Andric, Vuko | 2024
Working paper 2024 nr. 1
Part of preprint Studies in the Ethics of Coordination and Climate Change
Some philosophers hold that unstructured groups themselves, as opposed to the members of these groups, can have moral duties. There are different accounts of how such collective duties might be grounded in facts about individual duties of the group members. In this paper, I highlight and discuss some questions for these accounts that seem to warrant more exploration than they have received so far. First, if there is a collective duty to j that is grounded in individual duties, how does j-ing feature in the individual duties? The accounts that ground a collective duty to j in individual duties specify these individual duties with reference to j-ing. But if a collective duty to j is grounded in individual duties, then, on pain of circularity, the individual duties cannot be specified in terms of a collective duty to j. Second, are the individual duties that ground collective moral duties themselves also moral duties? Or are the individual duties, rather, rational duties? I will suggest that the individual duties should be classified neither as purely moral nor as purely rational, but rather as rational duties of moral agents. Finally, are the grounding individual duties perspective-dependent, i.e., do they depend on the epistemic situation of the members, as several philosophers have suggested? I argue that accounts of collective obligations should not commit themselves to an answer to this question, but rather leave the question to general ethical theories that do not focus on contexts of collective duties.
