Anne Schwenkenbecher

Many philosophers accept the idea that there are duties to promote or create just institutions. However, are the addressees of such duties supposed to be individuals—the members of the citizenry? What does it mean for an individual to promote or create just institutions? According to the “Simple View,” the citizenry has a collective duty to create or promote just institutions, and each individual citizen has an individual duty to do their part in this collective project. The simple view appears to work well with regard to—you guessed it—“simple” scenarios, but it is riddled with further questions and problems. In this chapter, we raise five problems for the Simple View: (a) we suggest that one cannot develop a view concerning the citizenry’s duty to promote just institutions in isolation from a conception of the ontological relationship between the state and its citizens; (b) we argue that it is not obvious that the citizenry is the right entity to be attributed duties in the first place; (c) we show that a plausible account of collective duties to promote just institutions must not remain silent on the complexities and difficulties amorphous, unorganized groups face vis-à-vis collective action; (d) we contend that without allocation principles for contributory duties amongst the citizenry, or—alternatively—a method for practical deliberation that is action-guiding in collective action contexts, the claim that the citizens have a collective duty to promote just institutions remains moot; and, finally (e) we demonstrate that the problem of reasonable disagreement is a serious threat to a collective duty to promote or create just institutions—it potentially undermines such a duty altogether and allows for conflicting contributory duties amongst the citizenry. We hope that our discussion will ultimately help improve existing theories and conceptual frameworks to better understanding citizens’ obligations to promote justice under non-ideal conditions.

We-reasoning as Moral Deliberation Moral agents facing collective-action problems regularly encounter a conundrum: together, we can effect change whereas, individually, we are inefficacious. Further, what appears individually rational can be collectively suboptimal. An individual agent may employ different types of reasoning in deciding how to act vis-à-vis such problems. Reasoning in the I-mode, she takes her individual agency and efficacy in the world as the starting point: What is the best thing she can do given the circumstance and given what others do? It is act-based, best-response reasoning. The preferences of agents deliberating in the I-mode may well be other-regarding: e.g. they may aim at furthering the group's interest or collective good. We-mode reasoning, or ʻwe-reasoningʼ, in contrast, is pattern-based: we infer our course of action from what is collectively best by way of acting as part of the group rather than for the sake of the group. I-mode reasoning with pro-group preferences (pro-group I-mode reasoning) and we-reasoning will often generate the same result, in particular in so-called strict joint necessity cases – where each agent's contribution is necessary for realizing a specific collectively available option. I-mode reasoning will regularly generate socially suboptimal results in so-called wide joint necessity cases – such as voting or carbon footprint reductions. Moral deliberating agents use both kinds of reasoning and contextual factors seem to function as important triggers. But can we-reasoning help us determine our moral obligations vis-à-vis collective action problems?

There exist overwhelming - and morally compelling - reasons for shifting to renewable energy (RE), because only that will enable us to timely mitigate dangerous global warming. In addition, several other morally weighty reasons speak in favor of the shift: considerable public health benefits, broader environmental benefits, the potential for sustainable and equitable economic development and equitable energy access, and, finally, long-term energy security. However, all the different pathways toward that goal involve tough choices.

Moral philosophy has traditionally been concerned with the question: ‘what ought I to do?’ But once we acknowledge that more often than not morally relevant outcomes (and actions) are collectively generated (or performed), we need to ask the complementary question: ‘what ought we to do?’ Some of our moral obligations are collective in nature – they are held jointly by two or more agents in that neither agent has that obligation on its own. This chapter contains a summary of my theory of collective obligations and introduces some of the core arguments.

When do agents in loose, unstructured groups have the joint ability that a collective obligation implies? Two agents a and b have joint ability to do x if a has individual ability to do xa and b has individual ability to do xb , where xa and xb produce x, both actions are compossible, and a and b are in principle capable of intentionally combining them. Importantly, joint ability is not the same as the ability to perform a joint action in the strict sense. Joint ability is scalar, and a plurality’s joint ability may be insufficient for grounding a specific collective obligation where the likelihood that the agents jointly produce x is very low.

What should we expect from a theory of collective moral obligations apart from a general level of plausibility? It should ideally confirm our moral intuitions for unambiguous cases and be practically action-guiding. Ideally, the theory would contribute towards an explanation of why we feel on occasion torn between collectively available action and individually available options. One might further think it desirable that an account of collective obligations harmonises with the agency principle and the capacity principle. There are good reasons to prefer accounts that are ontologically as frugal as possible. According to the unification desideratum, collectivist approaches may serve to unify our obligations to act towards collective endeavours. The moral improvement desideratum suggests such a theory should help overcome the individual impotence objection - the view that one does not have a duty to contribute to a collective endeavour where one’s contribution makes no perceptible difference. Finally, there is an aspiration which one might call the ‘moral phenomenology desideratum’: that a moral theory should be congruous with how agents subjectively perceive their moral agency.

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.

Collective obligations are not merely obligations to contribute to collective actions. Rather, an obligation that jointly attaches to two or more individuals is distinct from (but gives rise to) their individual contributory obligations. When agents are subject to such obligations, they may be responsible for the success of the collective action, such as coordinating the joint activity and generating the kind of group knowledge required for the group members to be able to fulfil their contributory actions. Further, they may have to pick up the slack left by others. The proposed view is not in violation of the agency principle, according to which only agents can hold moral duties, because collective obligations are ultimately held by individual moral agents, albeit jointly (the ‘ought’ itself is a joint ought).

Agents who are under a collective obligation have derivative individual obligations to establish and promote the collective endeavour. They may even permissibly use force to get other agents to comply. They can be jointly blameworthy in case of collective defection. For collective moral action problems with strict joint necessity, the number of agents available to address the problem equals the number of agents minimally necessary to address it. Wide joint necessity obtains where the number of available agents exceeds the minimally necessary number of contributors, and most large-scale collective action cases are wide joint-necessity scenarios. Importantly, collective obligations give rise to individual contributory obligations for all agents in the respective group, even for those who need not (and also for those who must not) take action.

We have collective obligations precisely when (i) there exists a specific morally significant joint-necessity problem P such that agents a, b and c can collectively, but not individually, address P. Further, (ii) conscientious moral deliberation leads all of them (or a sufficiently large subset of them) to believe that some collectively available option O is morally optimal with regard to P. Finally, (iii) a, b and c (or a sufficiently large subset of them) must be in a position to determine individual (or joint) strategies to realise O and to achieve P.