Abstract
Hierarchical groups shape social, political, and personal life. This paper concerns the question of how individuals within such groups can be responsible. The paper explores how individual responsibility can be partially grounded in difference-making. The paper concentrates on the control condition of responsibility and takes into view three distinct phenomena of responsibility in hierarchical groups. First, a superior can be responsible for outcomes that her subordinates bring about. Second, a subordinate can be responsible although she is unable to prevent the outcome she brings about. Third, a superior can sometimes be responsible to a greater degree than her subordinates. It is argued that difference-making, as an interpretation of the control condition that partially grounds responsibility, accounts for all three of these phenomena within a limited but significant range of circumstances and can hence partially ground individual moral responsibility in hierarchical groups. The paper provides an element of a theory of individual responsibility to complement theories of corporate responsibility.
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Notes
The debate over whether there are groups and whether they are agents is irrelevant for present purposes (since there might be an individual at the top of the hierarchy—hence the action of a hierarchical group would be, in a way, the action of this individual, which is carried out by individuals down the “chain of command”).
To understand what it means for a (hierarchical) group to act, I follow the two-level picture of Isaacs (2011): When a group acts there are two actions (or facts pertaining to two levels)—the action of an individual acting on behalf of the group, and the collective action, which the individual brings about (in some sense) but of which she is not the agent. My view differs from Isaacs’ in that I account for this difference via conditionals instead of what descriptions of the actions are possible (see Sect. 3). Moreover, to be applicable to hierarchical groups with many levels, I extend Isaacs’ account from a two-level to a multi-level view (this seems consistent with her view). Schematically, when a hierarchical group acts, for each level on a hierarchy, there is an individual action to be found. When there is no individual at the top of the hierarchy and the group is a corporate agent (cf. List and Pettit 2011, or Isaacs, 2011), then the individual actions together bring about, but are different from, the action of this group as a whole. I understand actions, of individual or corporate agents, as events that are caused in the right way by an agent’s intentions.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is equipped with an assemblage of various modes of collective responsibility from different legal traditions. In recent cases the court was split on the question of how these distinct approaches combine and interact and what distinguishes a joint criminal enterprise from indirect co-perpetration (Manacorda and Meloni 2011; Vest, 2014).
Similarly, Joel Feinberg (1970b) draws a distinction between collective responsibility and responsibility in hierarchical groups. Kutz (2000, 11) likewise criticizes the “paradigm” of collective responsibility as “unsuited to the depersonalized, hierarchic, bureaucratic, but nonetheless collective institutions that characterize modern life.”
This distinction is due to Rosen (2015) and I follow the understanding of “ground” presented there.
With one limitation: The understanding of “responsibility” in moral philosophy (which I follow), and the role the concept plays here, differs from the understanding in the literature on just war theory.
I use “agency” and “control” largely interchangeably. I prefer to talk of “agency” rather than “causation” because, whatever the agency condition may be, it is a further question how agency relates to causation (one could, for example, deny transitivity of one but not the other).
I focus on agency as a relation (between agents and outcomes) in contrast to agency as a predicate (i.e., an entity capable of acting). Agency as a relation seems central at least for some moral responses. In the terms of Shoemaker (2015), the kind relevant here would be “responsibility as accountability.” There are limits to this conception (see e.g. Smith, 2006).
Consider, relatedly, how causation by itself can hardly ground moral responsibility. (1) Agents are not responsible for all causal consequences of their actions (Rosen, 2010). (2) Agents might be responsible for things they did not cause (Sartorio, 2004). Moreover, some analyses, or forms, of responsibility do not require agency with respect to some event or outcome.
Bazargan-Forward (2017) examines non-hierarchical pairs of individual agents and thus does not speak of “superior” or “subordinate” but of an enabling and an enabled individual “P1” and “P2” respectively. But the puzzle for grounding the control condition of responsibility in a causal process theory is sufficiently similar.
