Tracy Isaacs, Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts, Oxford University Press, 2011, 204p
Reviewed by Matt King, St. Bonaventure University
//Summary - Level-C1//
Matt King reviews Tracy Isaacs's work "Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts", highlighting its innovative approach to synthesising individual and collective moral responsibility discourses. Isaacs introduces a two-level theory that critiques the sufficiency of individualist perspectives for addressing collective action and accountability. Her analysis extends to loosely structured collectives, emphasising the importance of collective contexts in individual activities and introducing forward-looking aspects of moral obligations. Despite its brevity and some unresolved complexities, Isaacs's exploration of collective responsibility, particularly within goal-directed collectives and organisations, presents a compelling argument for the indispensability of collective responsibility in understanding moral action and obligation. King appreciates Isaacs's efforts but notes the challenges of conceptualising collective agents and their duties, particularly in transient or loosely defined collectives, and urges further research in these areas.
1)
Most philosophical literature on moral responsibility focuses on accounting for individual blameworthiness and praiseworthiness.
A minority of the literature has concentrated on accounting for collective responsibility, the blameworthiness (or praiseworthiness) of groups of people acting together, with most of the debate concerned whether such a thing is possible.
(Collectivists argue that collectives can be irreducibly responsible for items, while individualists say that everything can be accounted for by responsibility at the individual level).
2)
Mostly, these two kinds of literature have been kept separate. Tracy Isaacs' new book attempts a new synthesis.
She aims to provide a two-level theory that illuminates the nature of collective and individual responsibility within collective contexts. The thrust of her thesis is that an individualist theory will be unsatisfactory for both collective and individual levels of action and accountability.
3)
Isaacs's argument has several virtues: it provides an illuminating analysis of loosely structured collectives, it effectively highlights how the collective context can be a salient feature of individual action, and it moves beyond consideration of 'backwards-looking' issues of moral evaluation to 'forward-looking' reviews of moral obligation.
And while I think Isaacs' account leaves much to be desired, it is an interesting first step towards a total defence of her view.
4)
Readers interested in moral responsibility and theories of agency will find this a rewarding book despite its limitations. With less than 200 pages of discussion, the pace is brisk, and the text is texture-readable. The reader never gets lost in the arguments, which are direct and compact.
But its brevity, in my opinion, is also its most significant flaw. I would have liked to have seen a fuller articulation of Isaacs's position and a more extended engagement with some of the difficulties presented.
What we get instead is a cursory defence of her general view. Though free of distracting complications and thus eminently accessible, the book is less satisfying.
5)
Issacs divides her task into two parts.
Part I of the book seeks to make room for collective responsibility. Many believe that collectives cannot be directly responsible for anything.
Issacs argues that the idea of collective responsibility is indispensable. Her view is structured around a distinction between two types of groups.
6)
First, there are organisations characterised by a formal structure that usually includes concrete procedures for how group decisions are made and how group actions are carried out. The paradigmatic example of an organisation is the corporation, but organisations also include governments, universities and professional sports teams.
Organisations are noteworthy because it is easiest to separate the actions, decisions and policies of organisations from those of their members.
7)
The second type of group is what Isaacs calls a "goal-oriented collective".
Such groups are organised not around a formal structure outlining positions and procedures within the group but rather by coalescing "around the action to achieve a particular common goal".
8)
A couple taking a walk together, a study group preparing for an exam, or hundreds of people doing the wave at a sporting event are all goal-oriented collectives.
While much critical attention has been paid to organisations (especially corporations), Isaacs' treatment of the more loosely structured (but arguably more common) collectives provides some of the book's most instructive and distinctive discussions. I will, therefore, spend some time outlining her claims.
9)
While organisations need some formal structure to outline the organisation, simpler collectives can form around a loosely shared goal, such as going for a walk together or doing a wave.
These actions are not possible for individuals: I cannot walk together alone, I cannot play street hockey alone, I cannot do the wave alone.
10)
These examples lend some credence to the idea that collectives are real, that when we go for a walk, the collective of ut does the walking, or at a sporting event, the crowd does the wave.
This collectivist view doesn't exclude individual action. What is crucial is that individuals have a role to play in generating the collective's intentions and actions.
11)
After all, the crowd can't make the wave if some individuals don't do something. Thus, Issacs draws our attention to two essential features of collective action. First, the individuals in a collective must share the goal of the collective effort.
