Niels de Haan

In this paper, I argue that anyone who believes that team reasoning is essential to explaining collective moral duties faces a troublesome dilemma. If the collective duty is conditional on the willingness of members, then team reasoning views generate wrong deontic moral judgments in certain cases that involve non-compliance. If the collective duty is not conditional on the willingness of members, then team reasoning views cannot provide a sound line of reasoning to what one morally ought to do in certain non-compliance cases, which undercuts the main motivation for adopting a team reasoning view. I conclude that team reasoning is not the right mode of moral reasoning for collective harm or collective benefit cases.

Collective agents can be praiseworthy without any of their members being praiseworthy. To support this “discontinuity thesis,” we consider the role that motivation plays in the attribution of moral responsibility. An agent who is praiseworthy must have had the appropriate moral motivation. We argue that it is possible that the collective agent was appropriately motivated, while its members were not. Subsequently, we develop an account of corporate moral concern, which gives substance to this second discontinuity thesis, about the moral motivation of collective agents.

In this paper, I explore the normative underpinnings of ghosting in the job market. Ghosting involves the abrupt cessation of communication without prior warning or explanation, which can be done by prospective employers or job seekers at various stages of a hiring process. This is a common phenomenon in the job market. I argue that the moral wrongness of ghosting can be explained by a principle of communicative reciprocity, which yields a duty of transparency and a right to be adequately informed for both parties. I further highlight the importance of corporate duties and corporate responsibility for ghosting done by organizations qua corporate moral agents. Organizations have corporate duties that require them to create and update relevant policies and infrastructure for conducting their hiring processes in a morally adequate manner. Finally, I reflect on why blame for ghosting in the job market is unlikely to be publicly expressed by both prospective employers and job seekers.

Moral collectivists argue that certain groups can bear moral responsibility and moral duties. Moral individualists reject this. In this debate, individualists and collectivists both make a common methodological mistake when theorizing about moral agency, responsibility, and blame. Their arguments implicitly assume an all-out primacy of the individual domain. Unless groups can satisfy the exact conditions of our best theory of individual moral responsibility, they are not morally responsible entities. I argue that none of the plausible arguments justify this all-out primacy. Instead, I defend moderate primacy: (1) We should start our theorizing based on individual cases; and (2) extensional inadequacy for the individual domain is worse than for the group domain. This moderate primacy opens the door for the group domain to play an important role in developing a comprehensive ethical theory. I sketch a directed reflective equilibrium method for systematically including the group domain in our theorizing about moral agency, responsibility, and blame. I further develop the Core Features Argument that shows why the collectivist is justified in developing agent-neutral principles and moral concepts that apply to individual and group agents alike. Finally, I suggest that the group domain offers the potential for adjudicating debates in ethical theory and exciting new lines of inquiry that could help us better understand the moral phenomena that ethical theory seeks to explain.

In this paper, we focus on the moral responsibility of organized groups in light of historicism. Historicism is the view that any morally responsible agent must satisfy certain historical conditions, such as not having been manipulated. We set out four examples involving morally responsible organized groups that pose problems for existing accounts of historicism. We then pose a trilemma: one can reject group responsibility, reject historicism, or revise historicism. We pursue the third option. We formulate a Manipulation Condition and a Guarding Condition as addendums to historicism that are necessary to accommodate our cases of group responsibility.

Many philosophers accept the idea that there are duties to promote or create just institutions. But are the addressees of such duties supposed to be individuals – the members of the citizenry? What does it mean for an individual to promote or create just institutions? According to the ‘Simple View’, the citizenry has a collective duty to create or promote just institutions, and each individual citizen has an individual duty to do their part in this collective project. The simple view appears to work well with regard to – you guessed it – ‘simple’ scenarios but it is riddled with further questions and problems. In this chapter, we raise five problems for the Simple View: (a) We suggest that one cannot develop a view concerning the citizenry’s duty to promote just institutions in isolation from a conception of the ontological relationship between the state and its citizens; (b) We argue that it is not obvious that the citizenry is the right entity to be attributed duties in the first place; (c) We show that a plausible account of collective duties to promote just institutions must not remain silent on the complexities and difficulties amorphous, unorganized group face in vis-à-vis collective action; (d) We contend that without allocation principles for contributory duties amongst the citizenry, or – alternatively – a method for practical deliberation that is action-guiding in collective action contexts, the claim that the citizens have a collective duty to promote just institutions remains moot; and, finally, (e) We demonstrate that the problem of reasonable disagreement is a serious threat to a collective duty to promote or create just institutions – it potentially undermines such a duty altogether and allows for conflicting contributory duties amongst the citizenry. We hope that our discussion will ultimately help improve existing theories and conceptual frameworks with a view to better understanding citizens’ obligations to promote justice under non-ideal conditions.

