Collective Responsibility

This paper applies Resolution Theory to political economy: responsibility attaches not to explanation, but to resolution—the authored point where uncertainty is closed into action under exposure across time. In markets, the central governance failure is not “capitalism” as such, but the repeated dissolution of authorship into procedure, committees, and short horizons—especially inside institutions large enough to amplify downstream harm. The result is horizon collapse: rewards are realised quickly while costs are diffused, delayed, or externalised onto the public, future populations, and (...) ecosystems. This creates responsibility subsidies—competitive advantages gained not through superior service or innovation, but through offloading exposure. -/- Telic Capitalism names the corrective: a pro-market architecture that restores legitimate risk-taking by making high-exposure decisions legibly authored, proportionately justified, and institutionally “owned” across time. It distinguishes good-faith failure from negligent stewardship, treats corporations as exposure amplifiers rather than moral agents, and proposes concrete mechanisms—authorship logs, anti-theatre aggravation for non-logging, duty-of-inquiry triggers, compensation contingency, and insurance-first reciprocity—to convert authorship into enforceable market consequence. The aim is not to moralise profit, but to prevent reckless extraction from outcompeting disciplined stewardship. (shrink)

This paper revisits Consumer Communism, a speculative framework first proposed in 2017, which reinterprets Nietzsche's "will to power" as an ethical drive toward mutual flourishing rather than domination. Integrating insights from Nietzschean ethics, Marxist political economy, and Ostrom's commons theory, the paper proposes a model of "free market socialism" in which autonomy and reciprocity coexist within AI-enabled systems of governance. As artificial intelligence approaches capacities for global optimisation, the framework explores how power might be exercised for collective benefit through decentralised, (...) altruistic design. By applying these principles to AI alignment, resource distribution, and post-scarcity ethics, Consumer Communism provides a philosophical foundation for reimaging governance and cooperation in an age of superintelligence. It suggests that freedom, autonomy, and mutual benefit may not be opposites, but the necessary conditions of sustainable, ethical progress. (shrink)

Anna Stilz claims that citizens of democratic states bear “task responsibility” to repair unjust harms done by their states. I will argue that the only situation in which Stilz’s argument for such “task responsibility” is not redundant, given her own premises, is a situation where the state leaves it up to the citizens whether to indemnify others for the harms done by the state. I will also show that Stilz’s “authorization view” rests on an unwarranted and implausible assumption (which I (...) call “the authorization principle”) about authorization and political obligation, and that this problem cannot be remedied by limiting the account to democratic states. I will then briefly turn to Pasternak’s account of citizen responsibility for state action and argue that it suffers from two deficiencies: first, she equates group membership with collective action, and second, she does not provide any explanation as to why citizens should incur liability for the acts of their state under the four conditions she highlights. I conclude that neither Stilz nor Pasternak succeed in showing that at least citizens of democratic states are liable (barring very special circumstances) for the acts of their states. (shrink)

Garrett Cullity concedes that saving a drowning child from a shallow pond at little cost to oneself is not actually analogous to giving money to a poverty relief organization like Oxfam. The question then arises whether this objection is fatal to Peters Singer's argument for a duty of assistance or whether it can be saved anyway. Cullity argues that not saving the drowning child and not giving money to organizations like Oxfam are still morally analogous, that is, not giving money (...) to organizations like Oxfam is morally nearly as bad as letting the child drown. I argue that Cullity's two arguments for this conclusion, an argument from "transitivity" and an argument from collective responsibility, fail. (shrink)

Many authors writing about global justice seem to take national responsibility more or less for granted. Most of them, however, offer very little argument for their position. One of the few exceptions is David Miller. He offers two models of collective responsibility: the like-minded group model and the cooperative practice model. While some authors have criticized whether these two models are applicable to nations, as Miller intends, my criticism is more radical: I argue that these two models fail as accounts (...) of collective responsibility as such. This result should not surprise us (liberals): there simply is no such thing as collective responsibility (in a strict sense), there is only individual responsibility. Thus individuals are not automatically responsible for the actions of their groups, nations or states, not even if they do not actively dissociate themselves from those actions. (shrink)

It seems groups can be proper objects of respect. Can groups themselves manifest respect for other things? In this paper, I argue that some highly structured groups can. I also argue that “group respect” is best understood in non-summative terms—that is, respect-relevant properties can obtain at group-level even if they don’t obtain at the level of individual members of that group, and vice versa. Group respect entails additional group agential phenomena at issue in the “non-summativist package of views” developed in (...) Jessica Brown’s recent book, The Epistemic and Moral Evaluation of Groups (2024). Most notably, group respect entails the possibility of group action for a reason. Since Brown’s is the most developed account of group action for a reason, her account, and the non-summativist package of views it’s linked with, are especially useful in developing an account of group respect. By connecting Brown’s project with the idea of group respect, I aim to illuminate the latter while lending further support to Brown’s project in three ways: further demonstrating its unifying power; revealing how it enables a new account of an underexplored group phenomenon; and extending Brown’s project to important societal issues, via social and political upshots of a non-summativist approach to group respect. (shrink)

