Collective responsibility

The basic bearer of responsibility is individuals, because that is all there is - nothing else can literally be the bearer of full responsibility. Claims about group responsibility therefore need analysis. This would be impossible if all actions must be understood as ones that could be performed whether or not anyone else exists. Individuals often act by virtue of membership in certain groups; often such membership bears a causal role in our behavior, and sometimes people act deliberately in order to promote the prospects of members of a given group. Nevertheless, it is rational to award proportionally to individual contributions to those actions and individual shares in the production of the consequences of those actions. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.