Arguments for Combinations’ and Coalitions’ Duties

This chapter examines six arguments in favour of the idea that combinations and coalitions are apt to bear duties. The first five arguments assert that combinations’ or coalitions’ duties are the best way to solve some problem: the problem of explaining individuals’ duties, of explaining intuitions about group responsibility, of capturing convictions, of distributing the duties correlative to human rights, or of avoiding overdemandingness. The sixth argument claims that some combinations or some coalitions are moral agents—and are, therefore, apt to bear duties by their very nature. Each of the six arguments is shown to be problematic. The result is a stalemate: we have no compelling arguments in favour of combinations’ and coalitions’ propensity to bear duties, yet we also have no arguments against that propensity.

Membership Duties

This chapter argues that collectives’ duties entail membership duties, which are duties (i) held by agents in virtue of the fact that they are members of a collective that has a duty and (ii) whose performance is a component of the collective’s doing its duty. It argues that collectives’ duties entail membership duties by arguing that whenever a collective fails to do a duty, a member has also failed to do an individually-held duty. The chapter reviews various accounts of membership duties and discusses their shortcomings. The chapter closes by proposing an account of membership duties that succeeds where these other accounts fail.

Differentiating Combinations and Coalitions

This chapter explains how coordination duties differ when held by members of combinations as compared with members of coalitions. It builds on the famous Hi-Lo problem to introduce the notions of we-framing and we-reasoning. It argues that the solution to Hi-Lo relies not on we-reasoning, but on a form of reasoning dubbed ‘coalition reasoning’. Crucially, this is reasoning in which the reasoner presumes that other agents will play their part in a particular pattern of actions. The chapter argues that when an agent holds a coordination duty as a member of a coalition, that duty requires the agent to coalition-reason. By contrast, when an agent holds a coordination duty as a member of a combination, that duty requires the agent to I-reason.

Against Combinations’ and Coalitions’ Duties

This chapter argues against the idea that combinations and coalitions are apt to bear duties. It builds on the previous chapter’s conclusion that combinations and coalitions are not moral agents by arguing for the Agency Principle: groups that are not moral agents cannot bear duties. It first considers—and rejects—the Ability Argument for the Agency Principle. This argument states that duties imply abilities and that groups that are not agents lack abilities. The Ability Argument fails, because non-agent groups often have abilities. Instead, the chapter endorses the Decision Argument for the Agency Principle. This argument states that duties imply a specific kind of ability: the ability to make morally sensitive decisions. Non-collective groups lack this specific ability. So, they cannot bear duties.

The Tripartite Model

This chapter provides an introduction and overview of the Tripartite Model of group duties. It opens by giving some real-world examples of attributions of duties to groups. It then provides an overview of the Tripartite Model, which is designed to assess and guide such attributions. This is the model that will be defended and detailed in later chapters. The chapter differentiates the issue of group duties from the issues of group causal responsibility and group moral retrospective responsibility. The three categories of the Tripartite Model—combinations, coalitions, and collectives—are described. Finally, the chapter elaborates on the book’s conception of duties and the range of questions that the Tripartite Model aims to answer.

Coordination Duties

Given that combinations and coalitions cannot have duties, how are we to charitably reconstruct attributions of duties to them? This chapter answers by using the notion of responsiveness: the notion of one agent acting upon one another with a view to the second agent being responsive to reasons. In cases where a morally important outcome could be produced by each of several agents being responsive, each agent incurs a duty to be responsive with a view to that outcome. These are ‘responsiveness duties’. In cases where a morally important outcome could be produced by a collective agent, where that collective agent could be produced by each of several agents being responsive, each agent incurs a duty to be responsive with a view to producing the collective agent. These are ‘collectivization duties’. Responsiveness duties and collectivization are two species of ‘coordination duty’. Coordination duties are held by singular agents and do not require the positing of any group duty.

Collectives and Their Duties

This chapter fleshes out the Tripartite Model’s conception of collectives and defends the attribution of duties to them. It begins by giving a detailed characterization of collectives and explaining how they have the specifically moral type of agency that’s at issue in duties. It explains that this conception of collectives is permissive (i.e. its conditions are easy to satisfy). The conception is compared with other prominent accounts of corporate agency or personhood. The final section argues in favour of including collectives’ duties within our ontology. This argument has two planks. First, collectives are able to make decisions based on duties. Second, those decisions are to produce an outcome that would not be produced if each of the collective’s members severally made decisions: the outcome of robust multilateralism (coordinated role-performance) amongst members. At a general level of description, a collective’s duty will be a duty to produce multilateralism amongst members—a decision that no member can sensibly take on their own.