In this short paper, I critically examine Veli Mitova’s proposal that social-identity groups can have collective epistemic reasons. My primary focus is the role of privileged access in her account of how collective reasons become epistemic reasons for social-identity groups. I argue that there is a potentially worrying structural asymmetry in her account of two different types of cases. More specifically, the mechanisms at play in cases of “doxastic reasons” seem fundamentally different from those at play in cases of “epistemic-conduct (...) reasons”. The upshot is a need for further explanation of what unifies these dimensions of the account. (shrink)

Moral collectivists argue that certain groups can bear moral responsibility and moral duties. Moral individualists reject this. In this debate, individualists and collectivists both make a common methodological mistake when theorizing about moral agency, responsibility, and blame. Their arguments implicitly assume an all-out primacy of the individual domain. Unless groups can satisfy the exact conditions of our best theory of individual moral responsibility, they are not morally responsible entities. I argue that none of the plausible arguments justify this all-out primacy. (...) Instead, I defend moderate primacy: (1) We should start our theorizing based on individual cases; and (2) extensional inadequacy for the individual domain is worse than for the group domain. This moderate primacy opens the door for the group domain to play an important role in developing a comprehensive ethical theory. I sketch a directed reflective equilibrium method for systematically including the group domain in our theorizing about moral agency, responsibility, and blame. I further develop the Core Features Argument that shows why the collectivist is justified in developing agent-neutral principles and moral concepts that apply to individual and group agents alike. Finally, I suggest that the group domain offers the potential for adjudicating debates in ethical theory and exciting new lines of inquiry that could help us better understand the moral phenomena that ethical theory seeks to explain. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the normative underpinnings of ghosting in the job market. Ghosting involves the abrupt cessation of communication without prior warning or explanation, which can be done by prospective employers or job seekers at various stages of a hiring process. This is a common phenomenon in the job market. I argue that the moral wrongness of ghosting can be explained by a principle of communicative reciprocity, which yields a duty of transparency and a right to be adequately (...) informed for both parties. I further highlight the importance of corporate duties and corporate responsibility for ghosting done by organizations qua corporate moral agents. Organizations have corporate duties that require them to create and update relevant policies and infrastructure for conducting their hiring processes in a morally adequate manner. Finally, I reflect on why blame for ghosting in the job market is unlikely to be publicly expressed by both prospective employers and job seekers. (shrink)

Collective agents can be praiseworthy without any of their members being praiseworthy. To support this “discontinuity thesis,” we consider the role that motivation plays in the attribution of moral responsibility. An agent who is praiseworthy must have had the appropriate moral motivation. We argue that it is possible that the collective agent was appropriately motivated, while its members were not. Subsequently, we develop an account of corporate moral concern, which gives substance to this second discontinuity thesis, about the moral motivation (...) of collective agents. (shrink)

This review engages with Ee Ling Quah's Fire Dragon Feminism: Asian Migrant Women's Tales of Migration, Coloniality and Racial Capitalism (2025), a timely contribution that theorises 'fire dragon feminism' through the lived experiences of Asian migrant women in the Australian academy. Quah examines their shifting positions of privilege and vulnerability within global racial capitalism, colonialism and neoliberalism, analysing how racialised myths condition migrant women's lives and how myths embedded in corporate equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) programs further shape their experiences. (...) In this review, I highlight how Quah's framework captures the structural dimensions of emotions such as burnout, hypervigilance and isolation in the white-dominant academy. While appreciating Quah's critique of binaries that portray Asian migrant women as either helpless victims or self-sufficient agents, I raise concerns about her use of 'culpability' to describe migrant women's complicity in oppressive systems. Drawing on Marilyn Frye's and Sukaina Hirji's accounts of 'double binds' and Iris Marion Young's 'social connection' model of responsibility, I argue that Asian migrant women are responsible for structural injustice without being blameworthy. By distinguishing implication and complicity from culpability and blameworthiness, I suggest a more adequate framework for understanding the collective responsibilities fire dragon feminism calls us to embrace. (shrink)

Should we displace the moral responsibility from the individual to the social in accounts of oppression, discrimination, and injustice? Here, I consider anti-individualist challenges to the explanation of social phenomena and of social injustice. First, I argue that those challenges are consistent with social phenomena that are constituted by people’s attitudes and actions, and I provide evidence from research in the social sciences to this effect. Second, I argue that putative paradigm cases of structural injustice are cases where individuals, or (...) collectives of individuals, have moral responsibility, or are cases with no individual or collective culprits, and where it is questionable that they are unjust. (shrink)

This volume extends the analysis of mental construction into collective systems, examining how shared models, institutions, and power structures emerge from interacting minds. It explores the formation of social norms, moral evaluation, and large-scale coordination without relying on metaphysical notions such as free will or intrinsic moral order. Drawing on neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and philosophy, the book proposes that collective behavior can be understood as the stabilization of shared perceptual and evaluative patterns across populations. It further analyzes how institutions function (...) as regulatory extensions of cognitive processes, shaping behavior through constraint, feedback, and reinforcement. The work presents a graded model of responsibility grounded in neural and systemic capacities rather than metaphysical agency. (shrink)

