Suchergebnisse

Groups of people are commonly said to be collectively responsible for what has happened. Sometimes the groups claimed to be responsible are vast in size, as when collective responsibility is ascribed to the class of all Americans or the class of all white males. In this book the concept of collective responsibility is analyzed. It is examined not only in the light of what philosophical proponents (such as Cooper, Held, Bates, French, Swinburne, and May) have said about it, but a genuine attempt is made to make sense of what ordinary people say about responsibility when it is ascribed to groups of people. Accordingly, it is distinguished from related concepts such as shared responsibility and moral taint. Parallels are examined between the actions of an individual and the actions of a group or collective, parallels which seem to make ascriptions of collective responsibility more plausible. Some philosophers oppose collective responsibility and argue for an individualist type of position; in this regard the positions of Lewis and Sverdlik are critically examined. The final chapter contains the author's own position, a position which affirms that collective responsibility is possible but which also preserves some of the central intuitions of the individualist

The terrorist threat remains a disturbing issue for the early 1990s. This book explores whether terrorism can ever be morally justifiable and if so under what circumstances.Professor Burleigh Taylor Wilkins suggests that the popular characterisation of terrorists as criminals fails to acknowledge the reasons why terrorists resort to violence. It is argued that terrorism cannot be adequately understood unless the collective responsibility of organised groups, such as political states, for wrongs allegedly done against the groups which the terrorists represent is taken into account. Terrorism an

The article discusses the link of collective moral responsibility with "I" as an act of the realization of subjectness. The authors provide and verify the thesis about the primacy of "I" to any forms and cases of collective responsibility. The notion of "I" is reexamined taking into account the critique of the subject undertaken in the so-called "post-metaphysical" (J.Habermas) philosophy. The key point of this critique is the rejection of the understanding of "I" and of the subject as unchanging metaphysical entities. In this situation, it is of paramount importance to distinguish the dynamic core of "I", which is free from any metaphysical connotation. In addressing this issue, the authors build on the concept of "I" as a responsible act (deed) as presented in works of Mikhail Bakhtin. According to this concept, "I" does not precede the act but is born in the actual responsible act in the face of an Other. This action turns out to be devoid of content here and is interpreted as an act of accepting responsibility in the face of the Absolute instance. Such an interpretation of "I" makes it possible to retain the possibility of a responsible act within the growing anonymity of a contemporary social being and to substantiate manifestations of collective responsibility in collective actions. The final part of the article lists the basic features that characterize the link of "I" as an act and collective responsibility. Of these features, the main one is associated with the impossibility of "external" vesting of responsibility to anyone due to his/her belonging to a certain community. Collective responsibility may be recognized only in the "inner" dimension of a personal act. Hence follows a fundamental asymmetry that characterizes the phenomenon of responsibility in general and collective responsibility in particular.