Getting Our Act Together

This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. The theory does not stipulate a new type of moral obligation, but rather suggests that to think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems.

Winner of the 2022 North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award

Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening, or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by ourselves. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others?

This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral agents hold jointly but not as unified collective agents. The theory does not stipulate a new type of moral obligation but rather suggests that to think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor, we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of 'massively shared obligations' to major-scale moral problems such as global poverty. *Getting Out Act Together: A Theory of Collective Moral Obligations* will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in moral, political and social philosophy, philosophy of action, social epistemology and philosophy of social science.

Autorentext

Anne Schwenkenbecher is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Murdoch University, Western Australia. She is the author of Terrorism: A Philosophical Enquiry (2012). Her articles on collective action and obligations have appeared in The Monist, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Synthese, Ethics & International Affairs, and the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

Klappentext

Winner of the 2022 North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening, or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by ourselves. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral agents hold jointly but not as unified collective agents. The theory does not stipulate a new type of moral obligation but rather suggests that to think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor, we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of 'massively shared obligations' to major-scale moral problems such as global poverty. Getting Out Act Together: A Theory of Collective Moral Obligations will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in moral, political and social philosophy, philosophy of action, social epistemology and philosophy of social science.

Inhalt

Introduction

1. Collective Obligations in a Nutshell

2. Joint Oughts and the Agency Principle

3. Joint Ability and How 'Ought' Implies 'Can' for Pluralities of Agents

4. Knowing When We Have Collective Moral Obligations

5. What Collective Obligations Mean for Individual Agents: Contributory Obligations, Non-Compliance, and Joint Blameworthiness

6. A Comparison of Existing Accounts of Collective Obligations

7. Massively Shared Obligations and Global Poverty

Conclusion