and remedies for digital ID-enabled harms

ABSTRACT National digital ID systems have been promoted by both private and public sector actor actors as a means of fostering economic development and individual empowerment, and of administering a growing digital welfare state. However, these digital ID systems have also been associated with different forms of injustice and remain flashpoints for the contestation of public sector digitalization and datafication initiatives. The complex, intersectional impacts that such systems may have on social exclusion and human rights have made it challenging to articulate rights-based approaches that cover the range of potential injustices or to institutionalize legal and administrative mechanisms capable of remedying violations. This paper posits two ways in which the legal contestation of digital ID has revealed potential barriers to obtaining adequate remedies for digital ID related harm. First, a core methodological challenge is the way in which powerful narratives about the capabilities of digital ID have worked in tandem with individualizing logics of databases, making it difficult to center the collective experiences of affected groups and balance competing interests. Second, is the way in which legal frameworks have structured governance of national digital ID systems, fragmenting responsibility across institutions and individuals in ways that compromise access to justice, rule of law, and pathways to remedies. In bringing together a data justice framework with insights from legal analysis, the paper seeks to assess both limitations and potential opportunities to work through existing legal frameworks to better address the collective harms of digital ID systems.

The Antidemocratic Harms of Mansplaining

The neologism “mansplaining” captures an insidious dynamic in which men explain things to women that women already understand, assuming that, by virtue of being a woman, she lacks the man’s knowledge. Mansplaining has started to receive some attention in contemporary scholarship, conceptualizing the phenomenon and identifying its epistemic harm. My purpose is to consider mansplaining and its harms from the perspective of democratic theory. Setting the problem of mansplaining against the norms we expect of democracy—equality, inclusion, and recognition—I argue that mansplaining poses harms that are not only individual and epistemic but also collective and relational. I distinguish two types of mansplaining based on women’s expertise and experience to elaborate on its collective epistemic harms to decision making and its relational harm of political exclusion. Mansplaining poses further relational harms of inequality and misrecognition, undermining the equal social relations and social trust required for deliberation.

How collective punishment harm intergroup relations through ingroup homogeneity, perceived fairness, and counter‐collective action: A registered report

How collective punishment harm intergroup relations through ingroup homogeneity, perceived fairness, and counter‐collective action: A registered report

Maroon Anti-necropolitics

This article describes Maroon anti-necropolitics and its implications for multispecies justice to aid in creating a genuinely decolonial Caribbean ecological theory. Ndyuka Maroons, the descendants of one nation of self-liberated formerly enslaved Black Surinamese peoples, have created a cosmopolitical order based on the refusal of necropolitics (which is the assumption that politics must be predicated on the sovereign human appropriation of the right to kill or let die). In its place, Ndyukas practice an ethics of sociality premised on the shared collective vulnerability of present and future generations to the consequences of acts of killing. This Maroon anti-necropolitics has three primary principles: (1) death always relates specific deaths to future collective harm; (2) humans do not have a sovereign right to death over the lives of others; and (3) death does not rupture relations between the living and the dead, or the community and its enemies, but intensifies them by imposing ineradicable connections of tragic loss between perpetrators and victims. Ndyukas accordingly articulate a theory of relational justice that rejects human sovereignty while emphasizing human responsibility. This article illustrates how Maroons have imagined a world beyond necropolitics and why this helps confront the ways in which necropolitical assumptions inflect how multispecies justice is imagined.

The Problem of Collective Harm: A Threshold Solution

Many harms are collective: they are due to several individual actions that are as such harmless. At least in some cases, it seems imper-missible to contribute to such harms, even if individual agents do not make a difference. The Problem of Collective Harm is the challenge of explaining why. I argue that, if the action is to be permissible, the proba-bility of making a difference to harm must be small enough. This in turn means that both the probability of harm and the probability of avoiding harm have to remain below the corresponding threshold probabilities. I compare this threshold probability account to proposals that revolve around difference-making, NESS causation and security dependence, and I argue that they fail for reasons of scope. For instance, a moral principle that invokes NESS causation prohibits so many actions that compliance with it would have a stifling effect on human life.

Justification for coercion in a public health crisis: not just a matter of individual harm.

