Introduction
When a person commits a crime, that person is or should be held responsible for it. This is a matter of personal responsibility. We may call it “individual responsibility” to emphasize that the offender is an individual rather than multiple people. In contrast to individual responsibility, we can define collective responsibility as that shared by more than one person or group of people. Two or more people, even many people or a group, are held responsible in cases of collective responsibility.
Collective responsibility is a controversial topic (Arendt 1987). Typical issues include whether German people who were not personally committed to the Nazi worldview that led to atrocities are also responsible for them and whether modern White Americans are responsible for the lingering effects of slavery. These examples puzzle us because they seem incompatible with our basic moral idea that no one is responsible for what he or she did not do.
Other issues concern whether moral...
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Takikawa, H. (2022). Collective Responsibility. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_126-1
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