Individual Moral Responsibility Research Articles

The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology as Emancipatory Discourse in the Late Soviet Union

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY AND JUDGMENT AGGREGATION

Paradoxical results concerning judgment aggregation have recently been invoked to defend the thesis that a corporate agent can be morally responsible for a decision without any of its individual members bearing such responsibility. I contend that the arguments offered for this irreducibility thesis are inconclusive. They do not pay enough attention to how we evaluate individual moral responsibility, in particular not to the role that a flawed assessment of the normative reasons that bear on the issue to be decided on play in this context. I go on to propose a method for distributing corporate responsibility to individual members within the judgment aggregation framework.

Preventing genocide: the role of the church

Recent events in Sudan reiterate the fact that genocide is still a real threat in the modern age, despite important developments in international law. The aim of this article is to discuss ways in which churches can help to prevent genocide. The central theoretical argument is that military and legal preventative measures cannot address the underlying causes of genocide. Social factors that usually contribute to genocidal behaviour are difficult living conditions, nationalism, ethnocentrism, collectivism, authoritarianism, a culture of impunity and the distortion of morality. The most effective way to prevent genocide is to change the moral fabric of genocidal societies by fostering caring societies that emphasize individual moral responsibility, respect for life and the universal dignity of all human beings. As a moral institution the church can play an important role in changing the moral habits of societies. Churches must not compromise themselves by seeking political power or serving secular ideologies. The Bible must be interpreted in a responsible way that does justice to the message of the gospel. Churches must also foster individual moral responsibility; proclaim reconciliation, justice and peace; try to be active bystanders in conflict situations; address difficult life conditions and promote respect for life.

Environmentalism, Moral Responsibility, and the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing

In ‘Doing and Allowing’, Samuel Scheffler argues that if a person sees herself as subject to norms of individual moral responsibility, then the content of her first-order substantive norms of individual moral responsibility must attribute greater responsibility to what one does than to what one could, but fails, to prevent. This paper is about how a morally responsible agent could deny the doctrine of doing and allowing, why an environmentalist should, and what this means for environmental ethical theory.

Collective Moral Responsibility: An Individualist Account

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.

GENOCIDE AND THE MORAL AGENCY OF ETHNIC GROUPS

Abstract: Genocide is the deliberate destruction, in whole or in part, of a people. Typically, it is a crime that is committed by a people. In this essay, I propose an analysis of the concept of an ethnic identity group, which is, I argue, the concept of ethnicity at issue in many important discussions of group rights, group acts, and the moral responsibility of group members for the acts of the groups to which they belong. I develop the account of collective agency presupposed by this analysis and explore its implications for assessments of individual moral responsibility for genocide. I argue, further, that among other advantages over culturalist approaches to questions about group rights, the approach that follows from the concept of an ethnic identity group sheds light on the specific moral wrong of genocide. I reply to individualist objections to the idea that ethnic group membership may be morally significant and argue that morally adequate responses to genocide presuppose acknowledgment of the fact that groups act and are acted upon in morally significant ways.

Something in common?

The relationship between the group and the individual poses an enduring challenge to our understanding of Christian social ethics. While some believe that individual moral responsibility is derivative of a collective personality, others suggest that the group is comprised of individual moral persons. The way that such dynamics work out in the ethics of Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel and Reinhold Niebuhr’s realist ethic is explored with reference to the philosophical and theological dynamics of the individual and corporate person. Insights gained are applied in a discussion of the corporate and individual person in more recent approaches, particularly as manifested in the World Council of Churches. The argument is made that although corporate personality must be acknowledged, when common consciousness is given primary emphasis, the responsibility of the self as moral agent is compromised.

Balancing Self‐interest and Altruism: corporate governance alone is not enough

Governance has become a topic of unprecedented emotional significance and fundamental importance in the boardrooms of companies, partly as a result of a confluence of early 21st century corporate scandals, stock market falls and public rage about senior executive remuneration. A simple adherence to formal systems of corporate governance, in terms of structures, rules, procedures and codes of practice, whilst a starting point, will not alone win back confidence in markets and corporations. Consideration needs to be given to how to release entrepreneurial self interest within a moral context. This focuses attention on the role of other major social institutions which may more naturally be able to nurture a moral framework as well as the role of individual citizens and the responsibility of all of us to enact a moral framework for business activities. There is no escape from individual moral responsibility, and our part in creating and sustaining social institutions beyond corporations.

