Reducing Personal Emissions in Response to Collective Harm

Anthropogenic climate change threatens humanity as a whole, making its mitigation a matter of pressing concern. Mitigation efforts at the institutional level are necessary to successfully change the course of climate change, but thus far governments and industries have been ineffective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A point of philosophical contention is whether individuals have a moral responsibility to reduce their own emissions given the lack of institutional action. I argue that they do by redefining climate change as a collective impact. Individual emitters share collective responsibility for that impact, which translates to an individual duty to reduce their contribution.

Antimicrobial Footprints, Fairness, and Collective Harm

This chapter explores the question of whether or not individual agents are under a moral obligation to reduce their ‘antimicrobial footprint’. An agent’s antimicrobial footprint measures the extent to which her actions are causally linked to the use of antibiotics. As such, it is not necessarily a measure of her contribution to antimicrobial resistance. Talking about people’s antimicrobial footprint in a way we talk about our carbon footprint may be helpful for drawing attention to the global effects of individual behaviour and for highlighting that our choices can collectively make a real difference. But can we be morally obligated to make a contribution to resolving a collective action problem when our individual contributions by themselves make no discernible difference? I will focus on two lines of argument in favour of such obligations: whether a failure to reduce one’s antimicrobial footprint is unfair and whether it constitutes wrongdoing because it is harmful. I conclude by suggesting that the argument from collective harm is ultimately more successful.

Collective Impact Problems and the Promise for Business Ethics

“Collective impact problems” refer to situations where there is a collective harm or benefit, but where no single action seems to make a difference one way or the other. Collective impact problems arise when considering several pressing ethical issues in business, such as shareholder and consumer activism, business and climate change, factory farming and animal welfare, fair-trade and sweatshop labor, and corporate philanthropy. Unfortunately, business ethics textbooks do not explicitly deal with collective impact problems and, as such, students may be lacking the theoretical and practical skills necessary to deal with issues of significant moral concern. This paper helps to address this gap by introducing the reader to some collective impact cases in business ethics, detailing the challenges that collective impact problems pose for consequentialist and non-consequentialists alike, and highlighting some of the promising pedagogical benefits of using collective impact cases in a business ethics class.

Governmental Culpability

This chapter returns to the issue of what the normative implications of collective culpability are for members of the collective (e.g. those in government, public services, defence forces and the police). After setting aside some preliminary worries with the idea of collective punishment, the chapter argues for a distribution of culpability under a particular transformation: proportional to hierarchy in the collective. This entails that all members get a share in the collective’s culpability, but some get a greater share than others. This conclusion is defended against several objections, including the problem that some employees may have done all they could to prevent a collective harm taking place.

Setting Limits

Commercial gambling has developed in the past few decades into a complex enterprise that is at once a recreational activity, a global profit-making industry, and a potentially harmful behavior. New technologies, large for-profit corporations, and extended legalization, have changed the contexts and traditional roles of gambling. Using a public interest framework, this book discusses gambling policies that will best serve the public good. The book critically evaluates the scientific research on regulations designed to prevent or reduce the individual and collective harm from the activity. Efficient methods have a high probability of success if adequate consideration is given to the complexity of the problems. The difficulty is political: the use of these methods most likely conflicts with financial considerations. Problem users bring in the largest share of the money to the trade. Preventing gambling-related harm is rarely possible without limiting the overall volume of the activity.

Moral Norms in Social Contexts

This chapter sets out the normative foundations on which the book is based. It starts by defending the case for the ‘pervasiveness’ of morality: no social sphere is ‘beyond’ morality, even if there is some degree of institutional ‘division of labour’. Next, it states and explains the moral norms this study is based on: the norm to respect all individuals as moral equals, and norms about the avoidance of individual harm, and about avoiding contributing to collective harm. These norms lie within an ‘overlapping consensus’ of different moral theories and worldviews. In pluralist societies, we should focus on such a consensus—even if it may sometimes be hard to delineate—when reflecting on the moral dimensions of organizations.