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    Individual members of a collectively responsible group ar... — Carmelics
    Home/Moral Responsibility
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Individual members of a collectively responsible group are not necessarily blameless for the harms their group causes

    Moral Responsibility
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Collective responsibility is non-distributional, meaning the group as a whole bears responsibility
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    • 2.Despite the non-distributional character of collective responsibility, many individual group members are themselves morally responsible for the harms their group causes
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Blameworthiness requires that an agent possess the capacity to have acted otherwise under the same structural conditions.
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    • 2.Individual members embedded in organizational hierarchies often lack the epistemic access and decision-making power required for genuine alternative action.
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    • 3.Where genuine alternative action is unavailable, attributing blame to individuals conflates causal contribution with moral culpability.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.H.D. Lewis argued that holding individuals responsible for group acts they did not personally perform violates the foundational principle that responsibility is irreducibly personal.
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    • 2.The supporting arguments assume individual complicity can be inferred from group membership, but membership is often involuntary or structurally coerced.
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    • 3.Inferring individual blame from group-level wrongdoing without independent evidence of personal endorsement commits the fallacy of division.
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    Moral Responsibility

    Related

    Blameworthiness requires that an agent possess the capacity to have acted otherw...Collective responsibility is non-distributional, meaning the group as a whole be...Despite the non-distributional character of collective responsibility, many indi...H.D. Lewis argued that holding individuals responsible for group acts they did n...
    +4 moreShow less
    Individual members embedded in organizational hierarchies often lack the epistem...Inferring individual blame from group-level wrongdoing without independent evide...The supporting arguments assume individual complicity can be inferred from group...Where genuine alternative action is unavailable, attributing blame to individual...

    Similar

    Collective responsibility does not require that all members produced s...88%Despite the non-distributional character of collective responsibility,...88%Acting as a member of a group is sufficient for collective responsibil...87%Collective responsibility is ascribed to those who participate in or f...87%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: collective-responsibility
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    Peter French makes such an argument himself in Individual and Collective Responsibility (1998). But he cautions that the non-distributional character of collective responsibility does not mean that individual members of the group that is collectively responsible for harm are themselves blameless. Indeed, he claims, many of these group members will be morally responsible for all sorts of harms that their group causes.
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit