Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CIRICC (Complicity: Individual Responsibility in Collective Contexts)
Reporting period: 2020-08-01 to 2021-07-31
Many of the systemic harms or wrongs in our world, such as climate change, the use of sweatshop labour in global supply chains, and the non-balanced representation of certain groups of people in positions of power and in the media, are caused collectively. That is, they are caused and upheld by a number of different agents, none of whom can affect the outcome directly on their own. They are also usually the unintended (but foreseen) consequence of some other activity, such as travelling on holidays or purchasing clothes, or an outcome of underlying biases and social norms that lead to certain groups being under- or misrepresented. In other words, these systemic effects can come about even when no contributing agent intends any harm or wrong.
Why should we care about what we do as individuals if the effects of our individual actions are imperceptible? Yet what we do together, in aggregate, matters a great deal: it is the difference between stabilized emissions or climate chaos. A crucial question in cases of systemic harms is whether individuals can be responsible for causing or upholding these, or whether the responsibility lies with a collective. In either case, there are many issues that need to be resolved. If individuals are deemed responsible, how exactly does each small action cause a great harm? On the other hand, if we want to argue that a collective is responsible, we need to clarify what this means.
The two-year project set out to explain how and in what ways individuals can be held responsible for collectively caused systemic harms, and when should we hold a collective responsible instead. The project produced four philosophical articles that focused on three overarching research questions:
1. What is collective responsibility?
2. How can an individual be responsible for systemic harms and wrongs?
3. How do ignorance and knowledge affect our social norms and our responsibility in collective settings?
When we understand the potential in our individual participation, we can create new groups and networks that can affect even systemic harms. We can also affect social norms and prevailing practices. This, I believe, is the key to solving the gridlock we are in not taking enough action over systemic harms like climate change.
Why should we care about what we do as individuals if the effects of our individual actions are imperceptible? Yet what we do together, in aggregate, matters a great deal: it is the difference between stabilized emissions or climate chaos. A crucial question in cases of systemic harms is whether individuals can be responsible for causing or upholding these, or whether the responsibility lies with a collective. In either case, there are many issues that need to be resolved. If individuals are deemed responsible, how exactly does each small action cause a great harm? On the other hand, if we want to argue that a collective is responsible, we need to clarify what this means.
The two-year project set out to explain how and in what ways individuals can be held responsible for collectively caused systemic harms, and when should we hold a collective responsible instead. The project produced four philosophical articles that focused on three overarching research questions:
1. What is collective responsibility?
2. How can an individual be responsible for systemic harms and wrongs?
3. How do ignorance and knowledge affect our social norms and our responsibility in collective settings?
When we understand the potential in our individual participation, we can create new groups and networks that can affect even systemic harms. We can also affect social norms and prevailing practices. This, I believe, is the key to solving the gridlock we are in not taking enough action over systemic harms like climate change.
During the first year of the project, I conducted research on the first two research themes, concentrating on questions around what we mean when we say that an organised collective, such as a corporation, is responsible for something, apart from the legal meaning. I argue that organised collectives such as governments, universities, and corporations should be thought of as collective agents and moral actors, although I deny that they are moral agents. Moral agency belongs to beings that can be morally reflexive, which includes feeling the pull of moral emotions. Still, the myriad ways that the collective setting affects the actions and decisions that are taken within, for, and by the collective agent, mean that we should view the responsibility of collective agents not just as an aggregate of individual actions and decisions. In many ways, the individual actions and omissions cannot be separated from the incorporation acts and the collective processes that they are a part of. When it comes to individual contributions to systemic harms, these can be so small, like grains of sand, that they make no relevant difference to collective outcomes, whether good or bad. Yet individuals need to care to motivate systemic changes. Highlighting the aggregate impact of tiny contributions leaves unanswered the question why any individual should feel responsibility for the overall outcome. Although we are members and constituents of collectives of different kinds, collectives that produce significant quantities of greenhouse gases, this viewpoint is missing in the literature. How organised collectives operate is decided by their members to a great extent. Therefore, when it comes to climate change and the individual, our responsibility as members of organised collectives should take centre stage. We should assess our role within organised collectives to see where we could make a difference in pushing the collective to adopt more carbon-neutral policies and procedures. This is the framing that we should push for in political philosophy and public debate alike to motivate people to take action.
