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There is virtually no philosophical consensus on what, exactly, imperfect duties are. In this paper, I lay out three criteria which I argue any adequate account of imperfect duties should satisfy. Using beneficence as a leading example, I suggest that existing accounts of imperfect duties will have trouble meeting those criteria. I then propose a new approach: thinking of imperfect duties as duties held by groups, rather than individuals. I show, again using the example of beneficence, that this proposal can (...) satisfy the criteria, explaining how something can both have the necessity characteristic of duty, while also allowing agents the latitude which seems to attach to imperfect duties. (shrink)

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Positinggroup levelobligations has come under attack from concerns relating to agency as a necessary requirement for obligation bearing. Roughly stated, the worry is that since only agents can have moralobligations, and groups are not agents, groups cannot have moralobligations. The intuition behind this constraint is itself based on the ability requirement of 'ought implies can': in order for agroup to have an obligation it must have the ability to perform an (...) action, but only agents can have abilities. This paper argues that from accounts of shared agency we can develop a concept of joint ability, undermining the problem of agency forgroupobligations. (shrink)

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Ifgroup members aim to fulfill a collective obligation, they must act in such a way that the composition of their individual actions amounts to agroup action that fulfills the collective obligation. We study a strong sense of joint action in which the members of agroup design and then publicly adopt agroup plan that coordinates the individual actions of thegroup members. We characterize the conditions under which agroup plan successfully (...) coordinates thegroup members' individual actions, and study how the public adoption of a plan changes the context in which individual agents make a decision about what to do. (shrink)

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Members of some social groups hold other members to have specialobligations in virtue of their membership. But is this justified? And if so, how? I argue that there is a deep connection between the structure of certain social groups and some specialobligations. The issue, then, is to determine how one might haveobligations in virtue of one's membership in a particulargroup. In this dissertation I argue that groups capable of collective action have, as (...) elements of their structure, interpersonal relations that generate commitments and these commitments, in turn, constitute specialobligations. ;I begin by arguing that groups capable of collective action must be able to coordinate or monitor the coordination of the members, and to do so within certain normative constraints. To coordinate members according to these constraints, groups must implement some form of decision procedure, a scheme by which the intentions and actions of individual members of agroup are coordinated toward some collective purpose or goal. This coordination requires that in groups capable of collective action, there must be some authority system by which the members are coordinated. This authority system must be able to authorize the implementation of norms through members' practices, endorsements, or sanctions, and to adjudicate conflicts that might arise between constraints. I argue that these authority systems may be largely tacit. ;Members of groups capable of collective action do not, however, acquireobligations because of their commitments to thegroup per se. Rather, members of such groups acquireobligations because of the nature of the relationships they cannot help but form with one another. Theirobligations form because of the commitments they have to one another in virtue of being a part of agroup capable of collective action. While theseobligations may not constitute all-things-considered normative requirements, they do constitute normative considerations that members of groups need to acknowledge when they determine what they ought or ought not to do. I conclude that insofar as agroup is capable of collective action, members of those groups have at least these limitedobligations toward one another. (shrink)

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Assuming that there is an obligation to combat structural injustice, what does it look like? I suggest that discerning what this obligation is, and on whom it falls, first requires being sensitive to facts about social structure. Importantly, we need to know how social structure is constituted, and the ways in which it can be disrupted. I argue that since social structure is constituted, in part, by concepts that undergird social practices, then our critical attention should be focused on those (...) concepts that undergird oppressive social practices. In the end, I suggest that the obligation to combat structural injustice falls on privileged social groups to significantly aid in the processes that give rise to conceptual change. (shrink)

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This is how A. John Simmons sets the scene for his discussion of political obligation in his book Moral Principles and PoliticalObligations, one of the best known contemporary philosophical treatments of the subject.