This makes it a goal-directed collective. This goal may be more or less well specified. Perhaps we share the purpose of making dinner together, playing music, or making the wave.
In any case, to be part of the collective requires that we share the collective goal of the action that requires us to work together.
12)
Secondly, we have to perform an intentional action ourselves. But this action is not the same as collective action.
Instead, each individual contributes to the collective action. This might be chopping the vegetables, playing the clarinet part, or standing up and raising my arms at the appropriate time.
13)
If we do this while sharing the goal, and if the rest of the group shares the plan, we've done a collective action together.
(This oversimplifies Isaacs' view. She has a fascinating discussion of the knowledge requirements of each collective member and the degrees of 'tightness' that collectives can exhibit. I will leave these aside for the sake of space).
14)
According to Isaacs, organisations and goal-directed collectives can be collective agents responsible for collective actions.
Her defence of this claim is twofold. First, the action-theoretical reason for collective responsibility is that some steps can only be performed by collectives, but these actions are nonetheless moral.
15)
They are the sort of thing based on which an agent can be judged morally. So, the agents of collective efforts can be morally responsible for those actions.
Isaacs gives the example of running in a race to raise money for cancer research.
Suppose this race raises two million dollars, and suppose that this is morally praiseworthy. But no one person raised that money. All the runners raised it together.
So they are to be praised as a collective for raising that money. So, collective action with a moral character is best explained by collective responsibility.
16)
The second reason is normative. Issacs points out that we lose something of normative significance if we ignore moral evaluation at the collective level. To return to the fundraising race, suppose Jones raises $200 as part of his effort in the race. This is commendable.
17)
But it does Jones a disservice to assume that this is all he is contributing. Instead, he is also doing his part to raise two hundred million dollars for cancer research. Without responsibility at the collective level, we can't properly understand the moral significance of Jones' actions.
18)
Indeed, Issacs argues that collective action is more fundamental than individual action, so that "individual contributions . . inherit relevant moral properties from the collective action context in which they occur" rather than the other way around.
19)
Similarly, to use one of Isaacs's examples, perpetrators of genocide commit morally atrocious acts.
But their actions can only be adequately judged in the context of a broader collective context in which their killings contribute to the genocide. It is the moral horror of genocide, assessable as a collective wrongdoing, that informs our assessment of individual killings.
20)
Again, the collective action and its moral weight are more fundamental than individual contributions. Although unconvinced, I found Isaacs's collectivist arguments compelling, especially against more individualistic views and critiques.
21)
Part II of the book changes tack somewhat and is more diverse in its aims.
Chapter 4 addresses the concern that individual members can escape responsibility if collectives can be blamed for collective wrongdoing.
Chapter 5 discusses the related notions of individual and collective obligation, especially in the context of essentially collective problems such as climate change.
22)
Chapter 6 considers the role of the individual in wrongful social practices where the collective is neither an organisation nor a goal-directed collective, such as in cases of endemic racism or ignoring the plight of people experiencing poverty.
These chapters are unified only as discussions of different concerns from Isaacs's two-level view. She argues convincingly that her view does not imply the absence of individual responsibility for collective wrongdoing.
23)
Her treatment of collective obligation is refreshing; it is rare to see backwards-looking and forward-looking notions of responsibility explicitly brought together.
And their discussion of wrongful social practices is rarely an element of careful reflection on responsibility. These chapters demonstrate the fruitfulness of considering collective contexts in their own right, which is one of the main merits of the book's project.
24)
Isaacs does a commendable job of showing how her position relates to the work of others on collective responsibility, as well as dealing directly with many objections to her place.
My main objection is a cluster of concerns stemming from a concern about collective agents being (metaphysically) accurate.
25)
One way of expressing this concern is to think of agents apart from the particular actions they perform. Most people count as agents and can execute a range of activities.
But they exist as agents in part apart from any specific action they might perform. Similarly, highly structured collectives, such as organisations, have the structure to be easily identified apart from their efforts.
A government or a sports team is what it is independent of the various activities it might perform.
26)
However, the exact identification does not seem possible for goal-directed collectives. We cannot identify the collective agent of the wave at a sporting event independently of the possibility of the wave.
This collective agent differs from the crowd because not all members need to participate. Instead, there is a collective event that determines the collective agent: it is the group that performed it.
However, this seems to imply that the collective agent has little reality apart from the collective action.
