In this chapter I discuss one of the key moral concepts that, as we saw in Chapter 2, underpins social institutions, namely, collective moral responsibility. As we have seen above, aggregated needs-based rights, for example, generate the institutional rights and duties of the members of welfare institutions via collective moral responsibility. I elaborate and defend an individualist account of collective moral responsibility, that is, one that ascribes moral responsibility only to individual human beings, as opposed to collective entities. Moreover, this account of collective moral responsibility presupposes the teleological account of joint action and social institutions elaborated in Chapters 1 and 2. On this individualist, teleological conception collective entities, such as social groups and organizations, have collective moral responsibility only in the sense that the individual human persons who constitute such entities have individual moral responsibility, either individually or jointly; collective entities as such do not have moral responsibility. Note that individualism in this sense is entirely different from the view that collective entities are reducible to individual human persons – an ontological claim that I reject. I begin by outlining my individualist, teleological account of collective moral responsibility. However, the burden of the chapter is my attempt to extend this account to enable it to accommodate a variety of different species of collective moral responsibility.

COLLECTIVE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

We can usefully distinguish four senses of collective responsibility. I will do so in relation to joint actions.