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Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where thegroup is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly,obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bearobligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair (...) of conclusions is important, since philosophers who endorse large-scale non-agentive groups’ abilities almost universally endorse theirobligations. More importantly, the twin arguments (one for abilities, one againstobligations) make the following novel contribution: abilities imply agency-involving explanations, whileobligations imply action-guidance. This general conclusion should be of interest beyond social ontology. (shrink)

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Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid togroup-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher ordergroup-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemicobligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that (...) our epistemicobligations concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemicobligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods. (shrink)

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Individuals have various kinds ofobligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work forgroup agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds ofobligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tantoobligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto (...)obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts. (shrink)

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The individual motorist often defends his unwillingness to change his driving habits in the face of air pollution by pointing out that a change in his actions would be insignificant. The environmentalist responds by asking what would happen if everyone did change. In this paper I defend the environmentalist’s response. I argue that we can appeal to the following principle to defend bothgroup and individualobligations to clean up air: if the consequences of everyone doing aare undesirable, (...) then each and every one ought to do was he can to prevent the undesirable consequences. (shrink)

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Recent developments in biology have made it possible to acquire more and more precise information concerning our genetic makeup. There are four groups of people who may want to know about our genes. First, we ourselves can have an interest in being aware of own health status. Second, there are people who are genetically linked with us, and who can have an interest in the knowledge. Third, individuals with whom we have contracts and economic arrangements may have an interest in (...) knowing about our genetic makeup. Fourth, society as a whole can have an interest in the composition of our genes. As regards the question of motivation, the term 'should' can be interpreted in three ways. Prudentially speaking, to say that individuals should act in a certain manner is to say that the actions in question promote the long-term self-interest of these individuals. From the viewpoint of morality, we should do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong. When it comes to legal thinking, it is held in most liberal societies that grave other-regarding harm should be the primary justification for the use of coercion and constraint. In the paper, all these aspects are examined in more detail. (shrink)

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We naturally attributeobligations to groups, and take suchobligations to have consequences for theobligations ofgroup members. The threat posed by anthropogenic climate change provides an urgent case. It seems that we, together, have an obligation to prevent climate catastrophe, and that we, as individuals, have an obligation to contribute. However, understood strictly, attributions ofobligations to groups might seem illegitimate. On the one hand, the groups in question—the people alive today, say—are rarely (...) fully-fledged moral agents, making it unclear how they can be subjects ofobligations. On the other, the attributions can rarely be understood distributively, as concerned with members’obligations, becauseobligations to do something require a capacity to do it, and individual members often lack the relevant capacities. Moreover, even if groups can haveobligations, it is unclear why that would be relevant for members, exactly because members often lack control over whethergroupobligations are fulfilled. In previous work, I have argued that a general understanding of individualobligations extends non-mysteriously to irreducibly sharedobligations, rendering attributions ofobligations to groups legitimate. In this paper, I spell out how the proposed account also helps us understand the relation between individual and sharedobligations. Even though few individual human agents have any significant control over whether we will be successful in preventing climate catastrophe, our collective capacity to prevent catastrophe and shared preventative obligation to do so can give rise to significant individualobligations to contribute to its fulfillment. (shrink)

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Stephanie Collins’Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under agroup-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of thegroup, duties to take steps responsive to the others with (...) a view to thegroup’s φ-ing or express willingness to do so. In support of the first claim, Collins argues that only groups that can make decisions can bear duties, and that the ability to make decisions requires the relevant sort of decision-making procedure. I suggest that both parts of this argument remain in need of further support. I furthermore argue that Collins’ account of coordination duties gets certain kinds of cases wrong, and suggest that attributions of duties to groups without decision-making procedures are more plausibly understood as attributing shared duties. (shrink)

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It is commonplace to attributeobligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where thegroup is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to haveobligations of their own, and thatgroupobligations can (...) be understood in terms of moral demands on individualgroup members. It has also been suggested that members of groups can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This paper discusses the agency problem and argues that the most promising attempts at solutions understandgroupobligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents. (shrink)

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In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collectiveobligations to refer toobligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collectiveobligations, in this sense; that suchobligations can give rise to and explainobligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective (...)obligations are not simply reducible to individualobligations; and that collectiveobligations supervene on individualobligations, without being reducible to them. The sort of supervenience I have in mind here is what is sometimes called ‘global supervenience’. In other words, there cannot be two worlds which differ in respect of the collectiveobligations which exist in them without also differing in respect of the individualobligations which exist in them. (shrink)

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Olle Blomberg and Björn Petersson (2023) argue that collective moralobligations, at least in some cases, are irreducibly collective. By this they mean the subject of the obligation is agroup and their having a moral obligation collectively cannot be analyzed into individualobligations of its members to do their parts in what thegroup has an obligation to do. The main argument focuses on a choice situation that looks like a moral Hi-Lo game, in which (...) we have the intuition that thegroup is responsible for pursuing the best moral outcome. Blomberg and Petersson argue that we cannot account for this intuition by deriving it from individualobligations of the parties to do their parts in bringing about the best moral outcome. In contrast, I will argue that the case has not been made and that we can plausibly account for the intuition that thegroup has a moral obligation while seeing it as grounded in the independently derivedobligations of the members to do their parts. (shrink)

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Does one have specialobligations to support the political institutions of one’s own country precisely because it is one’s own? In short, does one have politicalobligations? This book argues for an affirmative answer, construing one’s country as a political society of which one is a member, and a political society as a special type of socialgroup. Theobligations in question are not moral requirements derived from general moral principles. They come, rather, from one’s participation (...) in a special kind of commitment: a joint commitment. This theory is referred to as the plural subject theory of political obligation since, by the author’s definition, those who are party to any joint commitment constitute a plural subject of some action in a broad sense of the term. Several alternative theories are compared and contrasted with plural subject theory, with a particular focus on the most famous — actual contract theory — according to which membership in a political society is a matter of participation in an agreement. The book offers plural subject accounts of both social rules and everyday agreements, and includes discussion of political authority and punishment. (shrink)

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Front-line employees (FELs) facing double challenges of handling demanding supervisors and irresponsible customers in organizational settings. Performance of service organizations exceedingly reliant on knowledge sharing within organizational employees. FLEs develop the destructive emotions of revenge attitude from abusive supervision and customers’ mistreatment and diminish knowledge sharing. This work aims to determine the effect of abusive supervision (ABS) and customer mistreatment (CMT) on the development of revenge attitude (RVA) and felt obligation (FTO) reduces the knowledge hiding behaviors. Moreover, the FLEs categorical (...) factors of work experience and gender vary the effect of knowledge hiding. Survey data from 201 FLEs police officers. Structural equation modeling partial least square regression (PLS-SEM) SmartPLS 3.1 was utilized to test the model. Study results confirm that ABS and CMT significantly impact the RVA, and FTO reduces the RVA. Moreover, RVA influences the evasive, playing dumb, and rationalized knowledge hiding behaviors, and FTO significantly streamlined the knowledge hiding behaviors. FLEs personal attributes of experience and gender moderates the knowledge hiding behaviour and analysed with PLS multiplegroup analysis (MGA). The study contributes to the knowledge hiding in service work settings FLEs facing internal and external pressures. Service firms need to train the FLEs to manage the customer with the established working standards and work with the supervisor exceeding expectations. Study limitations and future research opportunities were reported at the end. (shrink)

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While philosophers have highlighted important reasons to resist one’s own oppression, they tend to overlook the phenomenon of complacency about one’s own oppression. This article addresses this gap by arguing that some oppressed agents are obligated to resist complacency about their own oppression because failing to do so would significantly harm themselves and others. Complacent members of oppressed groups fail to resist meaningfully, are self-satisfied, and are epistemically culpable. I contend that focusing on the obligation to combat complacency is useful (...) for at least two reasons. First, complacency about one’s own oppression is a distinctive phenomenon that warrants separate philosophical attention. Second, focusing on the obligation to resist complacency helps analyze an undertheorizedgroup of oppressed agents by challenging the binary understanding of power prevalent in the literature on the duty to resist, thereby sharpening philosophical accounts of resistance and filling a gap in a prominent well-being-based theory of resistance. (shrink)

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Do you persist as the same person over time because you keep the same mind or because you keep the same body? Philosophers have long investigated this question of personal identity with thought experiments. Cognitive scientists have joined this tradition by assessing lay intuitions about those cases. Much of this work has focused on judgments of identity continuity. But identity also has practical significance:obligations are tagged to one's identity over time. Understanding how someone persists as the same person (...) over time could provide insight into how and why moral and legalobligations persist. In this paper, we investigate judgments ofobligations in hypothetical cases where a person's mind and body diverge (e.g., brain transplant cases). We find a striking pattern of results: In assigningobligations in these identity test cases, people are divided among three groups: “body‐followers,” “mind‐followers,” and “splitters”—people who say that the obligation is split between the mind and the body. Across studies, responses are predicted by a variety of factors, including mind/body dualism, essentialism, education, and professional training. When we give this task to professional lawyers, accountants, and bankers, we find they are more inclined to rely on bodily continuity in trackingobligations. These findings reveal not only the heterogeneity of intuitions about identity but how these intuitions relate to the legal standing of an individual'sobligations. (shrink)