The second project year focused on the third research theme, the effects of ignorance and group lying for individual responsibility. The epistemic neighbourhoods we are born and live in have a heightened importance when it comes to issues such as climate change, where we have to trust experts. It would be unfair to hold most people blameworthy for their false beliefs regarding climate change given the complexities of climate science and the sophistication of the misinformation machine. Instead of concentrating on culpable individual ignorance, in some cases a more fruitful line of enquiry is to look at who impacts the epistemic community. This will also alleviate concerns about possible responsibility gaps as collective agents can be responsible for an individual’s ignorance through creating misinformation. However, to blame them, we might need to establish that they are indeed lying and trying to mislead the public. But how can we say that a group makes a statement that it believes to be untrue? I suggest a narrative constraint for truthful group statements. This is made up of two components: narrative coherence and narrative intention. Narrative coherence requires that a group statement cannot contradict earlier group positions or knowledge unless a coherent rationale for the change is given. Narrative intention looks at the process of gathering new evidence and requires that the group position behind the statement is formed in good faith. The narrative constraint will help to determine if a group is lying in cases when members hold differing views about the matter or believe in falsehoods due to ideology.
The research produced four articles and a workshop. The results were disseminated through several talks at philosophical conferences and workshops, alongside teaching, as well as media interviews and talks aimed at the general audience.
The second project year focused on the third research theme, the effects of ignorance and group lying for individual responsibility. The epistemic neighbourhoods we are born and live in have a heightened importance when it comes to issues such as climate change, where we have to trust experts. It would be unfair to hold most people blameworthy for their false beliefs regarding climate change given the complexities of climate science and the sophistication of the misinformation machine. Instead of concentrating on culpable individual ignorance, in some cases a more fruitful line of enquiry is to look at who impacts the epistemic community. This will also alleviate concerns about possible responsibility gaps as collective agents can be responsible for an individual’s ignorance through creating misinformation. However, to blame them, we might need to establish that they are indeed lying and trying to mislead the public. But how can we say that a group makes a statement that it believes to be untrue? I suggest a narrative constraint for truthful group statements. This is made up of two components: narrative coherence and narrative intention. Narrative coherence requires that a group statement cannot contradict earlier group positions or knowledge unless a coherent rationale for the change is given. Narrative intention looks at the process of gathering new evidence and requires that the group position behind the statement is formed in good faith. The narrative constraint will help to determine if a group is lying in cases when members hold differing views about the matter or believe in falsehoods due to ideology.
The research produced four articles and a workshop. The results were disseminated through several talks at philosophical conferences and workshops, alongside teaching, as well as media interviews and talks aimed at the general audience.
The main research innovation of CIRICC has been combining state-of-the-art findings from social ontology with pressing questions concerning what we should do in the face of collectively caused systemic harms. While most work in social ontology is concerned with theorising about small-scale cases of joint action, I have addressed complex real-life cases, namely the responsibility to take action on climate change mitigation and consumer complicity for exploitative labour practices in the supply chains. This approach will contribute to advancements within the research field by taking the discussion forward on what collective agents’ responsibility means for their members. CIRICC also highlights the importance of narrative coherence in conceptualizing when a group agent is lying, and offers a model of how being a constituent of an unstructured collective can affect our moral agency. These insights offer ample scope for trying to influence the public debate around many harms and wrongs that people tend to too easily feel helpless and hopeless about. An example is how many of us could affect the greenhouse gas emissions of the collective agents we work for through the decisions we take in our work roles.