Abstract:
Collective moral problems concern cases where some collective outcome must be generated or prevented, but no (individual or collective) agent has direct control over the outcome in the form of actions that are sufficient to prevent or generate that outcome. For example, refraining from buying factory-farmed chickens, not (over)using polluting modes of transport, moving to renewable energy among corporations, nuclear disarmament among states, reducing GHG emissions, or refraining from large-scale natural resource depletion. In such cases, we have good reason to think the group somehow morally ought to refrain from collective harm or to secure the collective benefit. The difficulty is that no agent individually can make a morally relevant difference, yet unorganized groups do not qualify as moral agents, and therefore the group itself cannot bear moral duties. Recently, Collins (2019), Schwenkenbecher (2021), and Blomberg and Petersson (2023) have developed accounts of collective moral duties based on variants of team reasoning to explain why (members of) non-agential groups have relevant duties in such cases. Team reasoning is a kind of reasoning that invokes the perspective of the group as the starting point for reasoning about what to do when faced with a collective action problem.
In this paper, I raise the non-compliance dilemma for such views. The collective duty is either conditional or unconditional on the willingness of members. If the collective duty is conditional on the willingness of members (Collins 2019; Schwenkenbecher 2021), then team reasoning views generate wrong first-order moral judgments in cases of known non-compliance. If the collective duty is unconditional on the willingness of members (Blomberg and Petersson 2023), then the ability to successfully team reason is masked in cases of known non-compliance, which shows that team reasoning is not the relevant kind of moral reasoning for collective moral problems. Finally, I argue that to account for our considered moral judgments in all collective moral problems, we must invoke a kind of moral reasoning based on a principle that has universality embedded within itself (e.g., Kant’s Formula of Universal Law). But this requires a solution to the problem of relevant descriptions. I conclude by tentatively suggesting such a solution.