Metaphysics of Group Moral Responsibility

Problematic of Group Moral Responsibility

Before coming to terms with the idea of group moral responsibility, we need to know what we mean by group in the first place. ³ This is important, especially because there is a myriad of human groups or collectives, each of which can have different standing insofar as the issue of their moral responsibility is concerned. Take for instance, the Indian cricket teams, Microsoft, Dalits, the United Kingdom, blue-eyed girls, socialists, mafias, the people at the market places and so on. Each of these is a group in the broader sense of the term. We can talk about the moral responsibility of each of them, depending upon how they behave in a given morally relevant situation. However, in this article, I am concerned with a particular kind of group, which has some sort of a structural base in place. For me, a group proper is not like a mob. A mob does not have any structure whatsoever. They are simple goal- or result-oriented collective entities. They do not have any hierarchy. A group proper, on the other hand, in my understanding is an entity whose members combine to act in such a way that the group as a whole can be seen to simulate or mimic an individual act. It has a decent structure, where members find themselves in certain positions. So, when I talk about groups or collectives, what I have in mind are small-scale entities such as clubs, committees, corporate bodies, teams and the like, who are capable of exhibiting certain mental characteristics in an autonomous way. Although my explanation will have some distinct implications to other forms of bigger groups such as nations, states, tribes, identity groups such as white Americans homosexuals, ultra-nationalists, and so on, as such I do not have much to suggest about them here. ⁴

In order to understand why and how the idea of group moral responsibility can be philosophically intriguing, let us take a widely quoted conversation between two parties in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you’re wrong there-quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they cannot control it. (Steinbeck, 1939, p. 43)

These lines of conversation between the tenant farmers and the representatives of the bank succinctly presented by Striben (Striben, 2014). The conversation exposes the problematic issues involved in the idea of group moral responsibility. ⁵ Without going into details of the story, we can take these statements at their face value and ask: What do we mean when we say the bank is something more than the men who make it what it is? Who is the bank in the first place? How come the bank representatives hate what the bank loves to do what it does? Is the bank just about the men and their interrelations? Or, it is more than what its men can individually claim to have a control over it? These are intriguing philosophical questions. They do not arise because of some Rylean category mistake. ⁶ There is a serious metaphysical issue that lurks in our effort of understanding the meaning of these questions. ⁷ The issue is the interpretation of the existence of group as a real entity over and above its constituent members.

In this section, however, I shall not take up these questions for discussion. ⁸ Rather, here my concern is to unpack the conceptual intricacies of the idea of attributing moral responsibility to groups or collectives and its repercussions to our basic moral principles. I shall mainly highlight a couple of issues, which do not augur well with the basic principles of what morality stands for. One of the most fundamental questions raised by the opponents of group moral responsibility is that if we take it too seriously, we would have to dispense with the traditional theory of moral responsibility—the theory that suggests that the responsibility bearing capacity can be found only in the agency of individual human persons. ⁹ An important corollary of this theory is that no individual can be held morally responsible for any actions performed by others. For no one can bear any moral burden on other’s behalf. Responsibility is essentially an individual matter with self as its primary habitation. Group moral responsibility is a deviation from this fundamental understanding as it seems to violate this basic principle, for it allows us to apportion moral responsibility to certain other individuals who might not have made any relevant contribution, either positively or negatively to the overall outcome of the group action. H. D. Lewis, one of the earliest critics, claims that our general understanding of group moral responsibility lends itself to the danger of endorsing an unjustified concept of moral responsibility (Lewis, 1948). He thinks that group moral responsibility goes against the freedom and autonomy of the constituent individual members. Lewis, thus, believes that the practical implication of the idea is very dangerous and supporting it would mean supporting some form of tribalism. Another important thinker, Jan Narveson in a similar spirit contends that group moral responsibility is an idea that generates insoluble problems and it entails mistreatment of individual people (Narveson, 2002). He thinks that the question of morals should be and is always fundamentally cast in individual terms. Even though certain actions are performed collectively, ultimately it is the individuals who execute the action and not the collectives qua collectives. Narveson thinks that ‘underlying individualism is the only rational meta-theory for collective responsibility’ (Narveson, 2002). If we ignore this and go for searching something else, all we end up doing is waving flags and writing poems (Narveson, 2002, p. 185).

At first glance, the problematic articulated by Lewis and Narveson look quite persuasive. Their normative concerns are well-founded. But one wonders, where do these concerns really come from? A little reflection reveals that such concerns mainly come from our overarching tendency of conceiving groups or collectives as sentient entities. If we consider these entities as the exact prototypes of individual human persons, then obviously we are bound to think that group or collective entities are not the proper candidates for the attribution of moral responsibility since they are not the real locus of sentient experience. In a sense, this is true. But perhaps this is only trivially true. It is trivial to say that a collective is not a subject of human experience and thus it is not the correct entity to which we can attribute moral responsibility. Perhaps it would be an ill-advised suggestion to allow a platitudinous truth to be a decisive argument for dismissing the idea of collective responsibility. Instead, we are pressed into thinking that the issue of the justification or otherwise of group moral responsibility cannot hang on such a platitudinous truth. The issue rather demands that we look beyond the truism of the non-sentient status of a collective and search for wider criteria in terms of which the moral status of a collective can be talked about. Even if sentience-based subjectivity is rightly taken to be a sufficient condition for attributing moral status to an entity, it is far from obvious whether it also constitutes a necessary condition. Perhaps only a myopic moral vision can afford to persuade us into believing that to be a necessary condition for bringing something under the purview of moral assessment and evaluation.

Possibility of Group Moral agency

If group actions and their moral status are as much real as that of their individual counterparts, then there should not be much difficulty in talking about the genuine possibility of group moral responsibility. Such a possibility is also evidently corroborated by our ordinary moral language and practices. But how do we make sense of group moral responsibility? What is the best possible way to suggest that groups or collectives can have the credibility to shoulder the moral burden for what they do by means of the actions or omissions of its constituent members? Our analysis of genuine actions essentially makes reference to the intentional states of the agent concerned. There is a crucial conceptual connection between an action, on the one hand, and its intention on the other. Possibility of individual action is explained by the presence of relevant intentional states on the part of the agent concerned. A group action is an action the subject of which must be a group intentional agent. But can there be anything called group agent, analogous to that of moral agenthood of individual human persons? Many believe that the only agents that the social sciences know of are individuals. Individuals are the final unit of our explanation of social phenomena. In the history of philosophical literature, we come across many complaints about the efficacy of the claim that there can be group agents. ¹⁰ Austin (1869), a nineteenth-century jurist famously claimed that collectivities can be as subjects or agents only by ‘figment, and for the sake of brevity of discussion’ (p. 364). Quinton (1976) raises similar concerns about the agential status of groups or collectives. He thinks that groups can be seen to be attributed with mental properties such as beliefs, emotions and attitudes. But these are plainly metaphorical. Quinton says ‘To say that industrial class is determined to resist anti-trade union laws is to say that all or most industrial workers are so minded’ (Quinton, 1976, p. 17). So to ascribe such things to group is always an indirect way of suggesting the same to its members. This is because, according to Quinton, human persons are the only minded entities that we know of. It is only human persons who have the ability to think and evaluate their desires and accordingly share their thoughts with others.

We can roughly formulate two broad concerns about the possibility of group moral agency—first, it is argued that group moral agency makes no sense both because we cannot isolate genuinely group actions, as distinct from identical actions of many persons. Groups, unlike the individuals who belong to them, cannot think as groups per se. The ascription of intentional actions to group or collective entities is nothing but metaphorical. ¹¹ When we say, ‘Google plans to launch a new product in the next week’, or ‘The state believes that it is gradually losing the support of the common people’, we do not mean that Google literally has an agential capacity for launching the product, or the state literally has a agential belief about the common people’s support. The ascription of agential capacity to collective or group entities is just a figurative way of talking about their positional stand. Second, the notion of group agency is counter-intuitive because the notion of agency as such is a notion of single unit. But group agency requires the involvement of more than one individual. So, the critic asks, how can there be an agency which is single and yet not singular? Besides, subscription to the notion of group agency may force us to accept the legitimacy of some other spooky concepts such as group mind and Hegelian Geist, which allegedly do not have any social scientific status. Such concepts may pragmatically look helpful, but they have hardly any defensible ontological status of their own.

The issue of the feasibility of genuine group or collective action has a long history. Philosophers and social scientists, especially the economists and political theorists, have debated over it for several decades now. Numerous accounts have been floated on how and in what sense we can meaningfully talk about its feasibility. Philosophical deliberations on this topic, however, took an interesting turn in last two decades with the development of a thesis called collective intentionality. Analytic philosophers such as Searle (1993), Bratman (1992, 1993, 1999), Gilbert (1989, 2000, 2006), Tuomela (1988, 2007), Pettit (2001), Velleman (1997) and others have tried to address the fundamental issue of what it is for a group of people to intend to do something together. They are especially concerned with the complex notion of collective intention, which is conceived as the underlying mental state that explains the possibility of collective or group actions. With this notion, these philosophers have been able to provide us with an excellent explanation of literally attributing intentional states to groups and collectives. However, whether or not such an explanation actually leads us to the acceptance of an independent group agent is an issue that receives contested responses.