This note challenges Veli Mitova’s “The Collective Epistemic Reasons of Social-Identity Groups.” Mitova aims to show that loosely structured social-identity groups are agents and have beliefs. I argue that each step in this project either begs the question or shifts scope. The examples of group action she provides are explainable as the actions of individuals. And the two theorists on whom she draws to bolster her view are both actually in disagreement with her: Charles Mills explicitly theorizes distributions of error (...) among individuals, not group-level cognition. And in Christian List’s model, agency depends on suitable organization and information integration, which undercuts attributions to loosely structured identity groups. With group agency and belief unestablished on the terms offered, the claim that such groups bear distinctive epistemic reasons is left unmotivated. (shrink)

Debates in AI ethics frequently invoke the notion of a responsibility gap, suggesting that increasing algorithmic autonomy makes it difficult to identify who should be held accountable for harmful outcomes produced by artificial intelligence systems. This paper argues that the responsibility gap diagnosis often misidentifies the underlying problem. In many organizational deployments of AI systems, responsibility does not disappear; rather, it becomes distributed across layered decision architectures in which different actors shape system behavior at different stages of design, deployment, and (...) operation. The paper introduces the concept of authority illusion to describe the structural misalignment between the location of decision authority and the point at which accountability is typically assigned. While upstream actors define system objectives, select training data, determine acceptable risk thresholds, and approve deployment conditions, responsibility frequently concentrates at downstream operational layers where human reviewers interact with system outputs. To analyze this asymmetry, the paper develops an authority mapping framework that traces decision authority across strategic, design, governance, and operational layers of AI system deployment. Drawing on insights from the philosophy of rule-following, particularly the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the analysis argues that decision authority in socio-technical systems is embedded within institutional practices rather than reducible to individual acts of review or intervention. The paper concludes that effective AI governance requires not only recognizing the distributed architecture of decision authority but also establishing forms of structurally independent oversight capable of auditing and intervening in upstream design and deployment decisions. By reframing the problem from a responsibility gap to a question of authority distribution within organizational architectures, the paper offers a structural perspective on accountability in contemporary AI systems. (shrink)

This paper argues that antagonism is not merely a historical or institutional phenomenon but an ontological feature of human relational existence. Human beings are constitutively dependent on one another for survival, recognition, language, and social participation. This dependence generates asymmetries of power, and asymmetry creates the structural possibility of instrumentalization and domination. Antagonism therefore arises not only from conflict or hostility but from the structural condition that human beings both need one another and can exploit that need. Against teleological theories (...) that interpret antagonism as historically contingent and ultimately resolvable, the paper argues that antagonism is historically transformable but ontologically persistent. Modern institutional and technological systems intensify antagonism through the diffusion and anonymization of responsibility, a phenomenon that can be described as ethical withdrawal (Enser 2026). Because antagonism cannot be eliminated, the ethical task cannot consist in designing a conflict-free society but in restraining domination through accountability. Ethical life therefore does not consist in eliminating antagonism but in remaining responsible within ongoing structural tension. The central ethical task is not reconciliation but accountability within antagonism. (shrink)

This paper argues that moral responsibility does not depend on the presence of consciousness. While much of modern moral philosophy assumes that accountability must be grounded in conscious awareness—intentions, deliberation, or reflective understanding—contemporary socio-technical systems reveal that responsibility continues to operate even when consciousness is absent, opaque, or irrelevant. -/- The expansion of algorithmic decision systems exposes a structural feature that has long been present but often obscured: responsibility functions primarily as a social allocation attached to roles and institutions rather (...) than as a property grounded in inner mental states. Legal and ethical practices routinely assign responsibility for negligence, systemic bias, and institutional failure without requiring direct access to an agent’s conscious awareness. The emergence of algorithmic governance makes this structure more visible by removing the traditional narrative center of a conscious subject. -/- The paper proposes that the current transformation represents a shift from moral psychology to moral architecture. Instead of focusing on intentions and beliefs, responsibility increasingly operates through the design of systems, institutional oversight, and distributed accountability chains. Algorithmic mediation does not eliminate moral responsibility; rather, it reveals that responsibility persists as a structural response to consequences produced within complex systems. -/- The survival of blame without a clear subject illustrates this transition. Public and legal demands for accountability continue even when harmful outcomes cannot be traced to a conscious decision-maker. Blame functions not as a report about mental states but as a regulatory mechanism that stabilizes social norms and compels institutional correction. -/- The central claim is therefore negative and reconstructive: the disappearance or irrelevance of consciousness in many decision processes does not undermine ethics. Instead, it exposes that moral responsibility has always been anchored in social structures of power, consequence, and governance rather than in the inner awareness of agents. The age of algorithmic systems makes this underlying architecture visible and forces a reconsideration of how responsibility is distributed in complex societies. (shrink)

This essay argues that the hard problem of consciousness retains structural significance in the age of advanced AI, even if AI never achieves consciousness. Consciousness functions as a boundary marker for attribution of responsibility and authorship in decision-making. As algorithmic systems increasingly mediate and delegate decisions, the erosion of clear agency attribution creates a moral vacuum that behavioral performance alone cannot resolve. The paper reframes the relevance of the hard problem from epistemic to normative, highlighting implications for accountability in non-conscious (...) technological systems. (shrink)

