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Distributing Collective Moral Responsibility to Group Members

David J. Zoller

Published in Journal of Social Philosophy 45:4 (Winter 2014), 478-479

There has been considerable recent interest in the “collective moral autonomy” thesis (CMA), that

is, the notion that we can predicate moral successes, failures and duties of collectives even if there are no

comparable successes, failures and duties among members.1 One reason why this position looks

appealing is because the opposing individualist position seems to have what we might call an accounting

problem. Individualists maintain that only individuals can be subjects of moral success, failure or duty;

however, many reasonable judgments about collective actions include moral information on a scale and of

a stringency that it does not seem possible to predicate even of the duties of members who have steering

power in the actions of the collective. Here I offer a paradigm for thinking about responsibility judgments

in organized collective cases to help individualism solve its accounting problem, and allow us to account

within a strict individualist perspective for moral information that ostensibly favors CMA. I begin by

presenting this problem of moral accounting in organized collectives, and the cases and arguments that

favor CMA (§1).2 These arguments already weaken once we avoid potential misunderstandings of the

prospective duties of steering members; I show that on a descriptively and normatively appropriate view,

steering members must be thought to face reasons at the group scale very directly (§2). I then argue that

retrospective evaluation can’t depart from the contents of those wide prospective member duties (§3).

Finally, I offer a view of responsibility judgments in collective cases that binds retrospective and

prospective responsibility in the required way (§4). This solves the accounting problem that

individualism seems to have, significantly strengthens what might be required of steering-level group

members in organized collectives, and neutralizes a core reason for favoring CMA over individualism.

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1: Accounting for Group-Scale Moral Information

David Copp has offered a case for the moral autonomy of collectives on the grounds that members

have merely pro tanto obligations to “do their part as appropriate in bringing it about that the collectives

to which they belong meet their duties,” whereas groups themselves appear to have much more stringent

situational obligations.3 The merely pro tanto character of member duties comes from the fact that

members are open to moral considerations that collectives are not, and those moral considerations reduce

the stringency of members’ duties to perform the relevant actions. Consider these versions of two of

Copp’s cases:

1. Prison Board: The Board of Directors for a prison fails to vote to fund very necessary security

measures, and so negligently permits a bloody prison riot to occur. Every individual Board

member has an excuse for voting “no” on funding (e.g. one always voted with a colleague, the

colleague voted based on the poor research of an intern, another defaulted to vote against while on

excusable leave, etc.); however, the collective as a whole was still obligated to fund the prison.

Hence every Board member is excused, but the collective itself has failed in its moral duty.

2. Prime Minister: The PM’s daughter is kidnapped by terrorists who want a dangerous prisoner

released. The PM’s government has an all-in obligation to let the hostage die and not to release

the prisoner. The PM, as PM, has a pro tanto obligation to let the hostage die, but this less

stringent obligation is overridden by the PM’s special duties to her daughter. The PM acts out of

her personal moral situation and releases the dangerous prisoner to save her kidnapped daughter.

The government has failed in its moral duty, even though the PM has not.4

Copp’s Prime Minister has merely pro tanto reasons to act since her situation includes some additional,

apparently stringent moral considerations; however, those considerations are irrelevant “from the

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perspective of the government.”5 Since it lacks those competing considerations, the government has an

“all-in” obligation not to release the hostage. Likewise, the excuses of Board members did not count as

relevant moral considerations from the collective’s perspective. Since the argument rides on the contrast

between the complex considerations that individuals face and the evidently simple duties of the group as a

whole, Copp refers to this as the “argument from moral complexity” for CMA.6

Member duties are accordingly described as “pro tanto duties to do their part as appropriate in

bringing it about that the collectives they belong to meet their duties.”7 The paradigm bears comparison

to Janna Thompson’s contention that members of a democratic nation are obligation to do their part to

ensure that the nation pays its debts and obligations.8 As Thompson makes clear, however, those debts

and obligations are not debts and obligations of members of the nation. But Copp’s cases are unlike

historical debts: they are cases where a member of an organized collective is in a position of significant

steering power in reference to the relevant moral situation. This allows Copp to hold a “transfer doctrine”

on which the failure of a collective to meet its duties may “transfer” pro tanto blameworthiness to

members, which according to Copp provides members with reason to ensure that the collective meets its

duties.9 Nevertheless, the “transfer doctrine” falls well short of blaming members for the same object as

the collective, and shares with Thompson’s account that it falls well short of giving members the same

duties and obligations as the collective itself has.

Miller has tried to suggest that individualists can account for all the relevant information by

morally separating roles: the PM-as-parent is “all-in” obligated to respond to moral considerations of her

daughter’s safety; the PM-as-PM is “all-in” obligated to let the hostage die.10 This would permit judges

to be correct in their assessment that there was an all-in duty not to negotiate with terrorists, since judges

here are tapping into the perspective of the PM-as-PM. Copp replies that this is no different from his

view: to say that I have two conflicting all-in obligations is just to say that I have pro tanto obligations to

both, and I am obligated to do my best by either of them when they compete.11 For my part I do not mean

to disagree with Copp in this: it may be that all the member obligations are merely pro tanto. The sticking

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point in the argument, which forces the accounting problem, is Copp’s contention that moral judges are

nevertheless correct to say that there was or is an all-in obligation that transcends the moral complexity of

members’ personal situations. Since evidently no agent had as stringent an obligation as “the group”

seems to us moral judges to have had, the obligation at its full stringency falls on the group itself.

One way in which Copp’s argument might fail is if members actually lack any excuses that

diminish the stringency of their obligations, to the point that they in fact had those obligations “all-in.”

Ludwig has argued that being integral to the occurrence of a weighty group outcome may preclude some

excuses: an integral members of a heart surgery team cannot excuse herself from an emergency procedure

to attend a wedding anniversary dinner; her duty is clearly to do the surgery.12 Thus moral complexity

does not by itself prove that member duties are merely pro tanto. Copp has reasonably replied by

reducing the stakes until member excuses are valid: a team member could excuse herself from a promised

elective plastic surgery to attend a funeral. Provided that this member’s excuse is valid, the group is at

fault for breaking a promise even though no member is so at fault. Since Copp only needs to prove the

possibility of CMA, it is sufficient if moral complexity rules out full blame for members in even one case.

Yet Copp’s reasoning requires the dubious premise that the group’s obligation persists despite

members’ excuses, e.g. that the plastic surgery team maintains its collective all-in obligation to perform

the surgery, or that the PM’s government maintains its all-in obligation not to release the hostage.

Individualists need not admit this. Certainly it is not generally the case that duties I happen to be excused

from performing must therefore be duties of some other entity. If you and I are excused from rescuing a

drowning swimmer, it is not the case that the obligation to rescue her floats off and attaches to the group

itself. One might naturally want to say that things are different in case we are an organized group of

lifeguards: perhaps “the team of lifeguards” was obligated to save the swimmer even if each of us has an

excuse. But while it can be appealing to presume that some groups merely by definition have certain

duties—a government to its people, perhaps, or a medical group to its patients—this cannot be merely

assumed, since this is the CMA thesis itself. Further, judges can be mistaken here: my sense as an

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armchair moral judge that “there is” a very clear overriding need to φ in a situation I read about is not

normally sufficient to prove that there exists some analytically autonomous entity that has that duty in an

overriding way. Likewise, that I am retrospectively in a position to see the objective necessity of some

action does not give me reason to postulate an entity in the situation (the government itself, or the Board

itself) from whose moral perspective that objective necessity is as crystal clear as it is from my armchair.