The possibility of group agency entails two counter-intuitive claims. ¹² On the one hand, it talks about the singleness of agency and, on the other, it refers to non-singularity of agents. This, for many, is philosophically untenable because there is evidently a gap between two facts—singularity of agency with plurality of agents. However, the apparent truth of these concerns does not seem to be so overriding that we will be compelled to believing that group moral agency is a fictitious idea. The image of fictionality permeates one’s idea of group moral agency only if one is blinded by the traditional individualist ethical theory that suggests that only discrete individual human beings are the bearers of responsibility. ¹³ It must be noted that the individualist forgets an important fact that human beings genuinely live a social life of action, which is characteristically distinct from their individual life, say, taking a solitary bath in one’s bathroom or singing alone aloud inside the bathroom.

What I mean by ‘living a social life’ here—a mode of life, which is irreducibly a life of (trans-personally) social action—is instantiated by countless contexts in the human world. The basic feature of such cases of life is that the action that I as an individual perform is logically impossible to carry out and accomplish without the simultaneous involvement of other fellow individual persons. Since such actions, properly called ‘social action’, are intrinsically transindividual, their agency is also intrinsically collective in nature. I cannot, for instance, individually engage in the act of waging a war against my neighbouring country; my engagement must—logically must—have the property of concurrence with the wishes and permission of my fellow countrymen, with whom I form a united team of warriors set to achieve a common goal. There is the united agency that has to be acknowledged in answering the question of who wages the war against the enemy country.

An Account of Group Moral Agency

Actions can be classified into two broad categories from the point of view of agency, namely, individual and group. Group actions require the participation of at least two people. Examples of group actions may include jointly writing a paper, singing a duet, playing a symphony, dancing the tango, pushing a car together and the like. One of the striking features of these actions is that all the members of the group in question engage in their actions in order to arrive at a single goal. The goal is not pursued severally by the individual members of the group, as it happens in the case of the passengers who get off a single bus at an airport in order to embark onto an aeroplane. The reason why a collection of passengers engaged in the act of embarking onto the same aeroplane is not a case of group action is that there is no group intention on the part of the passengers to board the aeroplane. No doubt, the goal here is a common one, a common end that they all are pursuing. But the pursuit of the common goal is not sustained by a common intention. Rather, the individual members are individually intending to perform the same goal without necessarily conceiving the goal as a group one. The intention to do X by an individual agent A is a mental state or attitude attributed to the individual mind of A. But a group action, not being a matter of individual agency, cannot possibly be tied up with a mental (intentional) state of any particular individual subject. How can someone individually intend to do something that requires the agential role of more than one agent? Intuitively, what an individual intends to do is always within the capacity of his or her agential power. The execution of the intention to do something is entirely up to the person who intends it. But since, in a group action, the performer is the entire group, how can the individual members of the group individually intend to do something, the doing of which depends on all the members of the group?

It is evident that I cannot intend to X if X-ing is a matter of group performance, in which you also have a part to play. But it is possible that I intend that we X together. Bratman (1993, 1999) draws an interesting conceptual distinction between intending-that and intending-to. Intending-to, according to him, is something where the agent is the sole author of what he or she intends to do. But intending-that refers to a situation where the agent does not have complete authorship over the intended action, and yet he or she is somehow connected with it.

Further, intending-that itself admits of two different senses. In the first sense, I intend that someone else X-es, but I myself have no agential role to play in X-ing. For instance, I can intend that my wife join academics instead of joining the management service. Intention in this sense is more like my wanting-that my wife X-es rather than Y-es. In the second sense, I intend that we X, where the authorship of the intended action is shared with others. For instance, in my intending that we renovate the club, I exercise my agential power in co-operation with the exercise of the agential powers of other members of the club by them.

