Collective Responsibility and the Scope of Justice

A view developed by Thomas Nagel holds that the requirements of egalitarian justice apply only among persons who are subject to a shared legal system coercively enforced in their name. The view suggests that is only when this condition obtains that the persons in whose name the rules are enforced are “made responsible for” the distributive effects of these rules, and that it is only if they are responsible for the effects that they are owed justification for them. The argument identifies the conditions under which requirements of justice apply with the conditions of collective moral responsibility attribution, which are in turn identified with the existence of coercive rules enforced in the name of those subject to it. The most plausible interpretation of these moves invokes an assumption about the relationship between justice and responsibility, and one about collective agency. First, a state of affairs is subject to the standards of justice only if some agent is responsible for it; and second, for a group of individuals to constitute a collective agent, they must possess centralized decision-making procedures. I argue that even if we assume the correctness of both of these assumptions, Nagel’s conclusion does not follow. The argument identifies the range of persons who are appropriately held collectively responsible for an outcome with the range of persons to whom justification is owed for that outcome. Furthermore, it restricts the scope of application of the requirements of justice to outcomes produced by such collective agents whose constituent members are appropriately held responsible for its actions. Neither of these restrictions is supported by the assumptions about collective agency, responsibility, and justice. There are collective agents whose responsibility for their acts does not distribute over their members, and there are collective acts for which justification is owed to some nonmembers.