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Pinkert, Felix (2014) What we together can (be required to) do. Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 38 (1). pp. 187-202. doi:10.1111/misp.12023 ISSN 0363-6550.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/misp.12023
Abstract
In moral and political philosophy, collective obligations are promising “gap-stoppers” when we find that we need to assert some obligation, but can not plausibly ascribe this obligation to individual agents. Most notably, Bill Wringe and Jesse Tomalty discuss whether the obligations that correspond to socio-economic human rights are held by states or even by humankind at large. The present paper aims to provide a missing piece for these discussions, namely an account of the conditions under which obligations can apply to loose collections of agents that do not qualify as collective agents in their own right. I first explain the notion of joint obligations of loose collections of agents (henceforth “collections”) as opposed to collective obligations of collections of agents that are collective agents in their own right (section 1), and argue that the conditions under which agents can jointly have obligations are the conditions under which they are jointly able to do what is required (section 2). I then build on Virginia Held’s seminal work on the (backward-looking) moral responsibility of “random collections” to develop such conditions for joint ability (sections 3 to 7). My discussion shows that collections of individuals can more easily be subject to moral obligations than previously assumed. It also shows that putative joint obligations need to be carefully time-indexed, and that it is largely an empirical question whether a given collection can be subject to a moral obligation to perform a given joint action at a particular time (section 8).
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BJ Ethics J Political Science > JC Political theory |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Philosophy | ||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Duty | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Midwest Studies In Philosophy | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc. | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0363-6550 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | September 2014 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 38 | ||||||||
| Number: | 1 | ||||||||
| Number of Pages: | 16 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 187-202 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1111/misp.12023 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 4 May 2016 | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 23 September 2016 |
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