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InGroup Duties, Stephanie Collins proposes a ‘tripartite’ social ontology of groups as obligation-bearers. Producing a unified theory ofgroupobligations that reflects our messy social reality is challenging and this ‘three-sizes-fit-all’ approach promises clarity but does not always keep that promise. I suggest considering the epistemic level as primary in determining collectiveobligations, allowing for more fluidity than the proposed tripartite ontology of collectives, coalitions and combinations.

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Introduction: Ethical considerations in clinical research extend beyond trial completion, emphasizing post-trial responsibilities to ensure participant well-being, particularly in resource-limited settings. This study explores the perspectives of researchers and Research Ethics Committee (REC) members in Tanzania regarding post-trialobligations and their alignment with key ethical frameworks such as the Belmont Report, CIOMS guidelines, and the Declaration of Helsinki. Methods: A qualitative phenomenographic case study was conducted, including a focusgroup discussion with 11 REC members from three Good Samaritan (...) Foundation (GSF) institutions with a longstanding research collaboration with international partners world wide. Additionally, in-depth interviews were conducted with purposively selected researchers. Data saturation guided the sample size, and NVIVO 12 software facilitated thematic analysis. Results: Findings revealed significant gaps in post-trial care, particularly in maintaining access to interventions. RECs and researchers face challenges in fulfilling post-trial responsibilities calling for clear guidelines and sustainable post-trial mechanisms in resource poor settings. A disconnect exists between RECs’ ethical oversight and researchers’ practical realities. Community engagement is crucial for ethical research but is often inadequately sustained. Conclusion: Ethical frameworks must explicitly address post-trialobligations, particularly in low-resource settings. Strengthening communication between RECs, researchers, and sponsors, along with ongoing community engagement, is vital for equitable and sustainable global health research. (shrink)

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This paper lists a number of puzzles for sharedobligations – puzzles about the role of individual influence, individual reasons to contribute towards fulfilling the obligation, about what makes someone a member of agroup sharing an obligation, and the relation between agency and obligation – and proposes to solve them based on a general analysis ofobligations. On the resulting view, sharedobligations do not presuppose joint agency.

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A morally objectionable outcome can be overdetermined by the actions of multiple individual agents. In such cases, the outcome is the same regardless of what any individual does or does not do. (For a clear example of such a case, imagine the execution of an innocent person by a firing squad.) We argue that, in some of these types of cases, (a) there exists agroup agent, a moral agent constituted by individual agents; (b) thegroup agent is (...) guilty of violating a moral obligation; however, (c) none of the individual agents violate any of their moralobligations. We explicate and defend this view, and consider its applications to problems generated by anthropogenic climate change and electoral politics. (shrink)

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Life in Groups: How We Think, Feel, and Act Together comprises thirteen essays by the author relating to human life in groups, together with a substantial introduction and concluding discussion. The essays continue the development and application of the author’s perspective on collective beliefs, emotions, and actions, arguing that these and other central social phenomena are grounded in a joint commitment of the parties. This commitment unifies them, guides their actions going forward, and determines their relations to one another in (...) important ways. In particular, it grounds in each of the parties a set of rights andobligations of a particular kind. The introduction serves both to introduce joint commitment to those unfamiliar with it and to advance discussion in light of questions that have been raised. Several of the essays respond to comments on particular aspects of the author’s work. These include an essay that addresses some central questions about a joint commitment approach to the problem of political obligation. (shrink)

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Punishing groups raises a difficult question, namely, how their punishment can be justified at all. Some have argued that punishing groups is morally problematic because of the effects that the punishment entails for their members. In this paper we argue against this view. We distinguish the question of internal justice—how punishment-effects are distributed—from the question of external justice—whether the punishment is justified. We argue that issues of internal justice do not in general undermine the permissibility of punishment. We also defend (...) the permissibility of what some call “random punishment.” We argue that, for some kinds of collectives, there is no general obligation to internally distribute the punishment-effects equally or in proportion to individual contribution. (shrink)