According to some collectivists, purposive groups that lack decision-making procedures such as riot mobs, friends walking together, or the pro-life lobby can be morally responsible and have moral duties. I focus on plural subject- and we-mode-collectivism. I argue that purposive groups do not qualify as duty-bearers even if they qualify as agents on either view. To qualify as a duty-bearer, an agent must be morally competent. I develop the Update Argument. An agent is morally competent only if the agent has sufficient positive and negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. Positive control involves the general ability to update one’s goal-seeking states, whereas negative control involves the absence of other agents with the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with updating one’s goal-seeking states. I argue that even if purposive groups qualify as plural subjects or we-mode group agents, these groups necessarily lack negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. This creates a cut-off point for groups as duty-bearers: Organized groups may qualify as duty-bearers, whereas purposive groups cannot qualify as duty-bearers.

I argue that agents can have duties to cooperate with one another if this increases their combined efficiency and/or efficacy in addressing ongoing collective moral problems. I call these duties cooperative duties of efficiency and efficacy. I focus particularly on collective agents and how agents ought to reason and act in the face of global moral problems. After setting out my account, I argue that a subset of cooperative duties of efficiency and efficacy of collective agents are duties of justice in virtue of the roles these agents have taken up.

Collective moral agents can cause their own moral incapacity. If an agent is morally incapacitated, then the agent is exempted from responsibility. Due to self-induced moral incapacity, corporate responsibility gaps resurface. To solve this problem, I first set out and defend a minimalist account of moral competence for group agents. After setting out how a collective agent can cause its own moral incapacity, I argue that self-induced temporary exempting conditions do not free an agent from diachronic responsibility once the agent regains its moral faculties. For collective agents, any exempting condition is potentially temporary due to the ‘malleability’ of their constitution. Therefore, in cases of self-induced moral incapacity and subsequent wrongdoing, unlike individuals, every collective agent can be (made) morally responsible for its actions even though it did not qualify as a moral agent at the time of wrongdoing. Hence, this is no reason for skepticism concerning corporate responsibility.

This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthiness, as distinct from her scope of blameworthiness. We suggest that an agent mostly controls her degree of blameworthiness—but even here, luck constrains what possible degrees of blameworthiness are open to her.

I argue that culpable ignorance can be irreducibly collective. In some cases, it is not fair to expect any individual to have avoided her ignorance of some fact, but it is fair to expect the agents together to have avoided their ignorance of that fact. Hence, no agent is individually culpable for her ignorance, but they are culpable for their ignorance together. This provides us with good reason to think that any group that is culpably ignorant in this irreducibly collective sense is non-distributively collectively responsible for subsequent unwitting acts and consequences.

There is good reason to think that moral responsibility as accountability is tied to the violation of moral demands. This lends intuitive support to Type-Symmetry in the collective realm: A type of responsibility entails the violation or unfulfillment of the same type of all-things-considered duty. For example, collective responsibility necessarily entails the violation of a collective duty. But Type-Symmetry is false. In this paper I argue that a non-agential group can be collectively responsible without thereby violating a collective duty. To show this I distinguish between four types of responsibility and duty in collective contexts: corporate, distributed, collective, shared. I set out two cases: one involves a non-reductive collective action that constitutes irreducible wrongdoing, the other involves a non-divisible consequence. I show that the violation of individual or shared duties both can lead to irreducible wrongdoing for which only the group is responsible. Finally, I explain why this conclusion does not upset any work on individual responsibility.