Nevertheless it seems reasonable to want to say that a team of lifeguards itself is always all-in

obligated in a clear and simple way to save lives, even if team members share that obligation in more

indirect ways; it might likewise be said that a prison’s Board of Directors simply is all-in obligated to

keep the prisoners safe. Pettit’s “discursive dilemmas” offer some reason why we might want to maintain

that, again drawing on the potential disconnect between members’ individual circumstances and the

actions that seem in retrospect to have been required.13 Pettit argues that discursive dilemmas make it

essential that the attitudes of groups as wholes are not simply thought to track with a majoritarian

aggregation of the changing attitudes of their members, on pain of groups holding inconsistent attitudes

and failing to be “rational.”14 Majority voting patterns of group members could make it such that (a) no

group member assents to the conjunct P&Q&R, so the group “collectively agrees” that the conjunct

P&Q&R is wrong, and yet (b) the group as a whole separately votes majority yes on P, yes on Q, and yes

on R, and so the group collectively votes in favor bringing to pass the conjunct P&Q&R. Hence the

group as a whole holds inconsistent positions if we use member voting patterns to gauge “the group’s”

position.15 To address this, Pettit argues that groups must agree on a standing body of judgments such as

a constitution to ensure their consistency, provided they mean to be rational bodies at all. But since these

standing judgments will sometimes be out of sync with the majority vote of group members, the collective

is autonomous in the sense of being “a distinct attitudinal center and a distinct agent” relative to its

members.16 When actions that arise from the group qua distinct attitudinal center have morally relevant

effects, the group as a whole is susceptible to moral judgment even if no members are. Thus the Board of

Directors could conceivably fail to live up to its charter-specified obligations even if those obligations are

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of no interest to any members. And either individual voting patterns or a constitutional resolution of

inconsistency can make it the case that group attitudes are independent of member attitudes.

Yet Pettit admits that attitudinal independence, while it suggests that the group is a distinctly

analyzable “intentional” entity (in the weak sense of having a quasi-desire on which it can be made to

act), does not by itself guarantee that a collective agent is morally evaluable:

There is nothing incoherent in the idea that group agents might not be able to form

judgments over [sets of] propositions [consistent with their standing beliefs], for certain

systems may count as intentional agents in the absence of this ability. As we saw earlier,

intentional agents will have to be reliably disposed to act in a way that satisfies their

desires according to their beliefs. But that disposition is consistent with their not being

able to hold any beliefs about the desirability—the desire-worthiness—of options.17

In other words, it is conceivable to admit that collective agents are analyzable as entities that complete

actions in line with standing desires, and yet argue that they have no situational capacity for weighing the

relative choice-worthiness of options. As Pettit explains, “We can use a sentence such as ‘I do X’ or ‘A

life is saved' or ‘Joan is happy,’ not just to report that result but to exemplify the possibility it expresses

and then to hold up that possibility as an object of attention and to ask about its properties,” specifically

its choice-worthiness.18 Moral evaluation requires that we and those whom we evaluate are dealing with a

state of affairs in this latter, more robust sense. Pettit’s response to this concern is that “a group will be

able to form a judgment over any proposition that members are capable of presenting for consideration

and of adjudicating by means of a vote or something of the kind…[Group members] will be able to

present evaluative, option-related propositions for group consideration and will be able to take a part in

deciding them.”19 This solution, while it offers a formal way of defeating the general objection that

groups lack the capacities requisite for responsible moral decision-making, invites again the objection that

it is only members, and not at all the group itself, who can apprehend such a thing as moral choice-

worthiness.20 Thus this line of thought does not at all rule out an individualist analysis. Of course,

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members would on Pettit’s model present options evaluatively primarily in light of the collective’s

standing commitments, even in defiance of their own personal judgments. But this too can be analyzed

individualistically: what is happening when a Board member appeals to a mission statement is that that

member sees the demands of a situation in light of a predetermined goal that itself seems to her (or

seemed at an earlier time) demanded, morally or otherwise, by the wider situation to which her role

demands she attend.21 Since Pettit does not rule out the possibility of members re-evaluating the

suitability of the group’s commitments, and since this would have to proceed through individual members

“holding up possibilities as objects of attention,” there is no reason to attribute any aspect of this process

to anything other than individual group members.22

Further, if members in steering roles fail to take as active a role as this, this need not be seen as

excusable or even sufficient for completion of their member duties. Hindriks has argued that the

apparently excused member agents in Copp's and Pettit's excuse and “discursive dilemma” cases might be

faulted in ways that Copp and Pettit have not recognized, namely for failing to be responsive to the right

reasons in the case.23 They would for Hindriks be open to the Scanlonian charge of “faulty self-

governance.”24 For members to regard the rules that aggregate their judgments and yield the final

collective action (e.g. voting procedures or premises that will connect their judgments) as fixed and

beyond consideration is irresponsible, since it implies a lack of sensitivity to the basic moral issue in the

relevant situation. After all, whatever mechanisms our group has in place will be what aggregates our

judgments and yields collective action; if we simply permit that process to happen in ways that may yield

an extremely undesirable outcome we will have reason to regret, we demonstrate that we clearly were not

appropriately sensitive to the moral considerations in the situation. This charge would apply at least to

Copp’s Prison Board case. Hindriks’ strategy would potentially remove the agents' excuses, since these

agents are quite specifically at fault for disregarding important moral reasons. The agents were in fact not

permitted to let the ultimate outcome of the situation ride on potentially faulty procedures for aggregating

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judgment, while personally focusing on less salient considerations. Instead, they were obligated to take

into account the reasons that we later think of as bearing on the collective itself.

Copp can still ask how far this is compatible with the clearly mixed moral considerations that bear

on any individual person, whose attention and life are hardly exhausted by her participation in the

collective. The Prime Minister is, after all, not resting on a faulty decision procedure or focusing on

considerations that fall short of the most morally salient outcome (as judged by outsiders). And if we

believe in an all-in duty, Hindriks' argument does not obviously prove that any individual had it, even if

Hindriks proves with Miller and Ludwig that the individual may have been obligated to give the

“collective’s” moral reasons greater weight than she did. To this I think we can only reply that it really is

possible that all members may have had merely pro tanto duties, and that in at least some cases the

relevant all-in duty is sort of a philosophical fiction. I explain this possibility in §4 below.

Much in the CMA arguments surveyed here rides on our retrospective, armchair sense that there

was moral information in the case sufficient to generate an all-in duty to perform some action. But we

must admit that embedded agents may not have had that duty, and individualists must argue further that

the collective also did not have it. The important thing is for us to be able to say this without declaring

that armchair moral judges are simply mistaken to think that there really was something clearly pressing

to do at the national level in Prime Minister, or to think that there was some crucial obligation to fund

prison security in Prison Board. What individualism needs is an account that (1) can accommodate the

idea that prospective member obligations were often merely pro tanto, but (2) does not require us to

abandon or grossly revise our sense of the stringency of the relevant obligations in our retrospective moral

judgments. First I argue that the dynamics of group membership should not mislead us into thinking that

members have merely indirect relations to the moral situations that groups face. This dispels one aspect

of the apparent mismatch between the actions that armchair judges think were all-in required and the

prospective responsibilities of members. I then argue that moral judges are only justified in concerning

themselves in retrospect with outcomes that match some corresponding prospective responsibilities of

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some individuals in the situation. Finally, I offer a phenomenology of moral judgment on which we can

preserve some privilege for the armchair moral judge’s retrospective judgment that there was an all-in

obligation to φ, while admitting that some of the apparent stringency she sees may be an artifact of the

conditions of removed “armchair” moral judgment. This permits (and requires) us to account for all the

moral information the judge sees solely within an individualist framework.