Modern moral and legal theory has long presupposed a structural alignment between action and bearer: if responsibility exists, it belongs to someone. Agency and answerability were assumed to converge in a subject capable of ownership. -/- This essay argues that the alignment has become unstable. -/- Across contemporary decision systems—algorithmic, bureaucratic, financial, institutional—outcomes continue to generate normative demands: justification, sanction, legitimacy, reform. Responsibility has not diminished. Yet the decisive moment no longer maps cleanly onto any identifiable agent. No participant fully (...) controls the outcome; no single role plausibly claims authorship without distortion; no institution fully contains the decision process it deploys. -/- The result is not collective responsibility in the classical sense. Collective responsibility still presupposes a bearer—plural, coordinated, internally responsive to blame. What is emerging instead is structural orphaning: responsibility persists as normative weight, but without a stable locus capable of carrying it. -/- The essay develops three claims: 1. Contemporary systems generate a moral surplus—normative pressure without a discharge point. 2. Responsibility increasingly attaches to outcomes rather than decisions. 3. Restoring consciousness—human or artificial—does not restore responsibility, because what is missing is not awareness but custody: the recognized capacity to intervene before an action closes. -/- Responsibility has not disappeared. Its bearer has. The philosophical problem is therefore no longer who is responsible? but where can responsibility still land without fiction? (shrink)

**AAA-06 - Algorithmic Mediation and the End of Intentional Action** -/- For much of modern philosophy, intentional action has been treated as the central structure of agency. Individuals perceive alternatives, deliberate among them, and initiate action through intention. Responsibility, in turn, is anchored to this moment of commitment. -/- This paper argues that algorithmic mediation is progressively destabilizing that structure. In many contemporary environments—digital platforms, recommender systems, adaptive interfaces, and automated decision infrastructures—the field of action is increasingly assembled before deliberation (...) occurs. Options are ranked, filtered, and sequenced in real time according to predictive models of behavior. Individuals still act within these environments, but their actions unfold within trajectories they did not design and cannot easily observe. -/- Under these conditions, intention no longer consistently precedes action. Instead, it often emerges retrospectively as an interpretation of actions already set in motion by mediated flows of options and prompts. Decision points dissolve into sequences of micro-interactions, while responsibility becomes difficult to localize within any single moment of choice. -/- The paper proposes that the most significant transformation produced by algorithmic systems is not the elimination of human agency but its reconfiguration. Agency persists, yet shifts from originating trajectories to confirming or modulating system-generated ones. Humans remain involved in action while the architecture of intention—the gap in which deliberation once formed—gradually contracts. -/- Understanding this shift clarifies a growing tension in contemporary societies: systems increasingly shape outcomes while normative frameworks continue to attribute responsibility to individual agents. The result is a widening gap between the lived experience of action and the institutional attribution of accountability. (shrink)

Recent debates on artificial intelligence frequently frame human–AI hybridity as an unprecedented ontological rupture requiring new categories of agency and responsibility. This paper argues that such framing is historically misleading. Human beings have always acted through technological, institutional, and symbolic extensions. What distinguishes contemporary AI systems is not hybridity as such, but the structural erosion of decision ownership. -/- Earlier technological mediations complicated responsibility without dissolving it. By contrast, AI-mediated systems increasingly reorganize decision-making in ways that diffuse accountability across designers, (...) deployers, operators, and institutions without leaving any actor in a position to authoritatively claim ownership of outcomes. Responsibility becomes distributed in form yet unclaimable in practice. -/- The central problem of the algorithmic age is therefore not machine consciousness or moral status. Accountability does not depend on inner experience but on identifiable authority over action. The relevant transformation is structural: decisions with real consequences are produced under conditions where no participant can fully stand behind them. -/- The paper develops this distinction between mediation and delegation, analyzes the illusion of distributed responsibility, and examines the social consequences of accountability dilution, including trust erosion, power concentration, and moral fatigue. It concludes that the future of AI governance depends less on metaphysical questions about machine minds than on institutional reconstruction of operational responsibility. (shrink)

Delegation Is Not Distribution intervenes in a recurring confusion in contemporary debates on agency, responsibility, and collective decision-making. Against the widespread assumption that responsibility can be preserved by spreading decision-making across multiple actors, the essay argues that delegation and distribution are structurally distinct—and that conflating them obscures how agency can disappear even as action continues. -/- The core claim is that agency requires custody: the capacity to interrupt, veto, or reclaim a decision before it becomes irreversible. Distribution preserves this capacity; (...) delegation quietly removes it. As a result, responsibility does not become collective—it becomes orphaned. -/- By clarifying this distinction, the essay reframes discussions of human-in-the-loop systems, collective responsibility, and institutional accountability, shifting attention from individual blame to the architecture of decision-making itself. (shrink)

