[Motorcyclist] Ten passersby witness a car accident in which a motor-cyclist gets trapped underneath a car, which has caught fire on one side. Somebody has to act very quickly to pull him out the other side and in order to do so the car will need to be ever so slightly lifted. None of the passersby can lift the car on their own and pull the man out, but together they can (without taking any undue risks to their own health and safety). As it happened, the people manage to lift the car and save the motorcyclistâs life.5
For the sake of argument, let us assume that the following is the case: it is obvious to the witnesses of the accident that the man is in imminent danger, and it is fairly clear what needs to be done to get him out of danger.
There are several scholars who argue that under circumstances such as these individual moral agents can be under a collective obligation (or have collective responsibility) to assist (Held 1970; May 1992; Wringe 2005; Miller 2010; Wringe 2010; Isaacs 2011; Schwenkenbecher 2013 b; Pinkert 2014; Schwenkenbecher 2014 b; Wringe 2016; Schwenkenbecher 2019). Collective obligations, on their accounts, are distinct from and not reducible to individual obligations (to contribute to cooperative ventures, for instance).
In the following, I will distinguish different ways of spelling out such collective obligations. But before I do so, let me briefly talk about why anyone might think that we need the notion of collective obligations. One of the starting points of many debates on collective obligations is the observation that in cases like the one earlier, in order to produce the morally best outcome, or in order to perform the action most likely to secure that outcome, individual agents need to cooperate with one another and coordinate their individual actions. It takes more than one personâs effort to make a difference to the person in need.
More generally, there is a class of actions (and outcomes) that cannot be performed (or produced) by one person on their own. They require at least two people in order to be realised, and no one individual agent can guarantee the success of the collective endeavour. These cases are char-acterised by âjoint necessityâ.6 Playing a duet is a joint-necessity type of activity. By definition, it cannot be done by one person. Another example is âtalking past one anotherâ. Joint necessity can be analytic (as in the two examples just given), where it is part of what it means to do x that x is done by at least two people. Or joint necessity can be circumstantial, where as a matter of fact (rather than as a matter of principle) something cannot be done by one person â for instance, if it takes two or more people to lift a heavy table (or a car, for that matter).
We can further distinguish between strict and wide joint necessity.7 For strict joint necessity to apply, the number of available contributors to a collective outcome equals the number of contributors minimally necessary to produce it. What it means to be an available contributor would depend on the outcome in question. For the motorbike accident described earlier, it would mean anyone close enough to see what is happening and able to make some kind of contribution. For strict joint necessity, the success of the joint venture is counterfactually dependent on each available contributor playing their part. It is entirely within my power to stymie any efforts of our duet playing, and the same applies to you.
Wide joint necessity applies where there are more available contributors to a joint outcome than minimally necessary. There are many large-scale examples of wide joint necessity, such as producing herd immunity (against a certain infectious disease), bridging the emissions gap (UNEP 2017) or producing a referendum outcome in favour of marriage equality. In order for herd immunity against a particular communicable disease to be achieved, it is not necessary that everyone who can safely be vaccinated should be in fact vaccinated. Depending on the disease, the figure may be around 90%. What this means is that, in contrast to strict joint-necessity cases, my unilateral defection in a wide joint-necessity case does not guarantee collective failure and neither does yours. This might lead someone to the conclusion that therefore individual obligations to contribute to such goods are always less stringent. But I think this would be the wrong conclusion to draw, as I shall show later.
In many joint-necessity scenarios, something morally important is at stake. Especially where lives are in imminent danger, people tend to share the intuition that those who could help ought to do so; for example, those witnessing the motorbike accident ought to assist the trapped person. But this common intuition may create a dilemma, because no individual can guarantee the success of the joint endeavour (or produce the desired collective good).8 That is, individually, none of these passers-by can assist the trapped motorcyclist. Hence, it cannot be any individual agentâs obligation to rescue him. They can only help jointly. So, whose obligation is it? We might want to say that it is the obligation of all of them together. But what does that mean? Is it the âgroupâ of passers-by that has the obligation to assist? Or is there âmerelyâ an obligation on each of us to do our best, given othersâ actions? The answer is not straightforward. In my view, this impasse is regularly felt when we try to make moral decisions: it is the pull between the individualist option (to do something that is under oneâs individual control only) and the collectivist option (where the success of oneâs actions often depends on othersâ contributions).
Scholars have chosen different routes to answer the question about the locus of moral obligation in joint-necessity cases. Roughly, they can be divided into two groups, which I will call âconservativesâ and ârevisionistsâ. Revisionist scholars will usually introduce new moral vocabulary and concepts to fill what they believe to be a gap in traditional moral theorising where joint necessity is concerned. Many argue that there is some kind of group-level obligation (or responsibility) that applies to loose collections of individuals such as the passers-by in scenarios like our exemplary case (Held 1970; May 1992; Wringe 2010; Isaacs 2011). Other revisionists, including myself, speak of individuals holding joint obligations (Miller 2010; Schwenkenbecher 2013 b; Pinkert 2014; Schwenkenbecher 2014 b; Schwenkenbecher 2019) or sharing obligations (Björnsson 2014). Conservative scholars, in contrast, do not see the need for new conceptual tools but attempt to resolve collective action puzzles in a way that is maximally continuous with existing theory. They tend to argue that joint-necessity cases give rise to (perhaps slightly more complex than usual) contributory duties only. According to Parfit, for instance, each of the individual passers-by simply has an obligation to contribute if she thinks that enough others contribute to get the joint endeavour off the ground (Parfit 1984). Collins and Lawford-Smith would argue that each ought to take steps towards forming a group that can then act as an agent (Collins 2013; Lawford-Smith 2015), though Collinsâ view has shifted and in her latest work she appears to endorse a more revisionist approach (2019).
I will discuss the merits of these different types of approaches in more detail in Chapter 6. The obvious downside of the conservative approach is that the obligation to produce the collective good (or to realise the joint endeavour) is not allocated. In our example, then, there is no obligation to free the trapped motorcyclist, even though individual agents have obligations to contribute.9 Holly Lawford-Smith acknowledges this problem for the conservative approach but bites the bullet because she thinks the advantages of this approach still outweigh its disadvantages (2015). In contrast, the obvious downside of the first type of revisionist approach is this: it seems to be built on the assumption that there is a (novel) entity, a group agent of sorts, that not only can act on the problem at hand but has a sufficient level of unity such that it can hold a moral obligation (or be held morally responsible). Revisionist scholars have tried to avoid this kind of criticism by arguing that being an agent is not a necessary condition for being the bearer of a moral obligation as far as groups (or collections of agents) are concerned (Wringe 2010).
However, my aim here is not to give an overview of the literature but to instead flesh out my own (revisionist) approach to collective obligations and show how it applies in a range of cases.10 This approach, while revisionist, avoids the objection sketched earlier by refraining from postulating a group agent (even a putative or potential one) and instead conceiving of the obligations to assist in joint-necessity cases as shared or âjointâ.