Perhaps the phenomenon of increasing responsibility (introduced below) received somewhat less attention and still benefits from clarification (e.g., how should the expression of someone being “more responsible” be understood?) before it can be explained.
These superiors might have superiors in turn. Thus, an individual can be both a superior (with respect to some) and a subordinate (with respect to others). I assume that the authority relation on the group is well-ordered.
“Directives” is sufficiently general to cover not only “orders” but also “decisions,” “plans,” or “policies,” which play a similar role. I am grateful to a reviewer for suggesting this term.
This is a phenomenon well-known in law (DeMott, 2014), public administration (Lipsky, 1980; Heath, 2020, Chap. 6), and principal–agent theory (cf. Buchanan, 1996). Sunstein and Ullmann-Margalit (1999) investigate the general class of second-order decisions, of which such delegation is but one type (See also Shapiro, 2014).
“Control” might be misleading since superiors’ influence is not always intentional. Whenever a superior issues a directive, there is a risk that the directive might be misunderstood or that it may have unforeseen consequences. Furthermore, superiors do not always exert control explicitly; subordinates might understand the intentions of their superiors tacitly.
It should be noted that this introduces an important further assumption, namely, that each subordinate is subordinate to exactly one superior. Redundancy may not be an essential feature of hierarchical groups, but it is an essential feature of certain organizations. Since such organizations—be it military, bureaucratic, or corporate—are central to social, private, and political life, it is organizations and hence hierarchical groups with redundancy, on which I focus here.
The description is ambiguous about the objects of responsibility, that is, what superiors and subordinates are responsible for. I understand them as individuals who are responsible for individual actions or outcomes.
This could be spelled out by saying that they are responsible to a greater degree (for the same action as for which their subordinates are responsible), or by saying that they are responsible for a worse action. Since I leave issues of action individuation aside for now, the two can be used interchangeably.
To be clear: Superior and subordinate responsibility, the first two phenomena, may likewise be characteristic but not essential. I do not claim that superiors and subordinates are responsible in all hierarchical groups or in all cases.
Kutz (2000, 52) dismisses appealing to “degrees of causation” because “independent normative interests are doing the real work.”
Specifically, the superior “must identify … and so must associate herself directly with [the] morally relevant characteristics” of the action (Kutz, 2000, 159).
Isaacs (2011, 105) supports this reading.
Isaacs (2011, 106) seems to recognize the problem and ends up rejecting the so-called Accordion Effect—that actions remain the token-same under different descriptions.
The NESS test defines c as a cause of e if and only if c is a member of a set of conditions such that these conditions (i) are sufficient for e, (ii) obtain, and (iii) c is necessary for the sufficiency of this set. See Braham and van Hees (2009, 613).
Braham and van Hees (2012, 615) state: “the NESS test has problems dealing with some types of strategies, namely, those comprising conditional actions.” This is irrelevant, for example in Frankfurt cases, where some (i.e., Black) have such conditional intentions, if the agents whose responsibility we seek to understand (i.e., Jones) do not have such intentions. But this is not the case for hierarchical groups.
For now, let me assume this local determinism for simplicity (and in line with the characteristic of functional dependence stated above). I relax this assumption to discuss the possibility of a collective resistance against Anne’s command later. That someone will shoot and that there is more than one shooter, is the assumption, in terms of List and Menzies (2009, 496), that Anne’s directive is realization-insensitive, that is, the directive is carried out (Collin is shot) even under small perturbations of how this directive is realized.
For both parts, I draw on an account of difference-making that was put forward in the context of mental causation (List and Menzies 2009).
For reasons discussed below, this is not quite correct. Instead, the result is better described as “then he would not have been shot on Anne’s order” (similar modifications will need to be made for the case of Bert). This is to avoid the problem of redundant causation, following in some ways a discussion of van Inwagen (1983, 173–74).
As so often with semantics for counterfactual conditionals, what counts as nearby must be taken as given. Furthermore, the counterfactual is vacuously true if there is no possible world in which Anne does not give the directive to shoot Collin. For brevity, I set aside vacuous truth.