This paper examines a structural transformation in contemporary decision environments: the migration of agency without the disappearance of action. -/- In algorithmically mediated systems, individuals continue to click, select, approve, and endorse. The visible surface of choice remains intact. What shifts is not behavior but authorship. Recommendation systems, ranking architectures, predictive interfaces, and automated defaults increasingly shape the field in which options appear meaningful, reachable, and comparable. Decisions are still executed by individuals, yet the architecture of those decisions is assembled (...) elsewhere. -/- The argument developed here is conceptual rather than technological. Agency is not equivalent to the execution of available options. Agency consists in the capacity to shape, interrupt, or contest the structure within which options arise. When that structure becomes adaptive, opaque, and optimized for scale, authorship thins even as activity intensifies. -/- This produces a distinctive asymmetry: responsibility remains socially anchored to the individual, while custody over decision formation drifts into system-level processes. The result is not the elimination of agency, but its redistribution without a corresponding redistribution of accountability. -/- The paper reframes current debates that center on machine consciousness, alignment, or intelligence. The pressing issue is not whether machines feel or understand, but whether decisions flowing through machine-mediated environments still possess a locus at which responsibility can meaningfully settle. -/- Agency has not vanished. It has become ambient, distributed, and structurally displaced. The question is no longer whether we choose, but where choosing still originates. (shrink)

Contemporary debates about artificial intelligence and moral responsibility increasingly rely on a behavioral shortcut: if a system behaves as if it understands, chooses, or intends, it is treated as possessing some form of agency. This paper argues that this shortcut is conceptually mistaken and normatively dangerous. -/- Historically, behavioral performance functioned as a reliable proxy for agency because actions were anchored to identifiable subjects who could be held accountable. Algorithmic systems break this condition. They generate human-like behavior—fluent language, coherent recommendations, (...) adaptive optimization—without occupying a position of responsibility within social, legal, or moral structures. Their outputs resemble decisions, but are not owned as such. -/- The paper draws a sharp distinction between behavioral resemblance and normative agency. Agency is not defined by intelligence, competence, or internal sophistication, but by structural exposure to accountability: the capacity to be answerable, sanctioned, and required to justify one’s actions. Algorithmic systems are explicitly designed to act without such exposure. -/- As decision-making is increasingly mediated by opaque technical systems, responsibility does not disappear but migrates—diffusing across designers, deployers, institutions, and users without settling on any bearer capable of owning outcomes. The result is not shared responsibility, but a growing accountability vacuum in which actions occur everywhere while responsibility can be claimed nowhere. -/- The paper concludes that focusing on machine consciousness or intelligence obscures the core transformation underway. The central ethical problem of advanced AI is not the emergence of artificial agents, but the expansion of agent-like behavior without agents—behavior that carries real consequences while remaining normatively hollow. Preserving moral and legal order in algorithmically mediated societies therefore requires resisting the collapse of agency into behavior, rather than attempting to humanize machines. (shrink)

To discuss possession is to risk immediate misunderstanding. The term arrives burdened with ideas modern thought has already filed away, filled with images of demons, exorcisms, superstition, pre-scientific fear, and theatrical displays of irrationality. It appears to belong to a world that no longer commands intellectual seriousness. The modern mind, trained to distinguish external causation from internal states and to prefer measurable mechanism over symbolic description, assumes the matter settled. Possession names a mistake. At best it survives as a metaphor; (...) at worst it lingers as a relic of coercive religious imagination. However, concepts do not endure across civilizations merely because they are false in interesting ways. They persist because they compress a recurrent feature of human experience that later vocabularies only partially replace. The question is not whether possession is literally real in any supernatural sense. The more difficult question is what reality the concept once made available to thought, and whether that reality has disappeared or simply lost its name. (shrink)

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence into financial markets is transform ing the architecture of investment decision-making. As algorithmic trading systems operate at increasing speed, scale, and autonomy, systemic risk may emerge not from irrational human behavior but from synchronized algorithmic rationality. This paper asks a critical question: Can AI trigger the next financial crisis, and if so, who bears responsibility? The study introduces the concept of a structural responsibility gap in AI-mediated investment environments. By distinguishing computational output from normative (...) judgment, it argues that investment decisions inherently involve risk endorsement, value commitment, and accountability beyond probabilistic calculation. When judgment is delegated to autonomous systems, responsibility becomes layered and fragmented across developers, institutions, investors, and regulators. Through analysis of algorithmic feedback loops, synchronization dynamics, and crisis amplification mechanisms—including flash crash events—the paper demon strates how automated coordination may intensify systemic instability. To address this gap, it proposes a Hierarchical Joint Responsibility Model designed to govern delegated judgment without attributing moral agency to AI systems. The stability of algorithmic finance ultimately depends not solely on technological control, but on the structural redesign of accountability. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence systems move beyond episodic model deployment toward agentic and physically embedded architectures, prevailing approaches to AI safety and governance encounter a structural limit. This article argues that governance can no longer be treated as an optional policy overlay once AI systems operate persistently, at speed, and under conditions of dependency and non-exit. Drawing on recent shifts in defence and industrial AI deployment, it diagnoses a transformation in justificatory structure in which delay itself is reclassified as systemic risk, (...) while failure and misalignment are reframed as tolerable, local costs. The central claim is that this shift renders existing governance frameworks inadequate not because they lack ethical ambition, but because they presuppose reversibility, episodic oversight, and downstream correction that no longer hold for agentic and physically embedded systems. Building on a structural account of agency, an analysis of distributed cognition as socio-technical infrastructure, and fiduciary theories of entrusted discretion, the article reframes AI governance as an architectural condition of legitimate authority. It concludes by identifying minimal design-level governance conditions—contestability, revisability, halt-capacity, and responsibility traceability—required for legitimacy and accountability to remain intelligible under velocity-driven deployment. (shrink)