2: Individuals and their Group-Level Prospective Responsibilities

One possible source of confusion here is that we cannot simply say that the collective has an all-in

duty to φ, whereas members have merely pro tanto duties to φ, as though collectives and individuals have

duties to take the selfsame action: whereas the surgical group itself is obligated to complete the surgery,

an individual cannot complete the procedure alone; rather, the individual is obligated instead to take a

different action that leads to the group doing the action it must. Yet the slippage here, whether we

articulate it openly or not, would stack the deck in favor of collectivism, since the most crucial moral

information in our judgments obviously bears on the collective’s duties. While this difference in kind and

degree between group and member duties is not a premise in Copp’s argument per se, it appears in his

formulation of member duties as pro tanto duties to “do their part as appropriate in bringing it about that

the collectives to which they belong meet their duties.”25 It is one thing to say that (a) S is required to do

her level best to ensure that the group as a whole meets its moral obligations to satisfy moral demand X.26

It is quite another thing to say that (b) S is required to use the means of collective action at her disposal to

satisfy moral demand X. My only contention in this section will be an analysis like (b), which preserves

all the moral information we care about at the level of individual agents, does better justice to the way

individuals perceive collective situations they have the power to steer. I argue that for members in

steering roles, their interest in the process and commitments needed to generate collective action must—

for both normative and descriptive reasons—be subsidiary to their interest in group-level moral reasons.

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At a glance, recent work by Margaret Gilbert offers an ostensibly more stringent, potentially “all-

in” way of obligating group members in cases I am considering that nevertheless, according to Gilbert, is

compatible with CMA. Gilbert’s joint intention paradigm operates on the notion that when you and I

agree to act together, this adds important social reasons to act into the mix of our respective obligations.27

Social reasons here are obligations to act when someone else acts; we might call them “lateral

obligations” to other group members, since we owe them to those other members. If you and I jointly

commit to going up the hill together to fetch a pail of water and you wander off, I can reasonably point

you back to our joint commitment and the lateral obligations therein. The lateral obligations gave you

new reasons to act that you neglected; those obligations made an otherwise non-obligatory goal, fetching

some water, into something you were bound to do. Gilbert has more recently argued that these lateral

obligations may be sufficiently strongly binding as to trump moral considerations an agent may have.28

For instance, I may be obligated through joint commitment to support my nation even if I have good

moral reasons not to do so. This is because, on Gilbert’s view, the content of such commitments, or the

independent desirability (moral or otherwise) of the goal is not the reason I am obligated to carry out the

specified actions, and hence “neither coercive circumstances nor immoral content prevents a joint

commitment from obligating the parties in the usual way.”29 Copp’s surgeon or prime minister, on a

Gilbert-style account, would be obligated to forgo a great many personal obligations to satisfy the group

goal: by taking on a role, each of them has agreed (probably explicitly) to be part of a joint effort to meet

a group goal. Nevertheless, since individual members are related to the group goal by lateral obligations

that have nothing to do with that goal’s independent moral choice-worthiness, Gilbert’s account leaves

room for distinct evaluations of groups and members.30

Despite that this view appears to give individuals extremely stringent obligations toward group

goals, what is incorrect about Gilbert’s view is that it regards joint commitments as somehow sacrosanct,

as though individual moral perception were mediated by deference to joint commitments once they are

made. But this seems incorrect. Suppose you and I spot a stranded boat on which everyone will die of

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thirst in two days' time. We agree to undertake the complicated rescue together. Bill, who knows the

circumstances and our plan, decides he doesn't care at all, even though his skills could help save even

more people, and Bill goes bowling the day of the rescue. Suppose I renege and go bowling with him.

Have I done something worse than Bill? In one sense, yes: I broke a promise. But beyond that not, since

I am ignoring moral reasons—deaths I could prevent at low cost to myself, and people who have claims

on me more stringent than my desire to bowl—exactly as Bill is. I merely also have a separate count of

guilt for the broken promise. The upshot is that if being part of a group imposes laterally obligating

reasons to φ on me as a group member, those lateral reasons to φ are never the really weighty reasons for

φ’ing. Michael Bratman has offered a general caution along these lines regarding Gilbert’s view, arguing

that, “interdependence of persistence [of reasons to act, through Gilbert-style lateral obligations] does not

require interdependence of etiology.”31 In Bratman’s example, when we all applaud together for a great

performance, “the etiology of the shared intention to applaud may be primarily a matter of the quality of

the performance together with common knowledge, within the audience, of common artistic standards.”32

My basic reasons for applauding have to do with the performance and its objective features in light of

certain norms we all endorse, despite that I additionally applaud because the others do. As a general rule,

while it may be true that once I am jointly obligated, I now have to φ also because I promised to φ if S

φ’s, I primarily have to φ because of the ambient moral reasons there are for φ’ing within my perceptual

situation.

Nevertheless, Copp or Pettit may reply that their cases concern organized groups in which even

steering members are related to possible group outcomes in virtue of institutional roles, so those outcomes

are not so straightforwardly identifiable with the member’s perceptual situation; the member’s own

situation instead contains personal considerations that compete with her role-based duty to cause the

collective to do what it should. One way to reply to this would be to invoke a normative argument, as

Hindriks does, that group members do not have license to let morally significant outcomes ride on

potentially faulty decision procedures. Members ought to be open to group-level reasons, on pain of

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“faulty self-governance.” But our CMA proponents can reply that members can in principle be so open,

without saying that those group-level reasons represent member duties: all we require is that our Prime

Minister has enough imagination to grasp what the nation ought to do—allowing that she really does

grasp how urgent it is—and she additionally understands her role-based responsibility to cause the nation

to do it. All collectivists need to do is re-describe reasons-sensitivity in such a way that an agent can be

requisitely sensitive to the all-in duties of her nation without taking them as her own duties.