An intention here is any mental entity that plays a certain functional role. It may be a belief–desire pair, an intention-in-action, or a proximal intention.
Outcomes are represented by sets of possibilia, such as possible worlds. I say more about the individuation of outcomes later.
Two independent reasons for this. First, it seems to violate too crassly pre-theoretic judgments about agency (this is the reason Lewis gives). Second, it seems to undermine the concept of agency playing its intended role of (partly) grounding responsibility.
I am indebted to a reviewer for suggesting this objection.
Moreover, it leaves the over-generation worry unaddressed on the level of agency. Regardless of facts about a person’s epistemic state, without the positive conditional, she would still be an agent of all downstream consequences (see Lewis, 1987, 184). This might weaken the explanatory contribution that agency makes to responsibility (insofar as a relation that more narrowly circumscribes the grounds of an agent’s responsibility gives a better explanation for why an agent is responsible when she is).
The difference is that if Edward were to sharpen the knife, Giulia may or may not cut herself; but if Anne were to give the order, Collin will certainly be shot by someone.
I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for prompting me to discuss this problem.
This individuation might be clarified by seeing outcome descriptions as implicitly contrastive. Contrastivism is implied by the account here (List and Menzies 2009, 186–87; Sinnott-Armstrong, 2021), and well accepted in the literature (Schaffer, 2005; Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008; Menzies, 2008; see also Dretske, 1977). A similar non-contrastivist proposal of actions with “a layered structure” such that “distinct actions can have the same parts,” is put forward by Ginet (1990, 50–51).
More precisely: The three sentences “it is the case that Caesar…”, what van Inwagen (1983, 171) calls “canonical names”, express three distinct propositions—since “there are many different ways [the concrete particulars that make up our surroundings] could be arranged that would be sufficient for the obtaining of a given state of affairs.”
This set of possible worlds represents the outcome in that it holds fixed the occurrence of the outcome while varying everything else that happens “around it.” I write “represent” to avoid suggesting that outcomes are identical to sets of possible worlds.
This might prompt a circularity worry. The individuation of outcomes may seem to presuppose an understanding of agency although the outcomes are also used to define agency. There is no circularity here. The particular outcome that Collin is shot by Bert can be described without reference to agency. The addition “by Bert” can be spelled out without reference to intentions in purely behavioral terms. For example, the “by Bert” in this case can be spelled out as Bert’s finger moving or as Collin’s body being hit by a bullet from Bert’s gun. As long as a non-agential analysis of this “by” addition is available, the particular outcome can be distinguished from the universal outcome without presupposing agency.
These ideas are more rigorously expressed with the following three conditions. (1) Outcomes: An outcome is represented by the set of possible worlds in which it occurs. (2) Distinctness: If two outcomes are represented by different sets of possible worlds, then the two outcomes are distinct, i.e., not identical. (3) Nestedness: An outcome a is nested within an outcome b if and only if the set representing a is a strict subset of the set representing b.
Paralleling the assumption that there are no overlapping competences in the hierarchy (i.e. each subordinate stands in the authority relation to exactly one superior), I make the following assumption requiring non-overlapping outcomes. Representing outcomes as sets, the intersection of any two outcomes is empty unless one outcome is a subset of the other.
See footnote 29 above.
Suppose, instead, that Bert shoots in all nearby possible worlds in which Anne gives the order. Anne then would make a difference to the outcome that Collin is shot by Bert. Such a case, that lacks redundancy (but keeps the characteristics of authority and functional dependence), would then be a case of proxy action: Anne is the agent of an action that Bert carries out in her stead as if he were her “tool” (cf. Feinberg 1970b, 222; Copp, 1979, 177; Ludwig, 2014; Himmelreich, 2018, 208).
I am grateful for an anonymous reviewer for suggesting objections along these lines.
By assumption of the objection that is. Otherwise, Anne would be an agent of the outcome that Collin is shot by Bert and thus can be responsible for this outcome. Similarly, superiors are regularly responsible for specifics when they make a difference to these specifics.
