An ability-based theory of responsibility for collective omissions
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An ability-based theory of responsibility for collective omissions Joseph Metz1
Accepted: 30 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Many important harms result in large part from our collective omissions, such as harms from our omissions to stop climate change and famines. Accounting for responsibility for collective omissions turns out to be particularly challenging. It is hard to see how an individual contributes anything to a collective omission to prevent harm if she couldn’t have made a difference to that harm on her own. Some groups are able to prevent such harms, but it is highly contentious whether groups can be loci of responsibility. This paper takes an existing and plausible framework of moral responsibility—one based on abilities—and scales it up to accommodate responsibility for collective omissions. This centrally involves identifying what the relevant collective abilities are and how they work. One significant benefit of this approach is that we can do this while remaining neutral on the debates about collective agency and collective responsibility by showing how individualist and collectivist versions of the theory work. Finally, I explore several further upshots of the scaled-up ability-based account, including that degrees of responsibility can be cashed out in terms of strengths of the relevant abilities, which has both theoretical and applied implications. Keywords Applied ethics Collective responsibility Ethics Omissions Moral responsibility
& Joseph Metz [email protected] 1
Philosophy Department, Social Sciences 213, University of Arizona, 1145 E South Campus Drive, Tucson, AZ 85721-0027, USA
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J. Metz
1 Introduction Collective behaviors have serious moral significance. Consider the role collective actions play in refugee crises: millions are displaced by collective actions that perpetuate civil wars, increase carbon emissions that worsen droughts and famines, and lead to military strikes that destabilize regions. Note, though, that refugee crises also arise because of collective omissions: we collectively omit to intervene to stop those civil wars, we collectively omit to invest sufficient resources in carbon– neutral energy production, and we collectively omit to decide to prioritize aid for the victims of natural disasters. Other large-scale harms—such as the devastating impacts of climate change and widespread hunger—also result in major part from failures to perform the collective acts that would have prevented them. Since we care about the moral (and legal) responsibility for harms like these, and since many of these harms result from our collective omissions rather than our collective actions, we need a good theory of moral responsibility that can accommodate collective omissions—not just a theory for collective actions. Responsibility for collective omissions turns out to be particularly puzzling, though, compared to collective actions and to individual omissions. Arguably, it is relatively clear how to identify the participants of collective actio
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