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It is natural to think of political philosophy as being concerned with reflection on some of the ways in which groups of human beings come together to confront together the problems that they face together: in other words, as the domain, par excellence, of collective action. From this point of view it might seem surprising that the notion of collective obligation rarely assumes centre-stage within the subject. If there are, or can be, collectiveobligations, then these must surely constrain (...) the ways in which we can act collectively. Indeed, one might even suspect that considerations about collectiveobligations ought to play a central role in demarcating the form that any legitimate form of political organization ought to take. -/- Elsewhere I have argued that we have good reasons for accepting the existence of global collectiveobligations - in other words, collectiveobligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole.(Wringe 2006, 2010, forthcoming, under review) For example, the existence of suchobligations provides a plausible solution to a problem which is sometimes thought to arise if we think that individuals have a right to have their basic needs satisfied. In this paper, I shall argue that in many situations, forward-looking globalobligations give rise to an obligation on individuals to work towards bringing into existence and support an institutional system which will enable theirobligations to be met. Call such an obligation the ‘Obligation to Promote Satisfactory Global Institutions.’ I shall also examine a significant challenge to this line of argument, which I call the ‘Pluralist Challenge’ One might suppose that the ‘Obligation to Promote Satisfactory Global Institutions’ could be met by providing strategic support to attempts to modify and extend existing international institutions. After all, creating new institutions is a difficult matter: perhaps it would be better, especially where stringentobligations are concerned, to concentrate on those institutions which we already have. On the other hand, existing international institutions are subject to a range of significant moral and ethical criticisms. It would simply be naïve to suppose that their existence of such institutions is based on an international consensus about what justice requires; and it is not clear how we could motivate individuals who have severe ethical reservations about the existence of such institutions, or why we should wish to. This suggests that those who think that there are global collectiveobligations, and that suchobligations should play an important role in shaping how we think of international distributive justice are faced with a significant dilemma: either support a program of extending and strengthening existing institutions in a way which risks entrenching some existing forms of injustice; or commit oneself to a program of attempting to build new institutions which will have to compete with those institutions we have already and which are unlikely to be in a position to meet help us to discharge our collectiveobligations at any point in the near future. Neither option seems satisfactory. I shall argue that our response should be to look for plausible ethical constraints on how international institutions should be developed, and suggest that these constraints are likely to take a cosmopolitan form. (shrink)

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_ Source: _Page Count 19 Collectivities can haveobligations beyond the aggregate of pre-existingobligations of their members. Certain such collectiveobligations _distribute_, i.e., become members’obligations to do their fair share. In _incremental good_ cases, i.e., those in which a member’s fair share would go part way toward fulfilling the collectivity’s obligation, each member has an unconditional obligation to contribute.States are involuntary collectivities that bear moralobligations. Certain states, _democratic legal states_, are collectivities whose (...)obligations can distribute. Many existing states are democratic legal states, but none satisfies more rigorous requirements of distributive justice. There, citizens who hold assets, in excess of what is just, bear a distributed duty to dedicate that excess toward correcting the injustice. It is an incremental good case not conditioned on the conformity of others who are also wealthier than justice allows, nor on the diligence of the state in meeting itsobligations. (shrink)

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Many authors hold that collectives, as well as individuals can be the subjects ofobligations. Typically these authors have focussed on theobligations of highly structured groups, and of small, informal groups. One might wonder, however, whether there could also be collectiveobligations which fall on everyone – what I shall call ' global collectiveobligations '. One reason for thinking that this is not possible has to do with considerations about agency : it seems as (...) though an entity can only be the subject ofobligations if it is an agent. In this paper, I try to show that the argument from agency is not a good reason for being sceptical about the existence of global collectiveobligations : it derives whatever plausibility it has from the idea that claims about obligation need to be addressable to some agent. My suggestion is that we should accept this principle about the addressability ofobligations, but deny that the addressee of an obligation need be the subject of that obligation. The collectiveobligations of unstructured collections of individuals, including global collectiveobligations, meet the addressability requirement insofar as they require something of the individuals who make up the collective. (shrink)