Individualists need to show that this re-description will not work, as it indeed will not. Van de

Poel has offered an instructive distinction in this vein between prospective properly moral obligations and

mere prospective tasks, since one may complete prospective tasks while failing in prospective moral

obligations.33 Focusing on descriptive facts about each agent’s lateral obligations (or, alternatively,

obligations to “ensure that the collective meets its duties”) seems to translate the properly moral

prospective responsibility relevant in the situation itself into something that bears on members only like a

responsibility to complete non-moral tasks. Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, whose trial was

famously chronicled by Hannah Arendt, appealed in his own defense to the fact that his actions during the

Holocaust were nothing but a series of mundane completions of various administrative tasks, which

included knowingly trafficking many thousands of human beings to their deaths.34 For him, this end was

merely the goal of his group, and if the end so happened to be of moral importance, this, in Eichmann’s

mind, was not his affair: he was a mundane, morally average person to all appearances, and for all he

cared the group’s shared task might as well have been to maximize profit or balance a firm’s accounting

books.35 This left observers, including Arendt herself, stunned that evil could be so “banal,” and that the

moral dimensions of the grand action that interested the court were not reflected in Eichmann’s

intentional actions as the court uncovered them.36 The Israeli court, left holding a large “remainder” of

guilt, hung Eichmann to considerable fanfare anyway. Perhaps, as is my view, they were right not to feel

limited in their moral evaluation by the descriptive analysis of Eichmann’s banal intentions.37 Consider

that even if something you and I have brought about, G, is of significant moral weight, the descriptive

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analysis as to how you and I were “jointly committed” to bring about G is neutral as to whether G is or is

not an outcome of moral importance, and likewise neutral about what G looked like or should have looked

like to us in the moment of decision. The descriptive analysis of Gilbert-style joint intention can make G

appear as merely another task, as Eichmann claims that the Holocaust was for him—as though our group

is committed to construct a playground this week, and to carry out genocide the next. (And perhaps we

shall chance to inherit some moral properties if the outcome turned out to be retrospectively morally

relevant to judges.)38 Yet this seems to descriptively ignore the morally perceptive capacities that

individuals do have, and any plausible description of their actions will need to reflect those capacities.

This problem is still more obvious in the case of a Pettit-style organized group where members

have crystallized and codified their joint commitment to some goal into an institutional mission.

Vandekerckhoeve and Commers have pointed to corporate mission statements as the proper objects of

employee commitment and of the employee’s sense of duty as an employee.39 Yet when we are talking

about collective moral failings, it seems that we greatly underplay the issue when we re-describe the

failures we want to talk about as failures to live up to the terms of a mission statement or other

constitutional commitment. We as moral judges would then be attributing an actual moral failure to the

corporate entity (e.g. a diamond mining company exploits an entire region), and attributing a mere failure

to obey the terms of a prior agreement or mission statement to the members (e.g. the owners did not obey

the terms of their joint mission, which stated that they should not cause the collective to do this).

Consider how this appears as an excuse in a similar case:

Oil spill: The board of an oil company endorses risky exploration practices that they know may

result in an oil spill. There is indeed an oil spill, which displaces thousands of innocent people.

Reducing human costs is part of the company’s mission statement. Every board member feels

regret for having failed to cause the corporation to satisfy the desires it expresses in its mission

statement. Board members wish themselves to be judged only for that failure, and wish to be

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excused in reference to the human costs of the oil spill itself. They claim that the company itself,

if anyone, should be blamed for those human costs.

Since on Pettit’s CMA paradigm it is indeed group members who apprehend moral choice-worthiness and

bring matters of moral salience to the attention of the group, the board members’ attempt to divorce

themselves from the corporation itself in Oil Spill is fairly specious. Steering members of a group are not

at liberty to claim that their duties and actions should only be described as a series of tasks without

intrinsic moral relevance, particularly if we presume it is they who are solely capable of apprehending

morally salient features of the situation. Instead, members’ steering actions with reference to the group

must be described in terms that reflect their openness to the moral demands in the group-scale situation.

They are open to those demands as demands that directly bear on their own agency, and possibly require

sacrifice.

3: When and How to Disregard Large-Scale Outcomes

Nevertheless, collectivists can conceivably reply that, even if steering members of a group have

rather wide prospective duties, many of our moral judgments about collective cases concern retrospective

information that cannot reasonably be laid to the moral fault or credit of an individual person. Tracy

Isaacs offers the example of the Terry Fox Run, which has raised $20 million for cancer research.40 No

individual runner raised the whole sum, and hence the group accomplished something on a “moral

magnitude” (raising $20 million) not characteristic of any individual’s contribution (raising $200). Of

course, individualists could break up that outcome into the discrete contributions of individuals, and deny

that the large-scale outcome has any independent relevance. Jan Narveson has taken this approach: a

“genocide,” according to Narveson, is nothing but a set of individual murders with a common motive. 41

By the same reasoning the outcome “raising $20 million” would have no independent relevance, and we

could instead talk retrospectively about a number of individuals each raising their own sum. Isaacs has

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replied that there is a significant loss of normative information in Narveson’s individualist translations;

among other things, a large-scale outcome like genocide has its own spectrum of effects, which for

genocide include damage to a people’s identity.42 Given that similar things could be said of many group

outcomes, we have reason to maintain retrospective interest in a group-scale outcome that could only

correlate with a collective action (and no mere individual action). This is a significant consideration for

my argument here, since it is arguably the foreseeable presence of just such “group-scale” outcomes that

generates the apparent all-in obligations that Copp and other CMA proponents want to reserve for the

group. Individualists certainly can get rid of those all-in obligations in Narveson’s way by telling moral

judges that apparently large-scale outcomes are usually mere fictions, and need to be broken up into the

corresponding small scale outcomes (and corresponding small-scale duties) associated with the actions of

individual people. The larger-scale phenomena would then have to be viewed as products of lucky or

unlucky chance, rather than morally evaluable rights and wrongs that might have corresponded to

prospective duties. Yet Narveson’s strategy already seems not to work in many cases of organized

collective action, such as Prison Board: I have argued that prison safety and the possibility of a bloody

riot just are the considerations that ought to have motivated members in voting, and we can neither

normatively nor descriptively admit that descriptions of members’ actions could have been appropriately

restricted to lesser considerations. So, contra Narveson, individualists should try to preserve our

retrospective interest in large-scale outcomes and our corresponding interest in the large-scale situations

and duties that correlate with those outcomes.43

What individualists clearly need to say is that the large-scale outcomes worthy of moral evaluation

just are the outcomes that corresponded to prospective duties of some members. In Copp’s example of

the plastic surgeon who begs off a procedure for personal reasons, this individualist analysis would tell us

(a) that the surgeon is bound specifically by the group’s promise to the patient, as though it were her own

promise, and (b) that if no individual was bound in that way, then we cannot say in retrospect that there

really was a “broken promise” in any morally evaluable sense at all. We can use this paradigm to sort out

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what is and is not worthy of moral judgment even in reference to a larger-scale outcome, such as Isaacs’

charity run, and we arguably do not lose moral information in doing so. Consider an “all-in” runner who

keenly feels the need for cancer research, e.g. one who lost a relative to cancer. While she may have

discharged her lateral obligations to others to run the race once the race is finished, our runner would

clearly not think that she had fulfilled all the relevant moral demands. She ran with her lost relative and

other languishing cancer patients in mind, with real human suffering in mind, as a real demand she was

running to answer. While our runner can feel satisfaction once the race is over, there is no sense in which

the pain and loss to which she meant to reply stop making moral demands of her after the race ends and

her lateral obligations are gone. Hence while it may be true that no individual can intend to perform a

charity run (the joint action), an individual evidently can intend to meet (or neglect to meet) the moral

demands at which the charity run as a whole is directed. The fact that an individual cannot perform an

entire charity run does not by itself tell against individuals facing moral reasons and situations at a large

scale, and these may well be thought to dovetail with the outcomes we want to evaluate retrospectively. If

the passionate runner may not earn credit for “raising $20 million,” she does deserve credit for “fighting

cancer.” Arguably it is the latter, not the former, that is morally salient in the first place.

