Collective responsibility

For the constitutional convention, see Cabinet collective responsibility.

Collective responsibility or collective guilt, is the responsibility of organizations, groups and societies.[1][2] Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools (punishing a whole class for the actions of one known or unknown pupil), military units, prisons (juvenile and adult), psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society.[3][4]

In ethics, both methodological individualists and normative individualists question the validity of collective responsibility.[5] Normally, only the individual actor can accrue culpability for actions that they freely cause. The notion of collective culpability seems to deny individual moral responsibility.[6] Contemporary systems of criminal law accept the principle that guilt shall only be personal.[7] According to genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses, "The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking."[8]

  1. ^ Collective Responsibility in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. ^ Gregory Mellema (1997). Collective Responsibility. Rodopi. ISBN 90-420-0311-1.
  3. ^ "Personality traits predict authoritarian tendencies, study finds". PsyPost. 29 September 2017. Retrieved 6 March 2019.
  4. ^ Alexopoulos, Golfo (January 2008). "Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s–1940s". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 50: 91–117. doi:10.1017/S0010417508000066. S2CID 143409375.
  5. ^ Smiley, Marion (1 January 2011). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University – via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  6. ^ Larry May; Stacey Hoffman (27 October 1992). Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 36–. ISBN 978-0-7425-7402-1.
  7. ^ Edwards, James (2018), "Theories of Criminal Law", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 6 March 2019
  8. ^ Anderson, Margaret Lavinia; Reynolds, Michael; Kieser, Hans-Lukas; Balakian, Peter; Moses, A. Dirk; Akçam, Taner (2013). "Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' crime against humanity: the Armenian genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)". Journal of Genocide Research. 15 (4): 463–509. doi:10.1080/14623528.2013.856095. S2CID 73167962. This is a telling slip; Lewy is talking about 'the Armenians' as if the defenceless women and children who comprised the deportation columns were vicariously responsible for Armenian rebels in other parts of the country. The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking. It fails to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, on which international humanitarian law has been insisting for over a hundred years now.