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ABSTRACT While philosophers have highlighted important reasons to resist one’s own oppression, they tend to overlook the phenomenon of complacency about one’s own oppression. This article addresses this gap by arguing that some oppressed agents are obligated to resist complacency about their own oppression because failing to do so would significantly harm themselves and others. Complacent members of oppressed groups fail to resist meaningfully, are self-satisfied, and are epistemically culpable. I contend that focusing on the obligation to combat complacency is (...) useful for at least two reasons. First, complacency about one’s own oppression is a distinctive phenomenon that warrants separate philosophical attention. Second, focusing on the obligation to resist complacency helps analyze an undertheorizedgroup of oppressed agents by challenging the binary understanding of power prevalent in the literature on the duty to resist, thereby sharpening philosophical accounts of resistance and filling a gap in a prominent well-being-based theory of resistance. (shrink)

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This article proposes a journalism ethics obligation to identify speculation clearly, attribute it to sources, report any basis for it, and offer appropriate qualification, especially when speculation is based on stereotypes of stigmatized groups. Explicitly recognizing this responsibility addresses a gap in the traditional conception of journalistic responsibilities: When journalists fulfill responsibilities corresponding to their gatekeeper and watchdog roles by reporting sources' views, speculation may enter. Examples from major American newspaper and newsmagazine coverage of Andrew Cunanan, an openly gay man (...) who in 1997 allegedly murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace and 4 other men, show how journalists met and failed to meet the proposed obligation when reporting speculation linking Cunanan's sexuality to his crimes. (shrink)

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There is another set of entities that needs to be brought into the conversation about the ethical, legal, and social implications of scientific conduct. This widely variedgroup includes not‐for‐profit educational, academic, public‐service, and philanthropic organizations other than the type mentioned above as well as for‐profit businesses. Despite their major differences, these organizations may all be in a position to make decisions, directly or indirectly, about the conduct of scientific research. And those decisions may have a significant impact on (...) the parties normally involved in thinking and talking aboutobligations and concerns—the researchers, the subjects, and the general public. Yet there are few if any conceptual frameworks to help organizations address the ethical, legal, and social issues related to conducting scientific research. There are also few resources to help organizations find and develop the expertise required to make responsible decisions or communicate those decisions in ways that could support and advance the ethical conduct of research.In what follows, we try to identify and explore the duties, rights, and interests of one such organization, the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University, when asked to play a supporting role in research on the genetics of intelligence. As central agents in this case, we hope to demonstrate why organizations like CTY cannot be neglected in the broader effort to ensure trustworthy research into the genetics of intelligence. (shrink)

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Tomasello describes how the sense of moral obligation emerges from a shared perspective with collaborative partners and in-group members. Our commentary expands this framework to accommodate multiple social identities, where the normative standards associated with diversegroup memberships can often conflict with one another. Reconciling these conflictingobligations is argued to be a central part of human morality.

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In this paper I attempt to show how an appeal to a particular kind of collective obligation - a collective obligation falling on an unstructured collective consisting of the world’s population as a whole – can be used to undermine recently influential objections to the idea that there is a human right to health which have been put forward by Gopal Sreenivasan and Onora O’Neill. -/- I take this result to be significant both for its own sake and because it (...) helps to answer a challenge often put to Those who argue for the existence of collectiveobligations: namely, to explain why the question of whether there are any suchobligations might matter from a practical point of view. One way of introducing the objection is to focus on questions of agency. Here I'll argue both that there can beobligations on groups that are not themselves collective agents, and that these can play an important explanatory and clarifcatory role in accounting forobligations which fall on individuals. (shrink)

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BackgroundA key ethical question in genomics research relates to whether individual genetic research results should be disclosed to research participants and if so, which results are to be disclosed, by whom and when. Whilst this issue has received only scarce attention in African bioethics discourse, the extension of genomics research to the African continent has brought it into sharp focus.MethodsIn this qualitative study, we examined the views of adolescents, parents and caregivers participating in a paediatric and adolescent HIV-TB genomic study (...) in Botswana on how solidarity and reciprocityobligations could guide decisions about feedback of individual genetic research results. Data were collected using deliberative focusgroup discussions and in-depth interviews.ResultsFindings from 93 participants demonstrated the importance of considering solidarity and reciprocityobligations in decisions about the return of individual genetic research results to participants. Participants viewed research participation as a mutual relationship and expressed that return of research results would be one way in which research participation could be reciprocated. They noted that when reciprocityobligations are respected, participants feel valued and not respecting reciprocity expectations could undermine participant trust and participation in future studies.ConclusionsWe conclude that expectations of solidarity and reciprocity could translate into an obligation to feedback selected individual genetic research results in African genomics research. (shrink)

