Rowan Mellor

This paper addresses how joint obligations bear on what individual group members should do. I argue that joint obligations do not transmit to the individual level. On the view I defend, “What should we do?” and “What should I do?” are separate questions to be answered independently. I distinguish two versions of the view that joint obligations transmit to the individual level: Ought Transmission, according to which if a group ought to do something, then each group member ought to do their part; and Defeasible Transmission, according to which if a group have a joint obligation to do something, then each group member has a defeasible reason to do their part. I argue that we should reject both of these. I then defend the opposing view, No Transmission, against two objections: one which claims that this view cannot account for the connection between obligation and deliberation, and a second which alleges that No Transmission counterintuitively implies that it is indeterminate what a given individual should do in cases of a certain structure.

We argue for three main claims. First, the sentence ‘A and B ought to φ and ψ’ can express what we a call a joint-ought claim: the claim that the plurality A and B ought to φ and ψ respectively. Second, the truth-value of this joint-ought claim can differ from the truth-value of the pair of claims ‘A ought to φ’ and ‘B ought to ψ.’ This is because what A and B jointly ought to do can diverge from what they individually ought to do: it may be true that A and B jointly ought to φ and ψ respectively, yet false that A ought to φ and false that B ought to ψ; and vice-versa. Third, either of two prominent semantic analyses of ‘ought’ – Mark Schroeder’s relational semantics, and Angelika Kratzer’s modal semantics – can model joint-ought claims and this difference in truth-value.

Suppose that it would be best if some set of people all did A, significantly worse if they all did B, and worst of all if some did A while some did B. Now suppose that they’re all going to do B, regardless of what the others do. It seems as though each of these people ought to pick B, given what the others are going to do. Yet it also seems as though something has gone wrong. This leads to a puzzle: how can it be wrong for everyone to act as they ought? In this paper, I resolve this puzzle by arguing that there are joint ‘oughts’ which apply irreducibly to pluralities of agents, and which can pull in different directions to ‘oughts’ holding of given individuals; even if everyone individually ought to pick B, what they jointly ought to do is all pick A.

This paper investigates whether responsibility could be borne vicariously. I distinguish between three different senses of responsibility: attributional responsibility, practices of holding people responsible, and substantive responsibility. I argue that it is doubtful both whether attributional responsibility could be borne vicariously, and whether it could be appropriate to hold someone vicariously responsible. However, I suggest that substantive responsibility can genuinely be borne vicariously. Getting clear on these conceptual issues has important implications for how we approach more concrete legal and political questions. More specifically, I argue these abstract arguments can be used to inform views on the common-law doctrine of joint enterprise, and on reparations for historic injustice.