Corporate Versus Individual Moral Responsibility

There is a clear tendency in contemporary political/legal thought to limit agency to individual agents, thereby denying the existence and relevance of collective moral agency in general, and corporate agency in particular. This tendency is ultimately rooted in two particular forms of individualism – methodological and fictive (abstract) – which have their source in the Enlightenment. Furthermore, the dominant notion of moral agency owes a lot to Kant whose moral/legal philosophy is grounded exclusively on abstract reason and personal autonomy, to the detriment of a due recognition of the socio-historical grounds of moral social conduct. I shall argue that an adequate theory of responsibility is needed, which does not only take into account individual responsibility, but also collective and corporate responsibility, capable of taking into consideration society and its problems. Furthermore, corporations are consciously and carefully structured organisations with different levels of management and have clearly defined aims and objectives, a central feature upon which I shall be focussing in this paper.

One nation, pulling apart: the basis of persistent poverty in the USA

Poverty in America has grown persistently throughout the twentieth century. Once a condition confined to immigrants, women and children, by the 1930s poverty became tied to the geographic development of the nation. Historically, poverty policy has emphasized individual moral responsibility while ignoring its geographic and structural origins. A weak attempt to address the deeper origins of poverty in the 1960s imploded with the economic crisis of the 1980s and the slide into conservative politics. By 1997 more than 700 counties in the USA were in economic distress. Few new initiatives have been offered to resolve this decades-old problem.

Moral luck, control, and the bases of desert

For nearly three decades, philosophers have been concerned with problems of moral luck.1 The problem which has received the most attention concerns justice. The problem arises in relation to what we may call the standard view of responsibility. On the standard view, it is unjust to hold a person responsible for that which she did not control. Agents deserve to be morally appraised or held liable only for that which they controlled. When luck is present, all ascriptions of responsibility based on the standard view are rendered unacceptable for people who champion justice. An acceptance of the standard view is tantamount to claiming that people are never justly morally appraised or held liable since luck appears to be omnipresent. If we want to see justice done with regard to responsibility, then we must either allow that people are never morally responsible, show that luck is not ubiquitous or at least that ubiquitous luck is not moral, or show that ascriptions of responsibility can retain justice despite the omnipresence of luck. Some Platonists advocate a version of the view that people are not morally responsible. They argue that since errors result only from misinformation about the Good, education, an epistemic matter, is always the appropriate response to misdeeds while blame, a moral matter, never is. Inasmuch as the argument made here contains the assumption that people do make moral errors, we will consider this alternative only indirectly. No one pursues the view that luck is not ubiquitous because the ubiquity of luck is impossible to deny. Most philosophers who have discussed moral luck claim that luck does not interfere with individual moral responsibility by arguing that luck is not moral. The conclusion reached here is that ascriptions of responsibility can retain justice because moral luck is compatible with justified moral appraisal.

Sounds of Silence

In this article, I suggest that exclusive attention to questions of individual moral responsibility for the killing of Vietnamese civilians in raids on My Lai and Thanh Phong (March 16, 1968, and February 24-25, 1969, respectively), while important, may serve only to silence equally important ethical questions like: Are these cases genocide and mass murder? What does the response or lack thereof of the American government and public to these events tell us about our quest for justice? If we cannot ascertain a reliable account of the facts, does this relegate such actions to meaninglessness? What role does memory play in our representation of horror as well as our memorializing the past? Do we have to be both victims and executioners or can we, in Albert Camus's words, become neither victims nor executioners? My point is that the relevance of this issue is less about returning to the past and assigning guilt and moral culpability and more about the pragmatic-ethical concern of addressing the conditions that make such actions possible.

Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character (review)

Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of CharacterIn his book Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character David H. Jones has provided students and teachers of the Holocaust with a clearly written, well organized exploration of the basic moral issues surrounding the murder of six million Jews. Written without the assumption of any background on the part of the reader -- either in ethics or in Holocaust studies -- the book is a good introduction to the topic.Part One of the book's two parts introduces the primary ethical concepts and questions to be considered and explains the author's concern with individual moral responsibility. Jones maintains that the perpetrators' actions morally wrong because they violated the prima facie moral duty to refrain from harming others. He also explains what constitutes good moral character: the virtues of benevolence, conscientiousness, courage, self-control, self-knowledge, and practical wisdom. In Part Two Jones takes the ethical principles outlined in Part One and carefully applies them to an analysis of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders in the Holocaust.The accent of this cogent study falls quite properly on responsibility. In Part One, for example, Jones presents very good arguments against cultural determinism and psychological egoism. He shows that a perpetrator cannot invoke his or her cultural environment or upbringing as an excuse for immoral actions such as mass murder; he also demonstrates the nonsense of the view that there are no unselfish acts by examining several cases of people who risked their lives to save the lives of others. A major strength of this study, then, is its ability to eliminate a variety of excuses and self- deceptions that would mitigate moral responsibility.Applying his moral theory to the case at hand, Jones examines five main topics in Part Two: political culture, principal perpetrators, secondary perpetrators, victims, and rescuers. He presents a very good analysis of Hitler and -- if it should be necessary -- a good argument for the blameworthiness of Hitler. Turning from Hitler to the men in the police battalions, Jones explains why neither the situational nor the dispositional excuses adequately explain their actions. While they were all subjected to varying levels of socialization into German political culture (p. 155), he maintains, that situation was not enough to justify murder; and while they may all have been disposed toward antisemitism, that disposition also fails to provide them with an excuse. Jones offers a good discussion of Daniel Goldhagen in this connection, pointing out both his strengths and weaknesses.In his treatment of the victims Jones takes Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt to task for their tendency to blame Jews for their complicity with the Nazis, particularly members of the Jewish councils; he also exposes the inadequacy, if not the immorality, of trying to make most Jews into accomplices to their own murder in that they went passively to their deaths, like sheep to the slaughter. …

Writing Against Knowing, Writing Against Certainty; or What’s Really Under the Veranda in Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues

This article looks at attitudes towards history in Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues. It situates the novel in its North American context, as an example both of "l'américanité," and an investigation of "l'altérité." It follows the progress of its characters as they simultaneously retrace and deconstruct the colonialist-expansionist vision represented by "the American dream." The article speaks to the tension in the novel between Eurocentric and Aboriginal imaginative and historical discourses, and to its engagement with post-colonial issues of power and disempowerment. It places these specific textual concerns in the larger context of post-Holocaust thought, seeing it in particular as a consideration of the relationship between historical and providential authority and individual moral responsibility, and as an engagement with fascism.

Ethical development of advanced technology: A postmodern stakeholder perspective

Zygmunt Bauman is arguably the most well-known theorist in postmodern ethics. He argues that to develop and enforce universal ethical laws or codes leads to an abdication of individual moral responsibility. Actors rely on external rules and a rational consideration of costs and benefits rather than on moral impulse. In order to recognize and act upon moral impulse, the moral agent must both recognize and understand the Other. We operationalize these ideas, applying them to the development of advanced information technology (AIT) in organizations. We propose that a stakeholder theory of enabling can be used to formulate processes that will give form and voice to the Other by providing mechanisms for face-to-face interactions and dialogue. Applying the principles of affirmative postmodern ethics through an enabling stakeholder oriented system development process explicitly allows for the examination of moral concerns which might otherwise be overlooked, ignored, or silenced.

Professional Ethics in Social Work-- What Future?