The COVID pandemic was an exceptional public health situation - which brought with it unprecedented restrictions across the global populace. But what was it about this pandemic which caused us to implement such drastic restrictions on liberty? Much of the ethical debate on restrictive measures such as lockdowns and vaccine requirements focused on the potential harm that individuals cause to other individuals by the risk of infection. I will suggest that this may come from a reliance on J.S. Mill's harm principle as providing the ultimate justification for coercion - i.e., the well-accepted principle that state coercion is justified in order to prevent the imposition of unacceptable risk of harm to others. Though there have been attempts, in the wider public health ethics literature, to use the harm principle as a basis for restricting contribution to collective harms, I will suggest that these attempts cannot rely on the harm principle alone. I will then turn to the ways in which an individual-based line of reasoning does not capture a distinctive sort of harm posed by the COVID pandemic (and others like it): the potential failure of healthcare systems. I will draw out three ways in which a focus on the harm that an individual poses to another individual fails to capture the full scope of harm wrought by the collapse of healthcare systems. First, it can't adequately capture the cumulative and "looping effects" of the harm caused by strained healthcare systems. Second, it fails to capture the widespread ripple effects the failure of a central societal institution can have on other institutions. And third, the failure of a healthcare system can impose "psychic costs", affecting the moral character of all members of society, reducing trust in institutions, and potentially posing an existential threat to the fabric of society. Finally, I will sketch some implications of the recognition of this distinctive sort of harm for the justification of coercive public health measures.

The case for a broader approach to AI assurance: addressing “hidden” harms in the development of artificial intelligence

AbstractArtificial intelligence (AI) assurance is an umbrella term describing many approaches—such as impact assessment, audit, and certification procedures—used to provide evidence that an AI system is legal, ethical, and technically robust. AI assurance approaches largely focus on two overlapping categories of harms: deployment harms that emerge at, or after, the point of use, and individual harms that directly impact a person as an individual. Current approaches generally overlook upstream collective and societal harms associated with the development of systems, such as resource extraction and processing, exploitative labour practices and energy intensive model training. Thus, the scope of current AI assurance practice is insufficient for ensuring that AI is ethical in a holistic sense, i.e. in ways that are legally permissible, socially acceptable, economically viable and environmentally sustainable. This article addresses this shortcoming by arguing for a broader approach to AI assurance that is sensitive to the full scope of AI development and deployment harms. To do so, the article maps harms related to AI and highlights three examples of harmful practices that occur upstream in the AI supply chain and impact the environment, labour, and data exploitation. It then reviews assurance mechanisms used in adjacent industries to mitigate similar harms, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, and how effectively they are being applied to AI. Finally, it provides recommendations as to how a broader approach to AI assurance can be implemented to mitigate harms more effectively across the whole AI supply chain.

Individual Responsibility for Collective Climate Change Harms

ABSTRACT This work employs Elizabeth Cripps’ collectivist account of responsibility for climate change in order to ground an individual duty to reduce one’s GHG emissions. This is significant not only as a critique of Cripps, but also as an indication that even on some collectivist footings, individuals can be assigned primary duties to reduce their emissions. Following Cripps, this work holds the unstructured group of GHG emitters weakly collectively responsible for climate change harms. However, it argues against Cripps that what follows from this is a corresponding collective duty to act qua group to bring about an end to the harm and a derivative duty for each emitter to promote the required organization of a group capable of this. Instead, this work argues that acts of GHG emission, to the extent that they are avoidable and performed with requisite knowledge, make one into a member of a group that is morally responsible for climate-related harms. Thus, individual emitters who can do otherwise should recognize themselves as members of a group that collectively harms. Subsequently, they should take all possible steps in order to renounce their membership (e.g. by reducing their GHG emissions).

Communal Riots and Its Psychological Impact: A Systematic Review Study in Indian Context.

In the Indian setting, communal riots characterized by intergroup violence have been common and have had an impact on the lives of both people and communities. The goal of this systematic review is to investigate the psychological effects of Indian communal riots in depth. Through a comprehensive review of the literature, the study aims to identify recurring themes, patterns, and variances in the psychological effects encountered by victims of community violence. The researcher searched Science Direct, PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and PsycINFO for research published between the year 2000 and the year 2022 in each of these databases. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale was employed to evaluate the study's quality. After identifying 1189 publications in all, 195 of them were chosen for full-text examination, and 41 research were ultimately included. Twenty studies examined depression and mental health with a prevalence rate of 49%. Five studies (12%) examined post-traumatic stress disorder. In places devastated by riots, the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder varied from 4% to 41%. Other studies investigated anxiety, alcohol abuse, and homelessness. However, two studies revealed that group activities could lower depression and suicide rates, perhaps as a result of increased social cohesiveness and group catharsis among subpopulations. The researcher investigated the connection between collective activities and mental health in this systematic review, providing strong evidence that riots, protests, and other collective actions-even peaceful ones-can harm mental health outcomes. Thus, healthcare providers must be aware of the psychological and emotional effects of riots, revolutions, and demonstrations. It is essential to do more study on this newly identified sociopolitical driver of mental health.