Stephanie Collins (2019) and Bill Wringe (2016) disagree on how groups bear collective duties. For Collins, in order to bear a collective duty, a group should have a decision-making procedure and only agential groups have such procedures. On this view, social movements cannot bear collective duties if they lack decision-making procedures. Contra Collins, Wringe argues that groups without decision-making procedures can bear collective duties when they share the moral phenomenology that we have a duty together. So on Wringe’s view, social (...) movements can bear collective duties even if they lack decision-making procedures. I agree with Wringe that the decision-making procedure criterion should not be a requirement for collective duties. However, I argue that collective duties are best explained by basic moral certainties because we can explain how group individuals can unite and act autonomously. And I argue that the paradigmatic case of collective duties as basic moral certainties can be found in social movements. (shrink)

In this chapter, we consider the question of how to attribute—and distribute—responsibility for work and its effects, focusing especially on cases when work has bad effects and there is not obviously a single person to blame. This chapter assess answers provided by collective or group agency views and individualist views, in part by showing how a subtle understanding of the relationship among responsibility, blameworthiness, and liability can help resolve apparently recalcitrant collective cases. Drawing insights from each view, the chapter introduces (...) and assesses an individualist account according to which each agent is responsible and blameworthy in virtue of what they do given their opportunities, where the focus is on the ex-ante assessment of the possible consequences of agents’ contributions in light of situational factors, including the actions and omissions of others. The chapter then highlight the distinctiveness of work by exploring the difference between moral and other kinds of responsibility for work and the hierarchical structure characteristic of work in collective contexts. (shrink)

Epistemic trust involves a catch-22. We have to trust others in order to acquire knowledge, but we need knowledge in order to know who to trust. Part of our vulnerability is that we may not realize the extent of our dependence on others to make sense of things. I argue for a holistic conception of epistemic responsibility by examining the roles that different sources of information have on our understanding of the world. Instead of grounding epistemic responsibility in individual virtue (...) or testimonial promises, I argue that what makes a source epistemically accountable is discretionary control over information to which audiences are vulnerable. To explain the apparent credibility of implausible views, we must include a network of sources who corroborate a claim. I distinguish responsible and irresponsible networks by their openness to criticism and self-examination about the plausibility of their views. I conclude that given the holistic account of epistemic responsibility that I develop, even conduits like social media companies can be held epistemically responsible for the distrust and confusion that they promote. (shrink)

How are we to think about our responsibility, both individually and collectively, in relation to revolution? How might recent conversations among philosophers help us think through questions of this sort, and where might we need to do some thinking for ourselves? For guidance, I turn to recent conversation concerning responsibility for collective inaction. My purpose is to reflect on how philosophers have been encouraging us to think about collective responsibility in relation to revolution, making explicit certain underlying assumptions about what (...) a revolution is, when we are justified in bringing one about, and under what circumstances we can hold one another responsible for failing to do so. In the process, I put the academic literature on collective responsibility into conversation with the thought and practice of James and Grace Lee Boggs, a pair of movement intellectuals who devoted their lives to building the next American revolution from their home in Detroit. By contrasting the thought of academic and organic intellectuals concerned with questions of collective responsibility, I hope to generate enough friction to conjure up even better questions—ones that will aid us in developing a more expansive understanding of ourselves in relation to our shared future. (shrink)

In this précis of three of the chapters of my book Taking Responsibility for Climate Change (2024), I explain why collective responsibility must be construed widely to grasp the scope of climate change responsibility. Individuals can share responsibility to take mitigation action as members or constituents of collectives and groups of several kinds. If we try to frame climate change responsibility exclusively from either the collective or the individual perspective, we leave out a crucial element of collective and shared responsibility—namely, (...) how we are all influenced by the collectives we belong to and how, in turn, collectives are influenced by individuals. I look first at organized collective action and shared responsibility as members of collective agents, followed by a discussion on the shared responsibility of constituents of unorganized collectives. I also discuss how misinformation tactics have been deployed to delay meaningful climate action, thereby derailing democratic decision-making processes. Collective agents involved in such activities bear responsibility for their actions. (shrink)

Niels de Haan (2023) defends the possibility of holding collectives morally responsible against a challenge posed by the problem of self-induced moral incapacity. Self-induced moral incapacity seems to introduce a responsibility gap that corporate agents might exploit to avoid responsibility. De Haan argues that the problem does not introduce responsibility gaps because collective moral agents become responsible for actions they committed while they were incapacitated once they reacquire moral capacity. I argue that de Haan’s argument is incomplete. Simply because a (...) group reacquires moral capacity does not also necessarily mean that the group retains attributability for the wrongs in question. This means we must supplement de Haan’s argument with an Attributability Proviso: To overcome the problem of self-induced moral incapacity it must be the case that the group reacquires moral capacity and that we can still attribute the earlier actions to the group despite the changes that it has gone through. (shrink)