The CMA proponent can respond that there are cases of joint action where nobody has the sense

of things that the passionate runner does, and where morally important collective outcomes are achieved

by groups of agents who are imperfectly, or not at all, committed in the way she is.44 To reply, it would

be instructive to imagine a case where every runner actually is acting merely out of lateral obligations

(“I’m just running because you’re running”) or out of an indirect, non-moral interest in the collective end,

so that nobody shares our passionate runner’s moral phenomenology. This scenario could yield a good

collective result: we all, to a person, run or do our other roles for narrower, non-moral reasons—maybe

because fundraising is a fun challenge for organizers, because this opportunity to raise money came along,

or because running with friends is fun—and we chance to do a good turn as a collective.

  17  

This sort of case appears to favor CMA, since some good was done, but all individuals involved

had intentions that were unrelated to or differently complicated than the intentions that correlate with the

good outcome. But it is doubtful that a group like this, where every member lacks any interest in the

relevant large-scale moral situation, could count as a group that is responsible for the outcome in question.

The group itself would be more akin to a machine whose actions in situation Y are controlled at a distance

by a group of actors who are more or less uninterested in or unaware of Y (maybe they are playing poker,

and their hands determine a robot’s actions in Y). The group would have ironclad moral excuses, as I

would be if I had Ned Block’s Chinese Nation brain, or would be a kind of “invisible hand”—and we do

not evaluate “invisible hands” in the language of moral responsibility. 45 Hence the cases where a

collective would most obviously count as “autonomous” are also cases where the group is not, in

reference to the relevant outcome, the sort of agent that can be morally responsible.46 Further, it is not

clear that the outcome in such a case would be worth morally evaluating at all, since with respect to the

situation moral judges retrospectively care about (i.e. funding cancer research), none of the agents who

can control their own actions had any interest in it. In a case like this, judges would have to give up their

retrospective moral interest in the collective outcome. Further still, following my prior arguments on

Pettit’s position in §1, CMA proponents can’t detour around this by specifying that the group is simply by

constitution or by definition “interested in” certain moral reasons, since this merely pushes the problem

back to processes of individuals securing reasons-sensitivity for the group. Absent there being some

individual person who had prospective obligations that correspond to the moral information that

retrospectively interests armchair judges (or someone who such obligations upon herself, in a case of

supererogatory actions), those judges will have to disregard that moral information.

4: Moral Demands and Moral Judgments

  18  

Part of my interest has been accounting for the apparent mismatch between the “group-scale”

moral information that interests moral observers, on the one hand, and the moral circumstances faced by

individual group members. But collectivists may complain that I have too quickly ruled out of judgment

all and only those cases that cannot be explained individualistically, in terms of prospective group

member duties. I have demonstrated that situationally embedded agents who enjoy a certain amount of

steering power in a collective should be thought of as being open to group-scale moral reasons. I

supported Hindriks’ point that they may be morally at fault if they are not, and argued that a steering

member cannot claim to be appropriately open to group-scale reasons if she tries to describe her

obligations as task-like pro tanto obligations to cause a collective to meet its duties. Individuals with

steering power therefore should be thought of as being directly open to group-scale reasons that impart

them with their situational duties.

In principle, collectivists can agree that these claims may hold true in some cases. What

collectivists cannot admit is my further claim that if there were no persons in steering roles who had

duties at this group-scale, then we have to scale back our retrospective moral judgments to match the

prospective duties that individuals actually had (or took on, if the duties were supererogatory).

Collectivists have reason to reply that this claim is rather ad hoc. While I have shown that we have some

reason to limit our judgments this way, lest the group be a mere invisible hand, I also claimed at the start

of my argument that we can adopt that limitation on judgment without losing any moral information

worth caring about. Collectivists can still reply that I am wrong about what moral information was worth

caring about. In the CMA examples surveyed in the first section above, a crucial factor favoring CMA

was the persistence of a moral judgment that the group had an all-in duty regardless of what kinds of

duties individual members had. It was crucial in the surgical team cases, for instance, that we judge that

the team as a whole maintains an obligation on a level of stringency that isn’t characteristic of any

member’s obligation. It may seem that my individualism simply tells us we are wrong about these

judgments anytime our judgments are not compatible with individualism.

  19  

Paradigms in the phenomenology of moral judgment offer us a way to explain the tight pairing on

which I have insisted between retrospective and prospective judgments of moral responsibility, in a way

that can account for moral information we do not simply want to discard out of hand.47 A

phenomenological perspective is also notably helpful for managing role-based conflicts of duties that

occur in collective settings, since phenomenological analysis is tailored to analyzing objects of perception

as objective contents that only manifest themselves subjectively in the complicated conscious lives of

individuals.48 Moral demands have this character: they are putatively objective matters of judgment that

necessarily manifest themselves subjectively. Maurice Mandelbaum has argued that we can readily see

this appeal to objectivity in the phenomenology of our ordinary “removed moral judgments,” that is,

judgments on the part of agents who are not directly involved in the situation.49 Those judgments purport

to be about something objective, and to that extent they have an epistemic component: in making a moral

judgment, one is making an observation about subjectively apprehensible demands in one’s perceptual

situation, and if one is making the judgment with reference to some person S, then she is in the first place

judging S to be in a position to apprehend the same things as she does.50 “Removed moral judgment” is

the position you and I occupy right now with respect to any CR case we are reading or talking, such as

Copp’s Prison Board or Prime Minister. A basic model of removed moral judgment can be gleaned from

a case without obvious moral contours. When I, the removed judge, judge that you should mow your

ridiculously overgrown lawn, I draw on my own viewpoint looking over your fence and subjectively

apprehending the “demand” that your grass needs to be mowed (by somebody, though not by me).51

My armchair apprehension of moral demands contains this objective content, except that it is

subjectively manifest through my own removed, merely hypothetical relationship to the situation.

Consequently, situational demands may subjectively appear to me as unduly simple, since they appear

without any real competition from personal demands in my perceptual situation. Yet this need not isolate

me from making correct removed judgments provided I am dispositionally situated to appreciate the

desire-worthiness of various situational states of affairs. I look over the fence and see that my neighbor’s

  20  

yard is overgrown and in need of mowing. This is compatible with its being the case that Joanne, the

owner of the yard, does not think that this objective demand to mow the grass competes very pressingly

with her overriding duties to care for her dying mother—hence the demand confronts her with merely pro

tanto prospective duty. I am not wrong that there exists some such demand, and Joanne is not wrong that

that demand is subjectively less pressing in light of her other concerns. But the fact that it is not pressing

to Joanne need not count as a reason to postulate some higher perspective, beyond my own and Joanne’s,

where the objective stringency of the demand to mow the yard resides at the “all-in” level at which it

appears to me. On the contrary, the demand is “really out there,” in the sense of being objectively

available to agents who perceive the relevant features of the situation, but can only manifest itself

subjectively in the complicated lives of embedded agents or the comparatively uncomplicated perceptions

of removed moral judges. This objectivity permits it to be the case that there is a relative separation in

removed moral judgments between the judgment that a demand exists—which judges may apprehend as

extremely stringent—and the judgment that that demand is directed at a given agent.

