Abstract
Despite enjoying unprecedented opportunities for engaging in collective action towards worthwhile causes, we might be growing ever more uncertain about what it means to be doing the right thing. One of the most difficult issues to assess is whether we can have massively shared obligations. Is the proposed theory significant beyond small-scale and medium-scale scenarios? What can it tell us about our obligations to reduce global poverty, to protest structural injustice, to mitigate climate change, to stop antimicrobial resistance or to cooperate with public authorities in the face of a global pandemic? Ordinary citizens’ obligations to address large-scale moral problems will often be collective only in a very weak sense, in that the collective level has normative primacy in determining the content of their individual obligations. Strengthening normative and epistemic links between agents in unorganised groups may change the nature of their obligations and may, in fact, increase normative pressure to contribute to collective action. Importantly, though, strengthening those links is an action that may not readily be available to agents in large and dispersed unorganised groups.