ABSTRACT
The notion of shared responsibility provides an opportunity to look at a harm that has occurred and identify the persons and entities that can be blamed for failing to act. Larry May offered an early account of shared responsibility that provided the resources to parse out shared individual responsibility for failures to act. What was novel about his account was its focus on this responsibility to intervene to prevent a harm, rather than a responsibility to refrain from interference. In this chapter, I argue that a revised version of May’s account of shared responsibility for wrongdoing can help us address important problems in the domain of collective inaction: namely, failures to prevent further harm. I explore what I consider to be the most compelling criticisms of May’s view and suggest that his view should be more focused on achieving certain states of affairs than performing backward-looking accountability assessments. I then use this revised version of May’s view to sketch a way to think about accountability for particular failures to prevent harm, where no specific individual or entity has the positive obligation to protect individuals or groups.