27)
Indeed, it makes no sense to ask what the collective agent did after the wave. Or before? If these periods do not include anyone who shares the goal of producing the lock, then there is no goal-directed collective.
We can talk about the group consisting of the collective members that created the tide, but sharing that goal no longer binds them, so it appears to be no more than an artefact of a passing event.
28)
This scepticism about the metaphysical reality of goal-directed collectives may not be troubling in and of itself.
Still, I think it raises puzzling questions about how to proceed with Isaacs's view. For example, how do we blame goal-directed collectives, especially after the members have abandoned the goal?
29)
Take the Rwandan genocide, an example Isaacs often uses.
In her view, it is an instance of collective wrongdoing. So, the collective agent is to blame. But who should our attitudes be directed at? The collective agent is simply the perpetrator of the genocide. This is presumably a group of Hutus.
30)
Blaming the collective must be different from blaming a particular Hutu, according to Isaacs, because each Hutu is responsible only for their contribution to the genocide, not for the genocide itself.
Moreover, Isaacs is at pains to argue that collective blame is not distributive; that is, the fact that a collective is guilty of a wrong is not distributed among the individual members of the group.
31)
So, suppose we have the relevant group in our moral sights, several Hutus who all contributed to the purposeful collective action of genocide against the Tutsis.
And suppose we blame the collective agent for this genocide. So, we seem to condemn the group for committing genocide.
But after the collective action, especially if the goal has been abandoned, we may no longer have that collective agent.
32)
So, it is unclear who we can blame. In other words, while we may be able to target a group whose members were members of that collective agent, the agent itself may have disappeared.
We can, of course, still blame each individual for their contribution to the genocide, but we may not be able to blame the collective agent any better than we can blame individuals who no longer exist.
And even if it is possible to blame, say, my dead relative for his past transgressions against me, the nature of that blame indeed seems different from that which I can feel towards living persons.
33)
A related concern concerns Issacs's discussion of collective obligations.
She argues that there are problems that require collective solutions, such as climate change, and that this suggests that the collective agents who are to work towards these solutions may have collective obligations.
34)
However, many problems that require a collective solution exist before a collective shares the goal of solving them. To take a contrived example (but one similar to Isaacs's), suppose a family boating has capsized and is having difficulty in the water.
No one person can rescue them alone; it takes a group of at least four people. Issacs claims we have a putative group with a putative obligation. The family needs to be saved, and we must do so. But who is the 'we'?
35)
Well, it's the group that ought to save the family. This is a collective problem requiring a collective solution, and the collective agent is obligated to perform the collective action of protecting the family.
36)
But the difficulty here, as above, is that there seems to be no collective agent who has this obligation. We might say I have an individual duty to form such a collective or to do my part to save the family.
Still, these are individual duties that I might plausibly have, whatever our view of collective responsibility.
37)
And it seems odd to suppose that there can be an obligation to a group that doesn't exist. Moreover, even if there is a shared obligation among all bystanders to form a collective to save the family, it still can't be an obligation that the collective agent has because there is still no collective agent involved.
38)
Indeed, as my remarks above showed, there is no collective agent apart from the one who rescues (or tries to rescue) the family. But since this can't be settled prospectively, talking about prospective obligations seems to put the normative cart before the metaphysical horse.
39)
A related concern concerns Issacs's discussion of collective obligations. She argues that there are problems that require collective solutions, such as climate change, and that this suggests that the collective agents who are to work towards these solutions may have collective obligations.
However, many problems that require a collective solution exist before a collective shares the goal of solving them. To take a contrived example (but one similar to Isaacs's), suppose that a family of boaters has capsized and is having trouble getting out of the water.
40)
I do not mean this to be a decisive criticism of Isaacs' view. Instead, I think these concerns are evidence of her position's novelty and suggestiveness. I'm afraid I must disagree with much of what she argues, and I believe essential issues remain unaddressed in the book.
41)
But this is a relatively minor criticism given what the book achieves: an intelligent and accessible discussion of an insightful and suggestive argument about the importance of collective contexts for moral responsibility.
That it raises concerns and questions speaks to its relevance for all those interested in questions of agency and moral evaluation.
Tracy Isaacs, Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts, Oxford University Press, 2011, 204p
Reviewed by Matt King, St. Bonaventure University
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/moral-responsibility-in-collective-contexts/
Tracy Isaacs
https://tracyisaacs1.tumblr.com/
