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Collective Responsibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

H. D. Lewis
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If I were asked to put forward an ethical principle which I considered to be especially certain, it would be that no one can be responsible, in the properly ethical sense, for the conduct of another. Responsibility belongs essentially to the individual. The implications of this principle are much more far-reaching than is evident at first, and reflection upon them may lead many to withdraw the assent which they might otherwise be very ready to accord to this view of responsibility. But if the difficulties do appear to be insurmountable, and that, very certainly, does not seem to me to be the case, then the proper procedure will be, not to revert to the barbarous notion of collective or group responsibility, but to give up altogether the view that we are accountable in any distinctively moral sense.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 23 , Issue 84 , January 1948 , pp. 3 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1948

References

page 4 note 1 The Nature and Destiny of Man, p. 234Google Scholar.

page 10 note 1 Of Civil Government, Part II, Section 182.

page 11 note 1 “Some Simple Thoughts on Freedom and Responsibility” (Philosophy, 01, 1937)Google Scholar and “Individual, Collective, and Social Responsibility” (Ethics, Vol. XLIX).

page 11 note 2 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XIX.

page 11 note 3 Op. cit., p. 249. Op. cit., p. 249.

page 18 note 1 Sir David Ross, for example, argues that a person's “responsibility for acts is divided” because “other people by teaching and example, the writers of the books he has read, and so on, have all helped to mould his character into that form of which his action is the expression.” Foundations of Ethics, p. 248Google Scholar.