Yet the collectivist can still reasonably ask: what makes it the case that one is personally obligated

to answer a specific moral demand? One natural reply would be that one is so obligated only if one can

perform an action that answers it. This would seem to favor collectivism: following Isaacs’ example, a

lone runner cannot “do” an entire charity run. If the moral demand at issue can only be fulfilled by a

collective action, then we seem forced to target our retrospective talk at a separate entity—a collective

agent—that did do or could have done the collective action that members themselves could not; members

had no obligation to personally open themselves to that demand, if they couldn’t perform the action that

answers it. Yet as I noted, moral events like charity runs or moves to implement security at a prison are

organized in the first place, and given any moral relevance they do have, by individuals who feel the

large-scale moral demands in the situation as demands directly bearing on their own time and capabilities.

This provides our runner or Board member with the motivation to find further avenues to answer the

demand, by organizing more actions, exhorting other agents to act, and so on. Assuming there are such

  21  

courses of action conceivable, our agent cannot complain that her hands are tied. Particularly since

organizational actions target large-scale demands over a long time-scale, an agent may be obligated to

secure capabilities to address them. What is required is an account of when and why this is the case.

My suggestion has been that we think of both prospective and retrospective responsibility

judgments in terms of moral demands, and that we think of moral demands phenomenologically, as

putatively objective perceptual contents. On this view, I am obligated to answer a moral demand or

address a certain moral consideration when I “see” it in my sphere of action, and what I see or should

have seen in my own sphere is at least partly an epistemic matter to be determined by the perceptual scope

implicit in my projects, my roles, who I am, and where I physically happen to be. Analogously, if I am

suddenly teleported right in front of people dying of thirst in the Kalahari Desert, my moral obligations

have shifted from what they are right now; if I am suddenly teleported to the position of an executive at a

multi-national corporation settling a mining deal, I am in yet another situation, with quite different matters

of moral salience before my attention. Being a member of a collective who can steer that collective’s

actions suggests that I already have a certain perceptual scope, dictated by scale of events at which I

regularly have to think and make decisions. Having to think and decide on phenomena of such scale

opens me personally to group-level moral reasons at that scale.52 Accordingly, one’s role as a member of

the Board of Directors at a prison includes the demand to attend to a certain scope of events. Being an

integral member of an emergency surgical team entails its own scope of attention. If for some reason I

was unable to meet whatever demands fell in my sphere, I may have an excuse; nevertheless, those

demands can still be thought to provide retrospective judges with the counterfactual object of blame from

which I am excused. If all steering members are excused from meeting a pressing situational demand,

then we have on our hands a tragedy, not an autonomous collective.

5: Social Roles and Moral Scope

  22  

I have argued that if we do want to talk about moral responsibility for large-scale collective

outcomes in retrospect, we need to do so in terms of the prospective moral demands on some individual

agent or agents within the situation. My aim has been to reiterate and solve an apparent accounting

problem that individualists have when trying to account for all the information in our retrospective

judgments about collective outcomes. Whereas it may seem that individuals even in steering roles exhaust

their duties of membership in ways that do not open them to the moral reasons faced by the collective as a

whole—perhaps because of competing personal concerns, or perhaps because their role-based

responsibilities are indirect—I have shown that this is not a descriptively or normatively credible idea.

An appropriately wide view of steering members’ duties will typically dovetail with the removed

judgments we want to make about situational moral demands, and when it does not, we have good reason

to withhold moral evaluation in reference to those specific demands.

Even when we do withhold judgment, framing both prospective and retrospective judgments in

terms of objective moral demands can make it the case that armchair moral judges like us are at least

relatively correct in our assessment that a situation like Prison Board contains very stringent, apparently

all-in or overriding duties to act. It will be true that agents embedded in that situation and living through

it experienced the relevant moral demands as live issues that had to compete with other considerations.

To admit this is not the same as saying that our removed judgment was simply wrong, nor is it the same

as saying we must simply discard moral information out of hand; rather, it is to admit that moral

information centers on demands that, to be what they are, need to manifest themselves subjectively in the

complex lives of conscious agents. So far as we know, moral demands do not exist any other way. If the

agents occupy steering roles that mandate a wide enough perceptual scope, they should expect that these

demands are demands on their own agency. If their competing concerns truly excuse them—which, as I

agreed with Ludwig, Miller, and Hindricks, will happen more seldom than Copp’s CMA examples

suppose—then those demands form the counterfactual object of blame. This preserves the large-scale

moral information in our judgments, while solving the individualism’s apparent accounting problem.

  23  

It may help by way of conclusion to see what kinds of retrospective judgments of praise and blame

this model would justify. On this model it is not supererogatory for a Congressperson to take it as her

own direct duty to, e.g., “ensure civilian safety in upcoming strikes in X Province.” If Congress failed to

bring about the needed action and there was a massacre, we might say that our Congressperson “did the

best that she could” as a marginal group member, but we would say that only if it were evident that she

apprehended the large-scale moral demand that concerns us moral observers, and only if she saw it as

making direct and considerable demands of her agency. We would not absolve her of failure if she

expressed a lack of appreciation for the moral urgency of the issue, or if she recognized the urgency but

cited the marginal character of her participation to justify a failure to act (“My single vote wouldn’t have

made a difference anyway, so instead I voted in ways that would build credit with So-and-so”).53

Likewise, if she failed, we would be doubly disappointed to hear that she understands her failure merely

as having reneged on a prior agreement or campaign promise. As a Congressperson participating in the

exercise of national powers of war, she exists on an exceptionally wide perceptual stage. Hence even if

she merely voted quietly for one measure that might have saved some civilians (but which didn’t pass),

the question of her having met her obligations is still not closed: voters can justly wonder whether she

might not have done more, and whether she took the collective situation seriously for what it was. If an

agent is not comfortable with the scale of moral demands which a given role may place on her agency,

this would be a good reason not to take on the role. On the correct individualist account, there is not, and

conceptually need not be, any collective to whom she can pass up the blame.

1  The  label  “CMA”  derives  from  David  Copp,  “The  Collective  Moral  Autonomy  Thesis,”  Journal  of  Social  Philosophy  38:3  (2007):  369-­‐‑388.    For  other  statements  of  the  CMA  position  see  Virginia  Held,  “Group  Responsibility  for  Ethnic  Conflict,”  The  Journal  of  Ethics  6:2  (2002):  157-­‐‑178;  Phillip  Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,”  Ethics  117  (2007):  171-­‐‑201;  Tracy  Isaacs,  Moral  Responsibility  in  Collective  Contexts  (New  York:  Oxford  University  Press,  2011);  David  Killoren  and  Bekka  Williams,  “Group  Agency  and  Overdetermination,”  Ethical  Theory  and  Moral  Practice  16  (2013):  295-­‐‑307.    2  Here  I  use  the  term  “organized  collective”  to  mean  any  collective  that  performs  a  genuinely  cooperative  action  under  mutual  knowledge  conditions,  with  enough  mutual  obligation  to  ensure  that  all  can  be  expected  to  perform  their  roles.  This  may  or  may  not  include  a  codified  mission  statement  or  rigidly  specified  voting  procedures;  as  I  show  below,  these  codifications  of  cooperation  make  no  difference  to  my  argument.    My  argument  is  confined  to  the  “steering  members”  of  such  collectives,  that  is,  members  who  are  in  a  top-­‐‑level  position  from  which  they  can  participate  (by  whatever  procedures  rule  here)  in  the  quality  and  direction  of  the  collective’s  actions.  For  the  purposes  of  this  paper  I  rule  out  of  

                                                                                                               

