Rowan Mellor (KCL) - 2016-17 Students
rowan.mellor.11@ucl.ac.uk

What is Collective Responsibility?

We are familiar with the idea of someone being responsible for some event. I think we have also become familiar with the possibility of several people being collectively responsible for some event(s). But what is collective responsibility? Under what conditions does it occur? Do we need to expand our ordinary notion of responsibility in order to understand collective responsibility? Does a commitment to collective responsibility presuppose the truth of certain ontological claims? The aim of my work is to go some way towards answering such questions. The primary argument will be that our ordinary notion of responsibility need not be revised in order to accommodate collective responsibility. Moreover a commitment to certain forms of collective responsibility presupposes minimal ontological commitments.