Nonlinear social evolution and the emergence of collective action.

Organisms from microbes to humans engage in a variety of social behaviors, which affect fitness in complex, often nonlinear ways. The question of how these behaviors evolve has consequences ranging from antibiotic resistance to human origins. However, evolution with nonlinear social interactions is challenging to model mathematically, especially in combination with spatial, group, and/or kin assortment. We derive a mathematical condition for natural selection with synergistic interactions among any number of individuals. This result applies to populations with arbitrary (but fixed) spatial or network structure, group subdivision, and/or mating patterns. In this condition, nonlinear fitness effects are ascribed to collectives, and weighted by a new measure of collective relatedness. For weak selection, this condition can be systematically evaluated by computing branch lengths of ancestral trees. We apply this condition to pairwise games between diploid relatives, and to dilemmas of collective help or harm among siblings and on spatial networks. Our work provides a rigorous basis for extending the notion of "actor", in the study of social evolution, from individuals to collectives.

Social Reintegration of Victims of Human Trafficking in Indonesia

Victims of trafficking in persons are understood as Victims of crime are persons who have suffered personal or collective harm, including physical or mental injury, mental suffering, financial loss, or substantial damage to their basic rights, as a result of acts or omissions that violate applicable criminal laws and laws. That prevents criminal abuse of power. Victims of human rights crimes, namely the right to obtain restitution, medical rehabilitation, social rehabilitation, social reintegration, and refoulment. This study uses normative legal research methods with a research approach, namely the statutory approach and the legal concept analysis approach. As well as the data analysis technique used is a qualitative descriptive analysis technique. the result of the social reintegration of victims of trafficking in persons as a process of reuniting victims with their families or communities includes physical, psychological and rehabilitation protection and ensures that the reintegration process of applicable social norms can be understood by victims who wish to return to their hometowns. In the Indonesian context, especially the Social Service in Malang, victims must also ensure that they have identity cards, family cards, and other supporting data as tools for identification and a complete assessment of human trafficking victims. However, considering that human trafficking victims are vulnerable, especially in population data and administration, other identification options are needed to make integrating human trafficking victims easier.
 Keywords: Social Reintegration; Victims; Human Trafficking; Indonesia.

Setting data free: The politics of open data for food and agriculture

Open data is increasingly being promoted as a route to achieve food security and agricultural development. This article critically examines the promotion of open agri-food data for development through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as well as through interviews with open data practitioners and participant observation at open data events. While the concept of openness is striking for its ideological flexibility, we argue that GODAN propagates an anti-political, neoliberal vision for how open data can enhance agricultural development. This approach centers values such as private innovation, increased production, efficiency, and individual empowerment, in contrast to more political and collectivist approaches to openness practiced by some agri-food social movements. We further argue that open agri-food data projects, in general, have a tendency to reproduce elements of “data colonialism,” extracting data with minimal consideration for the collective harms that may result, and embedding their own values within universalizing information infrastructures.

The Group Right to Mutual Privacy

Contemporary privacy challenges go beyond individual interests and result in collective harms. To address these challenges, this article argues for a collective interest in Mutual Privacy which is based on our shared genetic, social, and democratic interests as well as our common vulnerabilities against algorithmic grouping. On the basis of the shared interests and participatory action required for its cumulative protection, Mutual Privacy is then classified as an aggregate shared participatory public good which is protected through the group right to Mutual Privacy.

Indeterminacy in Global Warming: A Supervaluationist Response

AbstractGlobal warming is a very complex collective harm. While various models have been proposed to assign moral responsibility in such cases, global warming presents an additional problem. The complexity of the climate system gives rise to ineliminable indeterminacy, which makes it impossible to determine the extent to which any particular emissions contribute to this collective harm. This indeterminacy poses an obstacle to assigning moral responsibility to individuals. To overcome this obstacle, I propose adopting a supervaluationist approach. This approach has several benefits. Among other things, it supplies a framework for assigning moral responsibility that handles indeterminacy that commonly arises when dealing with complex, global collective-harm scenarios.