  24  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     consideration  cases  of  unorganized  collectives,  such  as  mobs,  crowds,  “American  consumers,”  human  beings  and  so  forth,  as  well  as  merely  putative  groups.    3  David  Copp,  “The  Collective  Moral  Autonomy  Thesis:  Reply  to  Ludwig  and  Miller,”  Journal  of  Social  Philosophy  43:1  (2012),  78-­‐‑95.  4  Cases  summarized  from  Copp,  “Collective  Moral  Autonomy,”  376-­‐‑379.    I  have  selected  just  these  two  for  the  sake  of  parsimony;  my  arguments  should  be  thought  to  apply  just  as  well  to  Copp’s  Tenure  Committee  case,  and  Copp’s  alternate  case  of  the  Prime  Minister  acting  in  self-­‐‑defense.  5  Copp,  “Reply  to  Ludwig  and  Miller,”  p.  86.  6  Copp,  “Reply  to  Ludwig  and  Miller,”  pp.  81-­‐‑82    7  Copp,  “Reply  to  Ludwig  and  Miller,”  p.  84.  8  Janna  Thompson,  “Collective  Responsibility  for  Historic  Injustices,”  Midwest  Studies  in  Philosophy  30  (2006):  154-­‐‑167.  9  Copp,  “Reply  to  Ludwig  and  Miller,”  p.  85.  10  Seumas  Miller,  “Against  the  Collective  Moral  Autonomy  Thesis,  Journal  of  Social  Philosophy  38  (2007):  389-­‐‑409  11  Copp,  “Reply  to  Ludwig  and  Miller,”  p.  87.  12  Kirk  Ludwig,  “The  Argument  from  Normative  Autonomy  for  Collective  Agents,”  Journal  of  Social  Philosophy  38  (2007):  410-­‐‑427;  at  423-­‐‑424.  13  Philip  Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,”  pp.  181-­‐‑182.  14  Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,”  p.  182.  15  Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,”  pp.  181-­‐‑182.  16  Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,”  pp.  183-­‐‑184.  17  Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,  185.  18  Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,”  186.  19  Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,”  187.  20  Michael  McKenna  has  offered  the  related  argument  that  collectives  are  not  susceptible  of  moral  evaluation  since  they  cannot  mean  anything  by  what  they  do,  and  so  aren’t  appropriate  targets  of  reactive  attitudes  such  as  resentment.    Michael  McKenna,  “Collective  Responsibility  and  an  Agent  Meaning  Theory,”  Midwest  Studies  in  Philosophy  30  (2006):  16-­‐‑34.  21  Bratman  has  recently  argued  that  steering  members  may  commit  to  shared  “weights”  for  different  factors  in  group  decision  making,  and  in  such  a  way  that  I  may  have  consented  as  a  steering  member  to  weigh  a  given  factor  in  group  decisions  more  than  I  personally  think  that  factor  “weighs.”    In  Bratman’s  example,  a  department  may  be  committed  to  giving  considerable  weight  to  sub-­‐‑field  specialization  for  new  hires,  and  I  may  structure  my  votes  this  way  even  if  I  don’t  personally  think  this  factor  is  so  important.    Nevertheless,  it  would  seem  hard  to  maintain  (and  Bratman  evidently  does  not  mean  to  maintain)  that  exactly  all  steering  members  could  responsibly  give  a  factor  a  weight  that  doesn’t  seem  appropriate  to  them,  whether  personally  or  prudentially  to  serve  valued  group  ends.    Michael  Bratman,  Shared  Agency:  A  Planning  Theory  of  Acting  Together  (New  York:  Oxford  University  Press,  2014),  at  pp.  135-­‐‑136.    22  Pettit  understandably  calls  it  a  “remote  prospect”  that  members  would  alter  the  standing  evaluative  commitments  in  the  group’s  constitution;  however,  we  would  have  to  think  that  this  prospect  is  only  truly  remote  once  the  standing  values  of  the  group  are  thought  by  members  to  be  generally  good  and  appropriate  ones.    Pettit,  “Responsibility  Incorporated,”  p.  187.  23  Frank  Hindriks,  “Corporate  Responsibility  and  Judgment  Aggregation,”  Economics  and  Philosophy  25  (2009):  161-­‐‑177.  24  Hindriks,  “Corporate  Responsibility,”  pp.  167-­‐‑168.    25  Copp,  “Reply  to  Ludwig  and  Miller,”  p.  84.  26  Janna  Thompson,  “Collective  Responsibility  for  Historic  Injustices,”  Midwest  Studies  in  Philosophy  30  (2006):  154-­‐‑167.  27  Margaret  Gilbert,  “Who’s  to  Blame?  Collective  Moral  Responsibility  and  its  Implications  for  Group  Members,”  Midwest  Studies  in  Philosophy  30  (2006):  94-­‐‑113,  at  pp.  98-­‐‑102.  28  Margaret  Gilbert,  A  Theory  of  Political  Obligation  (New  York:  Oxford  University  Press,  2008),  p.  163.  29  Ibid.  289.    Sarah  Stroud  has  expressed  this  by  saying  that  such  joint  commitments  "change  the  moral  landscape,"  that  is,  change  the  nature  of  the  individual’s  moral  obligations  in  ways  that  could  weaken  the  stringency  of  moral  demands  outside  the  group  relative  to  demands  from  other  members.    Sarah  Stroud,  “Permissible  Partiality,”  Brian  Feltham  and  John  Cottingham  (eds.),  Partiality  and  Impartiality:  Morality,  Special  Relationships,  and  the  Wider  World  (Oxford:  Oxford  University  Press,  2010),  p.  146.  30  On  Gilbert’s  support  for  CMA,  see  Gilbert,  “Who’s  to  Blame?”  p.  109.  31  Michael  Bratman,  “Dynamics  of  Sociality,”  Midwest  Studies  in  Philosophy  30  (2006):  1-­‐‑15,  at  pp.  7-­‐‑8.    Stephen  Darwall  has  recently  made  a  related  point  regarding  Gilbert’s  work,  that  “[i]t  is  impossible  for  agreement-­‐‑generated  responsibilities  and  obligations  to  come  from  agreements  all  the  way  down."  Darwall,  “Responsibility  within  Relations,”  in  Brian  Feltham  and  John  Cottingham  (eds.),  Partiality  and  Impartiality,  pp.  150-­‐‑168.      32  Bratman,  “Dynamics,”  p.  8.  