Error theorists of all stripes face the “Now what?”-question: what do we do with our judgements if they are systematically erroneous? The question is perhaps most commonly discussed with error theories about all moral judgements or all normative judgements in mind. But other error theories are possible. As it matters particularly for our social coordination and is ideologically and emotionally charged, I consider an error theory about corporate moral responsibility judgements—both for its own sake and to see if it generates (...) lessons about how to answer the “Now what?”-question more generally. First, I argue that an error theory about corporate moral responsibility judgements plausibly could be true, which gives us reason to explore the “Now what?”-question about it. Then I argue that if it is, we should become revisionary expressivists about corporate moral responsibility judgements. This allows us to preserve our interests in these judgements better than alternative responses, including abolitionism, conservationism, fictionalism, propagandism, and revisionary naturalism. Finally, I generalize to more familiar error theories. Altering some assumptions, the lessons from “Now what?” about corporate moral responsibility judgements also make revisionary expressivism generalize to answer the “Now what?”-questions faced by more familiar error theories. (shrink)

It is common to ascribe agency to some organized collectives, such as corporations, courts, and states, and to treat them as loci of responsibility, over and above their individual members. But since responsibility is often assumed to require free will, should we also think that group agents have free will? Surprisingly, the literature contains very few in-depth discussions of this question. The most extensive defence of corporate free will that I am aware of (Hess [2014], “The Free Will of Corporations (...) (and Other Collectives)”, Philosophical Studies 168 (1): 241–260) rests on a compatibilist understanding which takes reasons-responsiveness and acting from one’s own ‘actional springs’ as key conditions for free will but says little about a condition that free-will libertarians emphasize: the possibility of doing otherwise. In this paper, I will argue that group agents can have free will not only in a (less demanding) compatibilist sense, but also in a recognizably libertarian sense, which includes the possibility of doing otherwise. In developing this account of corporate free will, I will bring together recent work on group agency and recent work on free will. (shrink)

This paper addresses how joint obligations bear on what individual group members should do. I argue that joint obligations do not transmit to the individual level. On the view I defend, “What should we do?” and “What should I do?” are separate questions to be answered independently. I distinguish two versions of the view that joint obligations transmit to the individual level: Ought Transmission, according to which if a group ought to do something, then each group member ought to do (...) their part; and Defeasible Transmission, according to which if a group have a joint obligation to do something, then each group member has a defeasible reason to do their part. I argue that we should reject both of these. I then defend the opposing view, No Transmission, against two objections: one which claims that this view cannot account for the connection between obligation and deliberation, and a second which alleges that No Transmission counterintuitively implies that it is indeterminate what a given individual should do in cases of a certain structure. (shrink)

Most shared agency theorists believe that acting together is a matter of forming and enacting shared intentions. Not all agree, however. A growing number of dissenters have gone minimalist about shared agency by arguing that acting together does not require shared intentions and, hence, does not require the tight practical alignment between participants that shared intentions-based accounts assume. In this paper, I survey recent minimalist accounts of shared agency and explain four reasons why minimalism is attractive. One reason has to (...) do with shared activities engaged in by agents with limited cognitive sophistication. Although such agents (e.g., infants) do not have the capacity for shared intentions, they nonetheless have the capacity for shared agency—a fact that flies in the face of shared-intention-based accounts and thus supports minimalism about shared agency. Another reason minimalism is attractive has to do with the vast number of participants and many institutional intricacies that shared activities sometimes involve. Workers on the assembly line might act together simply by sticking to their institutionally-defined roles in the production plan and thus may not have shared intentions, a fact that, again, supports minimalism. A third reason in favor of minimalism flows from cases of alienated participation in shared agency, i.e., cases where (under some conception of alienated participation) participants feel they are no more than cogs in the machine. A fourth reason concerns shared responsibility. Even unintentional and unwitting participants in shared wrongdoing might share responsibility for the wrongdoing in question, a fact that yet again favors minimalism about shared agency. Our non-ideal social world (that is, a world rife with unjust power relations) increases the odds of alienated participation as well as unintentional and/or unwitting participation in shared wrongdoing. Minimalism, thus, is best geared to illuminate shared agency as we know it under non-ideal circumstances. (shrink)

摘要：本文以散文论文的笔触，融入玄-弦论的核心逻辑，探讨人性五层境界——愚 人、小人、君子、圣贤、修行人的本质差异与精神进阶路径。文章以“弦的波动（后天 欲望、道德、社会关系）”与“玄的本体（本心、天理）”为隐形骨架，剖析不同层级的 人性特征：愚人沉沦于弦的盲目波动，被本能欲望牵引；小人操控弦的波动，借后天 规律谋取私利；君子校准弦的波动，以规律造福众生；圣贤引领弦的波动，以思想与 行动抑恶扬善、开蒙化众；修行人超越弦的波动，于洞悉后天规律后回归玄的本心， 在出世与入世之间实现精神圆满。本文融合东西方历史人物案例，既不否定后天欲望 与社会规律的合理性，也不陷入道德说教，而是以人文情怀串联“欲望-道德-本心”的永 恒命题，揭示“弦动归玄”是人性进阶的终极方向，为现代人的精神困境提供慰藉与指 引。.

