Group Duties

Moral duties are regularly attributed to groups. We might think that the United Kingdom has a moral duty to defend human rights, that environmentalists have a moral duty to push for global systemic reform, or that the affluent have a moral duty to alleviate poverty. This book asks (i) whether such groups are apt to bear duties and (ii) what this implies for their members. It defends a ‘Tripartite Model’ of group duties, which divides groups into three fundamental categories. First, combinations are collections of agents that do not have any goals or decision-making procedures in common. Combinations cannot bear moral duties. Instead, we should re-cast their purported duties as a series of duties—one held by each agent in the combination. Each duty demands its bearer to ‘I-reason’: to do the best they can, given whatever they happen to believe the others will do. Second, coalitions are groups whose members share goals but lack decision-making procedures. Coalitions also cannot bear duties, but their alleged duties should be replaced with members’ several duties to ‘we-reason’: to do one’s part in a particular group pattern of actions, on the presumption that others will do likewise. Third, collectives have group-level procedures for making decisions. They can bear duties. Collectives’ duties imply duties for collectives’ members to use their role in the collective with a view to the collective doing its duty.