Deborah Tollefsen

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility comprehensively addresses questions about who is responsible and how blame or praise should be attributed when human agents act together. Such questions include: Do individuals share responsibility for the outcome or are individuals responsible only for their contribution to the act? Are individuals responsible for actions done by their group even when they don't contribute to the outcome? Can a corporation or institution be held morally responsible apart from the responsibility of its members? The Handbook's 35 chapters--all appearing here for the first time and written by an international team of experts--are organized into four parts: Part I: Foundations of Collective Responsibility Part II: Theoretical Issues in Collective Responsibility Part III: Domains of Collective Responsibility Part IV: Applied Issues in Collective Responsibility Each part begins with a short introduction that provides an overview of issues and debates within that area and a brief summary of its chapters. In addition, a comprehensive index allows readers to better navigate the entirety of the volume's contents. The result is the first major work in the field that serves as an instructional aid for those in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, as well as a reference for scholars interested in learning more about collective responsibility.

In everyday discourse we often attribute intentional states to groups. These attributions are found not only in colloquial speech but also in the context of legal, moral, and social scientific research. Contemporary accounts of group intentionality have attempted to analyze these ascriptions in terms of the intentional states of individuals in the group. Although these accounts acknowledge that group intentional ascriptions are something more than mere metaphors, they do not typically acknowledge groups as genuine intentional agents. I challenge these contemporary accounts and individualistic intuitions by arguing that, given a plausible account of the nature of intentionality, certain groups are genuine intentional agents. ;Focusing on the work of Gilbert, Tuomela, Searle, and Bratman, I argue that there are significant explanatory reasons for countenancing groups as legitimate intentional agents, reasons that require that we reject the individualism to which each of these authors is committed. My account of collective intentional agency is grounded in interpretationism. Interpretationism is the view an agent is an intentional agent if and only if he or she is interpretable. I defend interpretationism by building on the work of Davidson and Dennett. In particular, I develop more fully the notion of a rational point of view and argue that an adequate interpretationism must accommodate it. A rational point of view is not simply a point of view from which one's own actions can be seen as intelligible, it is a point of view from which an agent engages in deliberation and it is a locus of authority and responsibility. I argue that organizations have a rational point of view and are, therefore, interpretable. Thus, organizations are genuine intentional agents. ;If groups can be believers, then group knowledge and justification are coherent notions. There is a pervasive individualistic bias in contemporary epistemology, however, that rejects the idea of group knowledge and justification. This bias is largely motivated by the assumption that cognition is a process that takes place only within the individual mind/brain. I challenge this bias by showing how the standard models of individual cognition and epistemic agency can be extended to groups.