ABSTRACT
There are number of different senses of responsibility. Sometimes to say that someone is responsible for an action is to say that the person had a reason or reasons to perform some action, then formed an intention to perform that action, and finally acted on that intention, and did so on the basis of their reasons. As is the case with individual responsibility, people can distinguish four senses of collective responsibility. There are doubtless a number of different varieties of collective responsibility. The existence of this joint moral responsibility is consistent with the existence of disjunctive moral responsibility of the following sort. After all, 999 villagers are sufficient to dissuade theft by any one bandit. However, the point is that each is under a moral obligation to contribute on grounds of fairness, and also agreement. It is the established, and explicitly agreed to, cooperative scheme, and its purposes, that determines moral obligations.
