ABSTRACT
The debate about shared agency and its relationship to collective responsibility has focused on two related questions: (1) Is collective responsibility non-distributive or distributive—that is, should it be attributed to the group as such or to its individual members?; (2) If groups can be held collectively responsible, is this attribution explained by reference to the actions of the group or its individual members? Answering these questions is often taken to depend on whether groups are genuine agents in much the same way individual persons are. There are many views developed in the service of this end, but I will focus on one underappreciated aspect of this debate—namely, the role of commitments in explaining aspects of shared agency. Although commitments are not typically used to explain collective responsibility, their putative role in various views of shared agency underscores the value of exploring the connection between the two. I begin with a discussion of commitments (§13.1). I formulate a case to highlight commitments’ defining characteristics, with a special focus on how they might be fruitfully used to understand both individual and collective responsibility. In §13.2, I summarize the role of commitments in the literature on shared agency, with a particular focus on Margaret Gilbert’s and Michael Bratman’s respective accounts. I then turn to the relationship between (moral and non-moral) commitments and backward-looking collective responsibility (§13.3).
