The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility comprehensively addresses questions about who is responsible and how blame or praise should be attributed when human agents act together. Such questions include: Do individuals share responsibility for the outcome or are individuals responsible only for their contribution to the act? Are individuals responsible for actions done by their group even when they don't contribute to the outcome? Can a corporation or institution be held morally responsible apart from the responsibility of its members? The Handbook's 35 chapters-all appearing here for the first time and written by an international team of experts-are organized into four parts: Part I: Foundations of Collective Responsibility Part II: Theoretical Issues in Collective Responsibility Part III: Domains of Collective Responsibility Part IV: Applied Issues in Collective Responsibility Each part begins with a short introduction that provides an overview of issues and debates within that area and a brief summary of its chapters. In addition, a comprehensive index allows readers to better navigate the entirety of the volume's contents. The result is the first major work in the field that serves as an instructional aid for those in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, as well as a reference for scholars interested in learning more about collective responsibility.

Saba Bazargan-Forward is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He works on issues in normative ethics, including complicity, defensive violence, war-ethics, and the morality of benefitting from injustice. He is currently authoring a book on individual responsibility for cooperatively committed harms. Deborah Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. She is the author of more than 40 articles on topics such as group agency, group epistemology, and collective responsibility, as well as the book Groups as Agents (2015).

Introduction 1. Types of Collectives and Responsibility 2. Collective Moral Responsibility and What Follows for Group Members 3. Collective Moral Responsibility as Joint Moral Responsibility 4. What Sets the Boundaries of Our Responsibility? 5. A We-mode Account of Group Action and Group Responsibility 6. From Individual to Collective Responsibility: There and Back Again 7. Collective Obligations and the Point of Morality 8. Assembling the Elephant: Attending to the Metaphysics of Corporate Agents 9. Collective Responsibility and Collective Obligations without Collective Moral Agents 10. Collective Responsibility and Acting Together 11. Complicity and Collective Responsibility 12. Radical Collective Responsibility and Plural Self-Awareness 13. Commitments and Collective Responsibility 14. Collective Inaction and Collective Epistemic Agency 15. Shared Responsibility and Failures to Prevent Harm 16. Collective Guilt Feelings 17. Collective Responsibility and Entitlement to Collective Reasons for Action 18. The Possibility of Collective Moral Obligations 19. Individual Responsibility for Collective Action 20. Collective Responsibility and the Role of Narrative 21. The Discursive Dilemma and Collective Responsibility 22. Bystanders and Shared Responsibility 23. Collective Responsibility and International Relations 24. Competing Collective Values: Moral and Causal Responsibilities in Health Care 25. Collective Responsibility and Fraud in Scientific Communities 26. Collective Action and the Criminal Law 27. Collective Responsibility in the State 28. Shared Responsibility for Corporate Wrongdoing 29. Corporate Moral Responsibility and the Expectation of Autonomy 30. Responsibility for Shared Action in War 31. Collective Duties of Beneficence 32. Are States Responsible for Climate Change in Their Own Right? 33. Conspiracy Theories and Collective Responsibility 34. Enabling Collective Responsibility for Environmental Justice 35. Institutional Racism and Individual Responsibility