“We’re Not Allowed to Have Experienced Trauma. We’re Not Allowed to Go through the Grieving Process” - Exploring the Indirect Harms Associated with Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) Offending and Its Impacts on non-offending Family Members

ABSTRACT Online child sexual abuse encompasses a range of offenses including the accessing, downloading, sharing and creating of images of child sexual abuse, often referred to as Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). CSAM consumption has increased exponentially, and the lockdowns implemented as a response to COVID-19 have exacerbated this problem. CSAM offenders are more likely than other sex offenders to be married, to have children and to live with a partner and child(ren). Policy, practice and research has largely considered these families within the context of their protective properties, with little consideration for the individual and collective harms that they experience, and their unique support needs. Using data from 20 interviews with family members of those convicted of CSAM offenses in the UK, we propose seven key elements that characterize the impacts of CSAM offending on non-offending family members. We categorize these as: 1) Disenfranchised Grief; 2) Ambiguous Loss; 3) Ontological Assault; 4) Contamination by Causal Responsibility; 5) Wall of Silence; 6) No-Win Situation, and 7) Burden of Responsibility. We propose policy and practice responses to minimize these harms.

You Just Didn't Care Enough

We refine the intuitively appealing idea that you are blameworthy for something if it happened because you did not care enough. More formally: you are blameworthy for X (where X may be an action, omission, or outcome) just in case there is the right causal-explanatory relation between your poor quality of will and X. First, we argue that blameworthiness for actions, omissions, and outcomes is concerned with negative differences: you are blameworthy for the fact that X occurred instead of X*, where X is worse than X*. Second, we argue that the way in which your quality of will is poor has to fit what you are blameworthy for. With these refinements, the account already gives intuitively correct verdicts in cases of forgetting, making a negative difference to a nevertheless good result, and doing an action with runaway consequences. We then discuss what the right causal-explanatory relation is and suggest that it is simply causation, understood in the right way. Here, we draw on the account of causation developed in Touborg, The Dual Nature of Causation. According to this account, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for causation. Roughly, C causes E rather than E* iff (a) C is process-connected to E, and (b) C makes E more secure and E* less secure. With this account of causation, our account of blameworthiness now also gives correct verdicts in omission, pre-emption, and switching cases, Frankfurt-style cases, and collective harm cases.

The visible body and the invisible organization: Information asymmetry and college athletics data

Elite athletes are constantly tracked, measured, scored, and sorted to improve their performance. Privacy is sacrificed in the name of improvement. Athletes frequently do not know why particular personal data are collected or to what end. Our interview study of 23 elite US college athletes and 26 staff members reveals that their sports play is governed through information asymmetries. These asymmetries look different for different sports with different levels of investment, different racial and gender makeups, and different performance metrics. As large, data-intensive organizations with highly differentiated subgroups, university athletics are an excellent site for theory building in critical data studies, especially given the most consequential data collected from us, with the greatest effect on our lives, is frequently a product of collective engagement with specific organizational contexts like workplaces and schools. Empirical analysis reveals two key tensions in this data regime: Athletes in high-status sports, more likely to be Black men, have relatively less freedom to see or dispute their personal data, while athletes in general are more comfortable sharing personal data with people further away from them. We build from these findings to develop a theory of collective informational harm in bounded institutional settings such as the workplace. The quantified organization, as we term it, is concerned not with monitoring individuals but building data collectives through processes of category creation and managerial data relations of coercion and consent.

Future-proofing the city: A human rights-based approach to governing algorithmic, biometric and smart city technologies

While the GDPR and other EU laws seek to mitigate a range of potential harms associated with smart cities, the compliance with and enforceability of these regulations remain an issue. In addition, these proposed regulations do not sufficiently address the collective harms associated with the deployment of biometric technologies and artificial intelligence. Another relevant question is whether the initiatives put forward to secure fundamental human rights in the digital realm account for the issues brought on by the deployment of technologies in city spaces. In this special issue, we employ the smart city notion as a point of connection for interdisciplinary research on the human rights implications of the algorithmic, biometric and smart city technologies and the policy responses to them. The articles included in the special issue analyse the latest European regulations as well as soft law, and the policy frameworks that are currently at work in the regions where the GDPR does not apply.

Whose Fault Is It?

Many of the major challenges facing global society are unstructured collective harms (e.g., global warming): collective in the sense that they arise as the result of the actions of, or interactions among, multiple agents, and unstructured in the sense that there is no coordination or intention to cause harm among these agents. But how should we distribute moral responsibility for these harms? In this paper, an answer is proposed to this question. This answer builds on but develops existing proposals by drawing together literatures that speak to different aspects of the question. First, it is argued that the notion of causal contribution needs to be broadened to include the idea of causation as production. Second, it is discussed how the voluntariness and foreseeability conditions are best interpreted in this context. Third, literature on moral taint is drawn to introduce additional objective (external) criteria.