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Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

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The paper is organized around two major, but closely interconnected goals. First, the paper’s principal aim is to offer a normative theory of politicalobligations that is based on certain insights of philosophical anarchism, theories of associativeobligations and political realism. Second, the paper aims to offer a normative theoretical framework to examine politicalobligations in contemporary non-democratic contexts that does not vindicate non-democratic regimes and that does not exclude politicalobligations from the terrain of moral (...) normativity. The theory of politicalobligations this paper proposes can be briefly summarized as follows: politicalobligations are duties of compliance with the political authority claims of those who exercise political power. Their primary ground is membership. The mere fact of membership has moral weight in its own right and it is also inseparably embedded into a rich context of moral reasons for action that includes general reasons; ad hoc reasons; regime-specific reasons applying to every subject; and regime-specific offices that attribute specific responsibilities to individuals and groups. This rich context of typical moral reasons plays an important role in deciding what needs to be done, all things considered, with respect to the political authority claims. This account attempts to describe compliance in terms of genuine politicalobligations and also claims to be a plausible and general account. It does not claim to be a theoretically coherent moral justification for politicalobligations, however, just a theoretically coherent account of the varied sources and limitations of politicalobligations. (shrink)

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In Morality and Socially Constructed Norms, Laura Valentini argues that moralobligations to respect social norms can be explained without invoking the concept of ‘joint commitment.’ Her resulting account is, in one important sense, individualistic, and therefore struggles to account for widely held intuitions about the normative significance of social norms. I argue that we can rescue the notion of joint commitment from Valentini’s objections, and incorporate it into a version of her account that preserves its insights.

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We propose a new account of collective moral obligation. We argue that several agents have a moral obligation together only if they each have (i) a context-specific capacity to view their situation from thegroup’s perspective, and (ii) at least a general capacity to deliberate about what they ought to do together. Such an obligation is irreducibly collective, in that it does not imply that the individuals have anyobligations to contribute to what is required of the (...) class='Hi'>group. We highlight various distinctive features of our account. One such feature is that moralobligations are always relative to an agential perspective. (shrink)

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My response to the commentaries focuses on four issues: the diversity both within and between cultures of the many different faces of obligation; the possible evolutionary roots of the sense of obligation, including possible sources that I did not consider; the possible ontogenetic roots of the sense of obligation, including especially children's understanding of groups from a third-party perspective ; and the relation between philosophical accounts of normative phenomena in general – which are pitched as not totally empirical – and (...) empirical accounts such as my own. I have tried to distinguish comments that argue for extensions of the theory from those that represent genuine disagreement. (shrink)

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Those who believe that they have specialobligations to their community — to their family, state or nation, clan, tribe, or culturalgroup — often insist that they have duties not merely to present and future members. They also claim to have responsibilities to, or in respect to, their predecessors. David Miller, in his defence of ‘nationality,’ claims that the existence of a nation as a historical community is one of the features which make it ‘a community of (...) obligation.’ ‘“Because our forebears have toiled and spilt their blood to build and defend the nation, we who are born into it inherit an obligation to continue their work….’” Being a member of a nation, says Yael Tamir, requires individuals to keep faith with its history. Annette Baier thinks that if we fail to pass on our inherited public goods to our descendants we can be blamed not only for harming their interests but also for not carrying out the intentions of our forebears. (shrink)

