Collective responsibility

Abstract

Individuals constitute the sole metaphysical and moral bearers of responsibility, as collectives lack independent agency. While group membership influences behavior through causal roles or the deliberate promotion of group interests, moral predicates applied to collectives must ultimately translate into specific requirements for individual persons. The notion of irreducible collective responsibility is logically untenable; if a crime is viewed as truly collective and irreducible, it precludes the just distribution of blame or punishment to the individuals within that group. Consequently, phenomena such as genocide or war are best understood as aggregations of individual actions, where responsibility is apportioned according to specific contributions, levels of authority, and degrees of voluntariness. This methodological individualism further necessitates the rejection of collective resource ownership, which is characterized as a political myth that results in coercive intervention and inefficient outcomes. A rational meta-theory of responsibility prioritizes individual agency and freedom of association, holding that justice is achieved only by identifying specific actors and their distinct roles rather than attributing holistic guilt to demographic, ethnic, or national categories. – AI-generated abstract.