Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CIRICC (Complicity: Individual Responsibility in Collective Contexts)
Période du rapport: 2020-08-01 au 2021-07-31
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.
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.