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     33  Ibo  van  de  Poel,  “The  Relation  Between  Forward-­‐‑Looking  and  Backward-­‐‑Looking  Responsibility,”  in  Moral  Responsibility:  Beyond  Free  Will  and  Determinism,  Nicole  A.  Vincent,  Ibo  van  de  Poel,  and  Jeroen  van  den  Hoven  (eds.)  (New  York:  Springer,  2011),  37-­‐‑52,  at  p.  39.  34  Hannah  Arendt,  Eichmann  in  Jerusalem:  A  Report  on  the  Banality  of  Evil  (New  York:  Penguin,  1994).  35  Many  of  Eichmann’s  remarks  and  attitudes  during  the  trial  show  that  his  main  interest  had  been  climbing  the  career  ladder  that  was  open  to  him—and  resenting  (even  at  the  trial)  that  he  lacked  the  qualities  to  climb  higher.    See  Arendt,  Eichmann  in  Jerusalem,  pp.  57,  130-­‐‑131.  36  Eichmann  emphasized  in  his  defense  that  he  had  never  actually  killed  anyone;  strangely  (or  not),  the  prosecution  had  hoped  to  additionally  pin  him  with  the  direct  murder  of  one  Hungarian  boy.    See  Arendt,  Eichmann  in  Jerusalem,  pp.  22,  246.  37  Eichmann  was  indeed  found  guilty  of  capital  crimes  under  Israeli  law,  so  execution  was  not  inappropriate.    But  the  showy  state  trial,  the  charges,  and  Eichmann  himself  all  worked  on  the  notion  that  Eichmann  was  being  tried  in  some  sense  for  genocide:  in  his  closing  remarks,  Eichmann  protested,  “I  am  the  victim  of  a  fallacy,”  and  spoke  of  his  “conviction  that  I  must  suffer  for  the  acts  of  others.”    See  Arendt,  Eichmann  in  Jerusalem,  pp.  246-­‐‑248.  38  In  her  two-­‐‑level  theory  defending  CMA,  Isaacs  maintains  that  "individuals'  contributions  .  .  .  inherit  relevant  moral  features  from  the  collective  action  context  in  which  they  occur.”    Isaacs,  Moral  Responsibility  in  Collective  Contexts,  57.  39  Wim  Vandekerckhove  and  M.S.  Ronald  Commers,  “Whistle  Blowing  and  Rational  Loyalty,”  Journal  of  Business  Ethics  53  (2004):  225-­‐‑233.  40  Isaacs,  Moral  Responsibility  in  Collective  Contexts,  pp.  55-­‐‑57.  41  Jan  Narveson,  “Collective  Responsibility,”  The  Journal  of  Ethics  6  (2002):  179-­‐‑198.  42  Isaacs,  Moral  Responsibility  in  Collective  Contexts,  pp.  55-­‐‑57.  43As  an  alternative  individualist  solution,  Ludwig  suggests  that  distributing  partial  responsibility  to  several  members  will  result  in  a  scenario  where  there  is  no  “extra  portion  [of  blame]  left  over”  in  the  moral  accounting.    Ludwig,  “Argument  for  Normative  Autonomy,”  p.  418.    This  may  be  sufficient  in  some  cases,  but  it  seems  to  run  afoul  of  the  same  considerations  Isaacs  musters  against  Narveson.    My  aim  here  is  to  preserve  our  large-­‐‑scale  judgments  where  possible;  see  esp.  §4  below.  44  Seumas  Miller  has  noted  that  participants  in  a  charity  endeavor  like  this  may  have  the  collective  end  only  in  a  “weak  sense,”  such  that  they  do  not  much  mind  if  it  is  not  fulfilled  (unlike  the  passionate  runner).    Their  degree  of  responsibility  for  the  collective  outcome,  while  not  nil,  is  “attenuated”  (so  that  they  claim  partly,  but  not  fully,  diminished  moral  responsibility).    See  Miller,  “An  Individualist  Account,”  p.  182.    While  I  am  sympathetic  to  this  position,  it  could  still  leave  collectivists  asking  (a)  exactly  how  this  differs  from  Copp’s  notion  of  pro  tanto  member  obligations,  and  (b)  whether  and  why  this  solution  would  let  us  make  strong  moral  judgments  about  the  full  collective  outcome,  if  all  members’  prospective  duties  were  very  weak.    45  Block  describes  a  mind  that  appears  to  act  comprehensibly,  but  whose  outputs  actually  depend  (through  some  algorithm)  on  the  unrelated  everyday  actions  of  all  the  people  in  China.    Such  an  agent,  while  retrospectively  competent  to  observers,  obviously  does  not  mean  anything  by  what  it  does  despite  its  situational  competence.  Ned  Block,  "Troubles  with  Functionalism,"  Minnesota  Studies  in  The  Philosophy  of  Science  9  (1978):  261–325.  46  My  point  here  bears  comparison  to  recent  arguments  that  corporations  in  themselves  are  functionally  psychopathic.    See  Joel  Bakan,  The  Corporation:  The  Pathological  Pursuit  of  Profit  and  Power  (New  York:  Free  Press,  2005).    My  immediate  claim  here  is  more  modest,  since  it  touches  only  those  collectives  without  any  steering  members  who  can  or  should  appreciate  the  moral  salience  of  a  given  outcome,  and  only  with  respect  to  that  outcome  (though  the  implications  of  my  overall  argument  may  ultimately  dovetail  with  Bakan’s  position).    47  By  “phenomenology”  here,  I  mean  the  cognitive  structure  that  makes  the  experience  (of  moral  judgment)  a  distinct  kind  of  experience.    On  this  and  alternative  senses  of  the  term  “moral  phenomenology”  in  recent  literature,  see  Uriah  Kriegel,  “Moral  Phenomenology:  Foundational  Issues,”  Phenomenology  and  the  Cognitive  Sciences  7:1  (2008):  1-­‐‑19.  48  On  the  objectivity  of  obligations  apprehended  in  subjective  contexts  of  roles  and  practical  goals,  see  John  Drummond,  “Moral  Objectivity:  Husserl’s  Sentiments  of  the  Understanding,”  Husserl  Studies  12  (1995):  165-­‐‑183.  49  Maurice  Mandelbaum,  The  Phenomenology  of  Moral  Experience  (Baltimore:  Johns  Hopkins  Press,  1969),  at  pp.  94ff.      50  Much  has  been  written  recently  on  the  phenomenologically  objective  purport  of  moral  judgments,  and  this  is  occasionally  used  in  metaethical  arguments  for  moral  realism:  see  e.g.  Terry  Horgan  and  Mark  Timmons,  “Mandelbaum  on  Moral  Phenomenology  and  Moral  Realism,”  in  Maurice  Mandelbaum  and  American  Critical  Reaslism,  ed.  Ian  Verstegen  (New  York:  Routledge,  2010),  pp.  105-­‐‑126;  Kriegel,  “Moral  Phenomenology,”  p.  6.    Here  I  merely  use  that  objective  purport  to  establish  something  more  modest,  about  the  meaning  and  features  of  moral  judgment  itself.  51  Mandelbaum,  Phenomenology  of  Moral  Experience,  pp.  94  ff.  52  My  position  offers  additional  reason  to  favor  Ludwig’s  role-­‐‑based  assessment  that  the  Prime  Minister’s  role  obligates  him  to  sacrifice  his  daughter.    See  Ludwig,  “The  Argument  for  Normative  Autonomy,”  420.  53  Notice  that  one  can  logically  hold  that  “no  difference”  (over-­‐‑  or  under-­‐‑determination)  arguments  do  not  give  excuses  to  marginal  participants  who  acquit  themselves  badly,  without  blaming  marginal  participants  who  act  well  but  still  fail  

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     due  to  an  under-­‐‑determined  outcome.    This  accommodates  the  notion  common  in  the  literature  that  dissident  members  of  a  malfeasant  group  (who  are  participants  in  a  failed  collective  endeavor  of  a  special  sort)  have  an  excuse.    On  the  problem  of  overdetermination  see  Larry  May,  Sharing  Responsibility  (Chicago:  University  of  Chicago  Press),  155ff.;  for  a  contrasting  argument  that  overdetermination  problems  can  motivate  CMA,  see  Killoren  and  Williams,  “Group  Agency.”