Let's do it!: Collective responsibility, joint action, and participation

Abstract

Do responsibility voids exist? That is, are there situations in which the group is collectively morally responsible for an outcome although no member can be held individually morally responsible for their involvement? If so, under which conditions can such voids arise? In other words, what are the conditions that must be met for responsibility voids to exist? And, more generally, what is the relation between collective blameworthiness and individual blameworthiness? To answer these questions, I build on two central ideas to provide a systematic study of this relation. First, to analyse collective and individual responsibility it is vital to distinguish between member and individual responsibility. After all, what I ought to do as an independent individual may differ significantly from what I ought to do as a member of a particular group. Second, I rely on the idea that different modes of acting – causally, knowingly, and intentionally – are relevant for assessing the levels of culpability. These ideas jointly support the following three classes of action: (a) causal action, collective causal action, and causally contributory action; (b) knowingly doing, collectively knowingly doing, and knowingly contributing; and (c) intentionally doing, collectively intentionally doing, and intentionally participating. To cash out these two ideas I rely on philosophy, economics, and artificial intelligence. Despite its interdisciplinarity, this dissertation is foremost philosophical, or foundational, in nature and focuses on the philosophy of cooperation, joint action, and responsibility voids. To aid and guide my theorizing, I develop and use mathematical models that represent relevant features, such as action, knowledge, and intention, and their implication for the relation between collective decisions and individual decisions. In accordance with the two central ideas, I study different types of scenarios of collective blameworthiness: for example, those that involve collective causal action, collectively knowingly doing, and collectively intentionally doing, respectively. Even though the resulting picture is complex, it helps recognize the conditions that must be met for responsibility voids to exists. Instead of providing the full theory, let me give two exemplary cases in thumbnail form. First, in case a group collectively intentionally brings about a bad outcome, then each member intentionally participates in this collective wrongdoing. Even though a particular member may not make an actual difference to whether the bad outcome results, we can invoke the so-called Complicity Principle to infer that each member is morally blameworthy because her intentional participation makes her complicit in the collective wrongdoing. Second, in case a group collectively performs a group action that causes a bad outcome, it is not so clear whether any of the members is morally blameworthy in a similar way. That is, in general, a responsibility void may arise. Nonetheless, conditions can be given such that whenever a group fails to fulfill its collective obligation then there is a group member that fails to fulfill her individual obligation. In other words, for the causal mode of acting, the existence of a responsibility void requires a violation of these conditions. By studying the relation between individual and collective blameworthiness and the conditions that must be met for responsibility voids to exist, we can design our collective decision procedures such that they have desired properties. This can contribute to the collective decision-making that is essential to cooperations, committees, complex systems, and democratic institutions.