This paper attempts to deliver a conceptual framework for the relationship between collective agency and individual liability for it that stays within the bounds of liberal methodological individualism, but is capable of justifying demanding remedial duties on individuals participating in collective injustice. The notion of collective agency laid out in section 1 of the paper follows recent analyses of institutional action, put forward by Phillip Pettit and Christian List, in arguing that institutional agents can be said to possess “minds of their own”; they can function properly without their intentions and beliefs needing to track the intentions and beliefs of any of the individuals participating in them. It highlights that this result is entirely compatible with liberal belief in the methodological primacy of individual action. On this basis, the paper argues in section 2 that it must be possible for individuals to incur liability for the actions of institutions they participate in without any degree of "complicity", understood as identification - sharing their aims and beliefs. Otherwise, it would be possible to evade liability simply by designing institutions so as to render collective action independent from individual attitudes. This also means that identification with unjust institutional action, while increasing individual blameworthiness, does not fundamentally alter individual remedial duties. Nationalism for example, if understood as identification, makes no difference to the nature of such duties. Section 3 concludes by focusing on the nature of remedial duties, ranging from a duty to withdraw from unjust institutions in the case of voluntary participation, to duties to undertake collective protest, and to simultaneous individual compensation, in the case of non-voluntary participation. It clarifies these different duties by discussing, in an exemplary manner, some concrete cases: participation in a) transnational corporations (as employee or consumer), and b) state practices.