The relevance of this distinction between these two types of intention is that intention in the sense of intending-to is not the defining intentional state of group action. Intending-to sense of intention cannot explicate the making of group actions. However, there is a loose sense of group action, where intention-to may well seem to fit. To cite an example, an autocratic king fights against and defeats his enemy. He of course performs this task by employing his soldiers to bring about the desired end, which makes his task one of group action. In this case, despite the fact that it is a group action, the action is the result of executing the intention of one particular individual, namely the king. Therefore, the intention involved in this action can be described as the king’s—rather than the group’s—intending to defeat his enemy. It is obvious in the case of the king described above that there is no group intention that plays the explanatory role in relation to the so-called group action. It is therefore clear that such an action—where the grouply brought about consequence is due to individual intention—cannot properly be described as a group action. There is, in point of fact, no operation of group agency in this action, for the king has coercively thrust his autocratic intention upon the collection of soldiers fighting for him. It is therefore no wonder that this so-called group action is amenable to explanation by reference to ‘intending to’ rather than ‘intending that’.

If the intending-that sense of intention seems to be the appropriate mental state of the individual members of a certain group actions, then it is not too difficult to understand how its group agency can get formed in such a context. But the formation of group agency depends on the fulfilment of some special conditions by the constituent individual members. Here I am inclined to think about three such conditions, they are: (a) each member intends that they engage in the desired action; (b) each intends to do her part in this engagement; and (c) each believes that the other members intend to do their part as well. Of course, apart from these, the individual members also know the nature of their actions and their contributions to what they are jointly intending and doing. These conditions may exist in different forms in different situations of group moral actions. Conditions of this nature are fairly general. Some such conditions are also proposed by Pettit and Schweikard (2006) in the works on joint action and agency. ¹⁴ But one might wonder, how do these conditions ensure the formation of group agency? We may explain this with the help of a simple example. Consider the case of taking a decision by a committee comprising the members—A, B, C and D. These members individually intend that they involve themselves in taking the decision X, and thereby intend to play their individual part actions X1, X2, X3 and X4 in the joint engagement. They each believe that the other member intends to do their part action by exercising their ability to the rest of the members. One of the important things to note here is that these conditions may not always be found in their precise form in all forms of group activities. But even if they are present in some reasonable sense in certain group action situations, the resultant agency is the agency of the whole group. A group with such agential status is a group that can be believed to have the ability to shoulder the burden of moral responsibility in the most literal sense. Its abilities are thus analogous to the abilities of the paradigmatic case of individual moral agents.

Conclusion

Moral responsibility of groups is a fairly complex issue. There is no easy answer as to how and in what sense a group qua group can be meaningfully held morally responsible for doing something. In this article, I tried to explore its feasibility by invoking and articulating the moral agential status of certain groups of minimum structure. The account defended here has an attractive feature of being neither individualistic nor purely collectivistic. It keeps equidistance from both the extremes and thus it has the ability to overcome the problems of both. Nevertheless, it would be far from correct to suggest that the account is fully free from flaws. An important issue with this account is that it is too demanding. One might argue that if we embrace such a demanding plan for articulating group moral agency, there will be hardly any groups left for moral evaluation. This would drastically limit the scope of attributing moral properties to many social groups. In such a situation, most groups who otherwise qualify for our moral judgements would easily go scot free. To quickly respond to this, I would say that even if such a suspicion is well-founded, one must note that moral responsibility is not a matter of willy-nilly, attributing moral properties to somebody for something. It is not about how we, as a matter of fact, judge groups or collectives in our everyday life. An entity can be held morally responsible for their actions or inactions only when they are in fact morally responsible in their own right. This means they will have to qualify certain conditions irrespective of how strong such conditions may look like. For, moral responsibility is a serious matter and it cannot be apportioned as a token of honour or dishonour. Besides, many might suggest that group moral agency of this sort surprisingly ignores many social groups, who we otherwise think are quite capable of being morally responsible, for instance, tribes, communities, nations, mobs, crowds and the like. Here I must admit that the proposed account is indeed limited. It is limited in the sense that it fits for only those groups or collectives, who have a reasonably well-balanced egalitarian structure to deliver evaluative judgements on the basis of what its members democratically deliberate upon. But while accepting this, one must also note that the possibility of their having genuine moral status with such loose structure cannot be entirely ruled out. I think that an account of the kind actually paves the way for such possibilities. At this juncture, it is also worthwhile to mention that many contemporary thinkers believe that group moral responsibility does not necessarily depend on the purported agential status of any kind. One can meaningfully talk about the responsibility of groups without making their agential status the focus of our explanation. Writers like Wringe (2010), Pinkert (2014) and others have explored such possibilities in some of their recent works. Their works mainly rely on examples such as climate change, racism, and other large-scale collective action situations, where the question of agency does not arise in a compelling way and yet the talk of their moral responsibility is not quite misplaced. Needless to say, this article did not discuss such cases, as they require a different engagement altogether.