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“It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you place the blame.” (Oscar Wilde)
I’m super busy these days so, instead of championing “another crazy view”, I’m going to talk about two related issues without advocating any particular stance. Ideally I’d like this to turn into a forum of ideas where you, the reader, describe why you think what you do about this stuff and we all become more enlightened through this sophisticated process of sharing. But I realize that that might not be realistic given the sparse comments Alex and I receive and your general reluctance to formulate an opinions into words on the interweb. Nevertheless, here we go.
First, I want to ask: can we hold groups responsible for what they, as a group, do? And, if yes, can we justifiably attribute blame to all individual members of a group if they, collectively, did committed some wrong? Let’s look at an example: Assume that it was wrong for Americans to re-elect George “Dubya” Bush. I’m focusing on Dubya’s re-election because, I think, here we can say that that act was a foreseeable wrong and this will get around objections from those who’d say: “uhhh, I didn’t know he’d be such a fuck-up.” So if it’s true that him getting re-elected was a wrong, can we consider ALL Americans (who, at the time of his re-election, had the capacity to vote) responsible for that wrong? To try to answer this, let’s divide American voters into two groups: (1) those that voted for Bush; and, (2) those that didn’t. The former can, surely, be held responsible for obvious reasons – they played a direct and intentional role in his re-election. But, surely, the latter group can be held responsible as well since they had the means to prevent his election, either through casting their vote in a meaningful way or by contributing resources (e.g. time, money) towards a campaign against Bush. So the members of (2) share some blame in virtue of their failure to do enough to prevent his re-election. Okay, since all American voters fit into these two groups, can we say that all Americans are therefore responsible for Bush? Seems like yes. Can we say that they are “collectively” responsible? Again, seems like yes. Now even if you want to challenge me on how we got to this point, for the moment, just assume that (through the means I described or some other method) we can hold all voting Americans responsible for the re-election of Bush. With that in hand, can we trace the responsibility back down to individuals? By that I mean can we say our American friend - call her Jenny – is responsible for Bush’s 2nd term? Can we say: “Jenny, you jerk, it’s your fault we have to deal with Dubya!” Intuitively we might think not, after all, nothing she did as a individual agent made him get re-elected (or could have prevented him from getting re-elected). But this intuition is hard to grapple with, especially since we do treat friends like Jenny as if they were directly responsible for Dubya; regardless of her political leanings. If you think the Bush case is too much of a charged of an example, consider something else: The actions or activities of corporation X contribute to the destruction of our environment. Are the employees of X collectively responsible? Those who played a part in decision making processes are: either for contributing to the decisions that led to X doing those harmful acts or for not taking sufficient steps to influence the decisions such that the harmful things wouldn’t have happened (these would be managers, for instance); or, for being a cog in, that contributes to the efficiency of, a machine that does actions or activities that are considered bad (these would be file clerks, for instance). Here, more vividly that in the Bush case, people who don’t want to be considered responsible to the wrong being done by the collective can leave – if you don’t agree with what’s being done, leave the group. So all those who stick with corporation X can justifiably be considered responsible for the harmful acts of corporation X, right??
Needless to say, there’s heaps written on this stuff in moral and political philosophy. While I find it really interesting, I haven’t, unfortunately, had a chance to become familiar with it at all. And even though someone learned on this stuff could comment on this post with a response that would adequately address the points I raised (I welcome anyone able and willing to do it), I’m more interested in hearing the intuitive responses from others who haven’t really thought about this stuff before. But maybe I’m just on my own thinking there something worth talking about here. I could say more, but I think that’s enough for now. This is just my spur-of-the-moment thoughts on the subject. I could be wrong. After all, what do I know.
