Olle Blomberg

The dominant accounts of group moral responsibility argue that only those groups that have organizational capacities that mirror the agential capacities of rational and morally competent individuals are morally responsible agents. Undergirding these arguments is the taken-for-granted assumption that there is only one type of moral responsibility. This paper challenges this assumption and outlines a pluralist approach to the moral responsibility of groups. I first describe three types of groups that lack some of the capacities often assumed necessary for an entity to be morally responsible and suggest that these aberrant groups nonetheless warrant some of our reactive attitudes. Drawing on David Shoemaker’s tripartite theory, I argue that this is so because aberrant groups, although they are not fully-formed moral agents, might still have morally relevant emergent capacities such as the capacity for having and expressing a largely coherent evaluative outlook, the empathic and coordinative capacities for having regard for other agents, or the capacity for judging. I argue that these three sets of capacities are independent of each other and that each is sufficient to make the group fit to be held responsible in some way.

Much work in the philosophy of action in the last few decades has focused on the elucidation and justification of a series of purported norms of practical rationality that concern the presence or absence of intention in light of belief, and that demand a kind of structural coherence in the psychology of an agent. Examples of such norms include: Intention Detachment, which proscribes intending to do something in case some condition obtains, believing that such condition obtains, and not intending to do that thing; Intention-Belief Consistency, which proscribes intending to do what you believe you will not do; Intention Consistency, which proscribes intending each of two ends you believe to be inconsistent; and Means-End Coherence, which proscribes intending an end and not intending the means you believe to be implied by your end. In this paper, I present a series of examples that show that these requirements are not genuine requirements of rationality. The reason for this is simple: these requirements concern the presence or absence of intention in light of all-out belief. Rational agents like us, however, do not, and in fact should not, always form or revise their intentions in light of what they all-out believe. When such agents do not form or revise their intentions in light of what they all-out believe, they need not be irrational if they do not conform to these requirements.