We propose a new account of collective moral obligation. We argue that several agents have a moral obligation together only if they each have (i) a context-specific capacity to view their situation from the group’s perspective, and (ii) at least a general capacity to deliberate about what they ought to do together. Such an obligation is irreducibly collective, in that it does not imply that the individuals have any obligations to contribute to what is required of the group. We highlight (...) various distinctive features of our account. One such feature is that moral obligations are always relative to an agential perspective. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the moral responsibility of organized groups in light of historicism. Historicism is the view that any morally responsible agent must satisfy certain historical conditions, such as not having been manipulated. We set out four examples involving morally responsible organized groups that pose problems for existing accounts of historicism. We then pose a trilemma: one can reject group responsibility, reject historicism, or revise historicism. We pursue the third option. We formulate a Manipulation Condition and a (...) Guarding Condition as addendums to historicism that are necessary to accommodate our cases of group responsibility. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept the idea that there are duties to promote or create just institutions. But are the addressees of such duties supposed to be individuals – the members of the citizenry? What does it mean for an individual to promote or create just institutions? According to the ‘Simple View’, the citizenry has a collective duty to create or promote just institutions, and each individual citizen has an individual duty to do their part in this collective project. The simple view (...) appears to work well with regard to – you guessed it – ‘simple’ scenarios but it is riddled with further questions and problems. In this chapter, we raise five problems for the Simple View: (a) We suggest that one cannot develop a view concerning the citizenry’s duty to promote just institutions in isolation from a conception of the ontological relationship between the state and its citizens; (b) We argue that it is not obvious that the citizenry is the right entity to be attributed duties in the first place; (c) We show that a plausible account of collective duties to promote just institutions must not remain silent on the complexities and difficulties amorphous, unorganized group face in vis-à-vis collective action; (d) We contend that without allocation principles for contributory duties amongst the citizenry, or – alternatively – a method for practical deliberation that is action-guiding in collective action contexts, the claim that the citizens have a collective duty to promote just institutions remains moot; and, finally, (e) We demonstrate that the problem of reasonable disagreement is a serious threat to a collective duty to promote or create just institutions – it potentially undermines such a duty altogether and allows for conflicting contributory duties amongst the citizenry. We hope that our discussion will ultimately help improve existing theories and conceptual frameworks with a view to better understanding citizens’ obligations to promote justice under non-ideal conditions. (shrink)

Unlike Western philosophers, classical Buddhist thinkers largely remained silent about socio-political issues and did not develop explicit frameworks for theorizing them. The present article reconstructs a Buddhist account of shared action based on select passages from works by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. It outlines the structure of individual action, according to Vasubandhu, and identifies three conditions that need to be satisfied for a joint activity to take place. This model, I suggest, is reductive in seeing joint action as an (...) aggregation of individual actions, and it differs from Western treatments of shared agency in several respects. Primarily, Vasubandhu’s paradigm rests on an extended structure of action, it is guided by an internalist standard of moral evaluation that emphasizes the consequences of shared actions for the acting members, and it is centrally concerned with how individuals can extricate themselves from social entanglements and gain control over their actions. (shrink)

This book proposes that it is not only states and international bodies that have a responsibility to take action toward mitigating climate change. Other collective agents, such as corporations, need to also come onboard. Additionally, the book argues that climate change is not solely a problem for collective agents, but also for individuals, as they are members of collectives and groups of several kinds. Therefore, framing climate change responsibility exclusively from either the collective or the individual perspective leaves out something (...) crucial: how we all are influenced by the collectives we belong to and how, in turn, collectives are influenced by individuals. -/- The focus of the book is on areas of climate change responsibility that are often left out of the picture or get too little attention in climate ethics, such as carbon inequality within countries. But why should any theoretical arguments about normative issues matter when we have a real-life climate crisis on our hands? Säde Hormio argues that ethical arguments have an important role in setting climate policy: they can highlight what values are at stake and help ground normative arguments in public deliberations. (shrink)

Even with events like the Capitol attack, it is misguided to focus too much on the possible epistemic failures of individuals. Instead, the focus should be on the collective underpinnings of bad beliefs (such as false beliefs about a stolen election), and especially on the collective agents who peddle in misinformation. We can divide the collective agents that pollute our epistemic neighborhoods roughly into those that do so for ideological or other such reasons (misbelievers), and those that do so for (...) instrumental reasons (disinformers), although in practice these categories can overlap. These two motivations impact the responsibility of the collective agents that help to create bad epistemic neighborhoods. While misbelieving is more culpable in a purely epistemic sense, being a disinformer is more culpable in a moral sense. Epistemic institutions present a special case for the responsibility of collective agents. Although collective agents can present us with clear cases of culpability in epistemic matters, when dealing with consumers of fake news and misinformation, we should proceed with a certain level of epistemic humility. (shrink)