PURPOSE

Issues of responsibility matter for the fittingness of praise, rewards, blame and punishment, as well as the just distributions of burdens and goods. Though much philosophical theorizing focuses on individual moral responsibility, many of the most pressing contemporary questions about responsibility are more complex: To what degree are states, corporations or groups of individuals responsible for climate change or poverty? What obligations arise from this? An increasingly integrated world calls for a deeper understanding of responsibility in complex social systems. The project aimed to contribute to such understanding by developing and extending the application of a specific model of attributions of moral responsibility and of the relation tracked by such attributions. As planned, focus has been on four tasks:

1. Refining the application of the model to complex systems.
2. Using the model to clarify what it is for collective agents, i.e. agents constituted by several other agents to be responsible for certain outcomes.
3. Investigating how different agents in complex systems can share responsibility for an outcome.
4. Examining the relation between different kinds of responsibility for harm and resulting obligations to compensate for that harm and to prevent further harm.


THE MOST IMPORTANT RESULTS

In relation to TASK 1, our initial model has been developed into a sophisticated general account retrospective moral responsibility, the sort of responsibility in virtue of which moral blame and credit can be deserved ([4][5]). The relation between such moral responsibility and forms of responsibility that ground blame and credit in non-moral domains has been spelled out by anchoring moral blame and credit in the agent’s quality of will, following an influential trend in responsibility research. The project further understands an agent’s quality of will in terms of whether she cares about morally important things as can be reasonably demanded of her. In brief:

EXPLANATORY QUALITY OF WILL (EQW): X deserves moral blame (credit) for Y if and only if Y is morally bad (good) and explained in a normal way by X’s quality of will falling below (above) what could be properly morally demanded of X.

The implications of EQW have been further explored by spelling out the relations between retrospective moral responsibility and important notions of moral obligation and prospective moral responsibilities ([1][2][7]). Other work within the project shows how the project’s model of responsibility attributions better accounts for various intuitions of undermined responsibility than some recent competitors ([2][3][9][10]).

In relation to TASK 2, EQW suggests that moral agency should be understood in terms of the capacities required to be a subject to proper demands on caring, including primarily the capacity to care and the capacity to respond to demands that one care ([4], work in progress). In humans, this arguably involves the capacity to feel guilt; [8] argues that suitably organized collective or corporate agents can have the corresponding capacities to self-regulate and respond to demands on caring.

In relation to TASK 3, the project has developed a richer understanding of shared responsibility and related notions of shared obligations and shared prospective responsibilities. One central step has been the identification of crucial similarities between cases of individual and shared responsibility and obligations ([1][6]; in progress).

In relation to TASK 4, the project has traced and analyzed various relations between shared responsibility, shared obligations, shared responsibilities, and individual obligations and responsibilities. A key strategy for moving beyond cataloguing intuitively plausible connections has been to develop general accounts of obligations and prospective responsibilities ([1][6][7]). Given EQW, shared responsibility has to do with what caring can be reasonably demanded, and so, it seems, with demands on individual moral agents. However, demands directed at a plurality of agents might be different from those directed at the individual agent considered on its own (work in progress). For the case of shared obligations, particular attention has been given to explaining how individual obligations can arise in cases with unclear individual control of the overall outcome and ground shared obligations with regard to that outcome, and how such shared obligations can in turn ground individual obligations to contribute [6]. We have also defended specific claims about obligations arising in the context of climate change ([6][11]; in progress).


NEW RESEARCH ISSUES GENERATED BY THE PROJECT

To say something about shared obligations and obligations generated by shared responsibility, something also needed to be said to distinguish kinds of moral obligation, identifying the sort of obligations of interest for our studies, and understand how such obligations can generate further obligations. Preliminary proposals were developed in [2] and [6]. Work on the main tasks of the project made clear that we needed to say something about the nature of prospective or normative responsibilities, as the literature contained no remotely plausible proposal. We developed a first attempt at an account in [7]. A complete picture of the domain would also require an overview of the variety of ways in which agents can be “tainted” by their involvement in or relation to various harms or morally bad actions when they are neither individually nor collectively to blame for it. Both Björnsson and Brülde have work in progress on this issue. Furthermore, our strategic focus on similarities and differences between individual agents and groups have raised new questions about individuals and their obligations. Work on EQW has also stressed the importance of the question of what it can be reasonably demanded that agents care about, and in what way or to what extent. This question relates to central questions in normative ethics, and bears a strong relation to questions raised by virtue ethical approaches to normative issues, but will need its own systematic treatment.


INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS OF THE PROJECT

Björnsson has co-authored papers with Derk Pereboom (Cornell) and Kendy Hess (Holy Cross), and was Research Fellow at FSU Tallahassee during spring 2013 due to an award from their Big Questions in Free Will project. Björnsson coordinated the Moral Responsibility Research Initiative (later “GRP”) at the University of Gothenburg until fall of 2015 and has since been affiliated as researcher; Brülde has also been part of GRP. GRP has been a hub of international responsibility research, currently employs five postdocs, and has organized a number of workshops and one major conference on issues of responsibility. Björnsson has also been co-organizer of two Social Complexes: Parts and Wholes workshops (Gothenburg, Lund), European Network of Social Ontology V (Lund), and Responsibility in Complex Systems (Umeå), all with mostly international participants. During the project period, Björnsson and, to some extent, Brülde have also presented at a great number of other international workshops or conferences on themes related to the project, sometimes as keynote or main speaker.


RESEARCH COMMUNICATION OUTREACH

Brülde has made over ten presentations of topics closely related to the research of the project to the public and to non-specialists; Björnsson a handful. Brülde’s book on climate ethics (with Duus-Otterström, 2015) was aimed at a popular audience.


THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS

Given the project’s focus on refining and expanding the application of a given model, any choice of two publications as the two most important will be arbitrary. However, “Essentially Shared Obligations” ([1]) and “Corporate Crocodile Tears? On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporate Agents” ([8]) each represents a central strategy of the project. The former addresses the issue of shared obligations by analyzing relevant aspects of a central concept of moral obligations and by looking closer at individual obligations the discharging of which requires no overall deliberate decision and which might involve a number of non-coordinated contributions analogous with individual contributions to satisfactions of shared obligations. According to the proposal developed there,

MORAL OBLIGATION: X has a moral obligation to φ if, and only if, were X to have the sort of motivational sensitivity that can be reasonably morally required of X, this would ensure, in normal ways, that X φ.

It is argued that this condition can be satisfied for a plural X along the same lines as for individual agents. This suggestion is further developed in [6], and the strategy is currently applied to shared responsibility (work in preparation).

Publication [8] argues that certain collective agents can be fully-fledged moral agents even if human moral agency requires a capacity for reactive attitudes, in particular that of guilt. The role the latter play in human agency is to increase the capacity to care about morally important matters, and respond to demands on such caring. The paper makes the case that insofar as corporate agents are possible, they can have the corresponding capacities. The strategy here, as in most other papers, is to lean on analysis that gain credibility independently of their application to specifically collective phenomena.


PUBLICATION STRATEGY FOR THE PROJECT

Most of our publication choices have aimed at maximizing reach of project results. We purchased commercial open access for [1] and [8]. Other publications in international venues have been made available via home pages and the most prominent site for finding publications in philosophy, PhilPapers.org. At the initiative of Oxford University Press, Björnsson is also currently working on a book manuscript dedicated to further refining and expanding EQW, as a monograph is ideal for defending and showcasing the overall theoretical power of the account.