Consider here the conditional probability of the outcome that Collin is shot by Bert given that Anne has given the order to shoot Collin.
I am grateful to a reviewer for encouraging me to highlight the intuitiveness of the account here.
Moreover, responsibility might have a deontic condition, someone’s responsibility might depend on (or be partly grounded in) the deontic status of an action, the degree of its wrongfulness, or its “moral significance.” This would be another component in the function representing degrees of responsibility. But for present purposes, this deontic condition, like the intentional condition, has to be set aside.
The law often proceeds in a similarly comparative fashion (Lepora & Goodin, 2013, 99).
Strictly speaking, representing agency as degrees requires revising my earlier definition of agency as difference-making. The sufficient condition of difference-making would have to be understood as setting the agency measure to 1. The necessary condition would have to be dropped to allow for partial or shared agency with respect to a larger outcome.
They do not need to be direct superiors and subordinates, but there can be intermediate superiors or subordinates respectively (i.e., the two agents need to be connected in the authority relation that defines the hierarchy).
The sense here is a relative power to prevent outcomes. There is a different sense of agency understood not as the power to prevent but rather as the power to fine-tune some result. On this latter sense of fine-tuning, subordinates generally have a higher degree of agency than their superiors.
Suppose a mafia captain tells her associates to “get rid of Collin,” without specifying how exactly they ought to do so. In fact, the associates could just tell Collin to leave Chicago forever, but they could also poison Collin, shoot him, or even torture him to death. Given their range of options, when opting for torture, the associates would be more responsible than their captain.
See footnote 59.
The claim is not that this is the only explanation. Another explanation for increasing responsibility could be that the actions “get worse” or more significant as we go up the hierarchy (as suggested by one reviewer). However, whether this (“responsibility increases with significance”) is an independent ground or one that partly depends on ideas such as that of nested actions (or that “responsibility increases with agency”), cannot be settled here. And it need not, since the two explanations seem compatible.
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this observation and for suggesting a case along these lines.
This assumption might be a stretch. Arguably, there are nearby possible worlds where Bert is about to shoot Collin, but Bill fails to get Bert to pick a brutal gun. However, without this assumption, this case would be easy to explain: Without this assumption, Bill doesn’t make a difference (to an outcome that entails Collin’s death). The aim is to explain how Bill is not responsible for Collin’s death despite making a difference. This assumption ensures that Bill makes a difference to an outcome that entails Collin’s death.
That subordinates intend to shield their superiors suggests an important relation between this way of aiming for plausible deniability and complicity. Subordinates and superiors might be complicit in this scheme.
Specifically, my view is consistent with the “two-level view” that distinguishes between questions of individual and collective responsibility. See Isaacs (2011).
Similarly, Kutz (2000, 113) writes that there is often a “disparity between collective harm and individual effect… If no individual makes a difference, then no individual is accountable for these collective harms.” Pace Kutz, on my account there are groups where individuals do make a difference.
Only “an idea close to” because it does not vindicate the idea, which could taken to be the basic tenet of command responsibility, that individuals are responsible for a collective action.
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Acknowledgements
This paper sees the light of day a little over 10 years since it was first presented at the London School of Economics and at the University of London. It has benefitted from discussions at the Graduate Reading Retreat of the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, at the Humboldt Universität Berlin Philosophy Colloquium, Neil Roughley’s colloquium in Duisburg-Essen, and at Collective Intentionality X. The many people who commented on drafts or helped in conversations include Saba Bazargan-Forward, Gert Keil, Gabriel Wollner, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matthew Adler, and Deborah A. DeMott, Christian List, Susanne Burri, Helen Frowe, Ying Shi, Jesse Saloom, Sebastian Köhler, and Seth Lazar, as well as three anonymous referees for this journal (one of whom in particular saved me from many errors large and small).
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Himmelreich, J. Difference-making and the control relation that grounds responsibility in hierarchical groups. Philos Stud (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02077-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02077-4