SUMMARY This paper examines the ethical implications of recent changes in social work, particularly in relation to the conception of social workers as professionals guided by a code of ethics. These changes include the fragmentation of the occupation, the increasing proceduralization of the work and the growing focus on consumer rights and user participation. Some people have argued that codes of ethics are becoming increasingly irrelevant in this climate, in that they assume a unified occupational group and are based upon professionals' definition of values without consultation with service users. On the other hand, it has also been maintained that it is ever more important to retain and strengthen codes of ethics in order to maintain professional identity and to defend the work of the profession from outside attack. This paper explores the relevance of a code of professional ethics for social work, focusing particularly on the British Association of Social Workers' code, in the context of the changing organization and practice of the work. It considers two alternative approaches: the 'new consumerism' which focuses on the worker's technical skills (rather than professional ethics) and consumer rights (as opposed to professional obligations); and a 'new radicalism' which stresses the worker's own personal or political commitment and individual moral responsibility (as opposed to an externally imposed code of professional ethics). It is concluded that the changes in social work do threaten the notion of a single set of professional ethics articulated in a code, and that, in some types of work, this model is less appropriate. However, there is still mileage in retaining and developing a code of ethics, not as an imposed set of rules developed by the professional association, but as part of a dynamic and evolving ethical tradition in social work and as a stimulus for debate and reflection on changing and contradictory values.

The Integrity Factor-Critical to Accounting Education

Integrity must be the organizing principle for accounting education and accounting practice. Without integrity, ethical frameworks can be misused as manipulative devices to support particular interests. The accounting profession has frequently addressed integrity. The professional interpretation, however, has been a narrow rules-oriented approach focusing on identifying fraudulent financial reporting and on traditional views on the nature and scope of the audit report. This paper links integrity to corporate responsibility and to the individual moral responsibility to take the moral point of view.

Hume's Theory of Moral Responsibility: Some Unresolved Matters

One reaction to the theory of moral responsibility Hume presentsis that the theory cannot be reconciled with his remarks about the self inTreatise, Book One. Hume declared a self or person to be nothing but a bundle of transient perceptions, arguing further that there is no one perception that continues invariably the same at any two moments of time. It would follow from such a view that, since one and the same bundle cannot logically exist at two distinct moments, and hence a person att1is distinct and different from a person att2, it is logically impossible, even unjust, to ascribe responsibility to a person at a later time for, say, a moral crime committed at a previous time. The reason is that the individual to whom responsibility will be ascribed is the successor of the criminal and not the criminal himself. But since this runs counter to our moral practices of making accountable the perpetrators of crimes, Hume would therefore have to give up or at least revise his theory of the self if he is to discuss intelligibly the issue of individual moral responsibility.

Engineers and management: The challenge of the challenger incident

The Challenger incident was a result of at least four kinds of difficulties: differing perceptions and priorities of the engineers and management at Thiokol and at NASA, a preoccupation with roles and role responsibilities on the part of engineers and managers, contrasting corporate cultures at Thiokol and its parent, Morton, and a failure both by engineers and by managers to exercise individual moral responsibility. I shall argue that in the Challenger case organizational structure, corporate culture, engineering and managerial habits, and role responsibilites precipitated events contributing to the Challenger disaster. At the same time, a number of individuals at Morton Thiokol and NASA were responsible for the launch failure. Differing world views, conflicting priorities of the engineers and managers on this project, and the failure of either engineers or management to take personal moral responsibility for decision-making contributed significantly to the event.

Moral Risks?: A Reply to Hollis and Howe

'Moral Risks in the Social Work Role' represents a succinct summary of the authors' original paper (Hollis and Howe, 1987). Insofar as they present new arguments I take this opportunity to respond, and to cor rect some misapprehensions of my own argument, in an attempt to move the discussion forward. First, pace Hollis and Howe, I do not argue that responsibility in social work is a purely collective issue (p. 547); individual social workers will make bad decisions or errors, and insofar as these are not the result of the organizational structure of social work, then the responsibility for those errors lies with the individual concerned. My argument is, however, first, that responsibility accrues irrespective of the outcome, and second, that there are certain circumstances in which it does not make sense to talk of individual moral (or any other) responsibility but where what is needed is a moral language which recognizes the struc tures within which decisions are taken and actions undertaken. The