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Although psychologists have paid scant attention to the sense of obligation as a distinctly human motivation, moral philosophers have identified two of its key features: First, it has a peremptory, demanding force, with a kind of coercive quality, and second, it is often tied to agreement-like social interactions in which breaches prompt normative protest, on the one side, and apologies, excuses, justifications, and guilt on the other. Drawing on empirical research in comparative and developmental psychology, I provide here a psychological (...) foundation for these unique features by showing that the human sense of obligation is intimately connected developmentally with the formation of a shared agent “we,” which not only directs collaborative efforts but also self-regulates them. Thus, children's sense of obligation is first evident inside, but not outside, of collaborative activities structured by joint agency with a partner, and it is later evident in attitudes toward in-group, but not out-group, members connected by collective agency. When you and I voluntarily place our fate in one another's hands in interdependent collaboration – scaled up to our lives together in an interdependent culturalgroup – this transforms the instrumental pressure that individuals feel when pursuing individual goals into the pressure that “we” put on me to live up to our shared expectations: a we > me self-regulation. The human sense of obligation may therefore be seen as a kind of self-conscious motivation. (shrink)

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Group-based reasons are reasons to play one’s part in some pattern of action that the members of somegroup could perform, because of the good features of the pattern. This paper discusses three broad conceptions of such reasons. According to the agency-first conception, there are nogroup-based reasons in cases where the relevantgroup is not or would not be itself an agent. According to the behaviour-first conception, what matters is that the other members of the (...)group would play their parts in the relevant pattern, not whether they would have the cooperative intentional states constitutive ofgroup agency in doing so. This paper argues against these conceptions and in favour of the powers-first conception, according to which what matters is that the members of thegroup have practically relevant powers. (shrink)

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Two groups of agents, G1 and G2, face a *moral conflict* if G1 has a moral obligation and G2 has a moral obligation, such that theseobligations cannot both be fulfilled. We study moral conflicts using a multi-agent deontic logic devised to represent reasoning about sentences like "In the interest ofgroup F of agents,group G of agents ought to see to it that phi". We provide a formal language and a consequentialist semantics. An illustration of (...) our semantics with an analysis of the Prisoner’s Dilemma follows. Next, necessary and sufficient conditions are given for (1) the possibility that a singlegroup of agents faces a moral conflict, for (2) the possibility that two groups of agents face a moral conflict within a single moral code, and for (3) the possibility that two groups of agents face a moral conflict. (shrink)

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Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civicobligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and (...) Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civicobligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as agroup. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights. Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds. (shrink)

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We argue that individuals who have access to vaccines and for whom vaccination is not medically contraindicated have a moral obligation to contribute to the realisation of herd immunity by being vaccinated. Contrary to what some have claimed, we argue that this individual moral obligation exists in spite of the fact that each individual vaccination does not significantly affect vaccination coverage rates and therefore does not significantly contribute to herd immunity. Establishing the existence of a moral obligation to be vaccinated (...) despite the negligible contribution each vaccination can make to the realisation of herd immunity is important because such moral obligation would strengthen the justification for coercive vaccination policies. We show that two types of arguments—namely a utilitarian argument based on Parfit’s Principle ofGroup Beneficence and a contractualist argument—can ground an individual moral obligation to be vaccinated, in spite of the imperceptible contribution that any single vaccination makes to vaccine coverage rates. We add a further argument for a moral obligation to be vaccinated that does not require embracing problematic comprehensive moral theories such as utilitarianism or contractualism. The argument is based on a “duty of easy rescue” applied to collectives, which grounds a collective moral obligation to realise herd immunity, and on a principle of fairness in the distribution of the burdens that must be borne to realise herd immunity. (shrink)

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A traditional ethic of medicine asserts that physicians have specialobligations to individual patients with whom they have a clinical relationship. Contemporary trends in US healthcare financing like bundled payments seem to threaten traditional conceptions of specialobligations of individual physicians to individual patients because their population-based focus sets a tone that seems to emphasise responsibilities for groups of patients by groups of physicians in an organisation. Prior to undertaking a cogent debate about the fate and normative weight (...) of specialobligations and a traditional ethic for contemporary healthcare, we need a deeper examination of what the traditional ethic of specialobligations really means. Here we offer a conception of ‘doubly distributed’ specialobligations. Physicians and similarly minded healing professionals abiding by a traditional ethic have always spread their devotion and attention across multiple patients and have shared responsibilities with physician and non-physician colleagues in much the same way devoted parents have frequently distributed their specialobligations across multiple children and across multiple parents. By taking up the extended analogy of parent we argue that doubly distributing specialobligations need not contradict the possibility of specialobligations in restructured collective forms of healthcare delivery and financing. (shrink)

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