Abstract
This article undertakes four tasks: (1) outline a theory of joint action, including multi-layered structures of joint action characteristic of organizational action; (2) utilize this theory to elaborate an account of joint epistemic action – joint action directed to the acquisition of knowledge, e.g. a team of scientists seeking to discover the cause of climate change; (3) outline an account of collective moral responsibility based on the theory of joint action (including the account of joint epistemic action); (4) apply the account of collective moral responsibility to the issue of human-induced, harmful, climate change with a view to illuminating both retrospective responsibility for causing the harm and also prospective responsibility for addressing the problem in terms of mitigation and/or adaptation.
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Notes
- 1.
Here there is simplification for the sake of clarity. For what is said here is not strictly correct, at least in the case of many actions performed by members of organizations. Rather, typically some threshold set of actions is necessary to achieve the end; moreover the boundaries of this set are vague.
- 2.
I accept the arguments of Montmarquet (Montmarquet 1993: chap. 1) to the conclusion that one can be directly responsible for some of one’s beliefs, i.e. that one’s responsibility for some of one’s beliefs is not dependent on one’s responsibility for some action that led to those beliefs. In short, doxastic responsibility does not reduce to responsibility for actions. However, if I (and Montmarquet) turn out to be wrong in this regard, the basic arguments in this chapter could be recast in terms of a notion of doxastic responsibility as a form of responsibility for actions.
- 3.
The “greenhouse effect” works roughly as follows. GHG simultaneously admit short wave solar radiation while blocking some of the long wave radiation emanating from the earth’s surface thereby ensuring that the temperature at the earth’s surface is greater than it otherwise would be.
- 4.
Weaker epistemic assumptions are, of course, consistent with accepting the need to act to avoid catastrophe, e.g. that catastrophe has a 50 percent chance of taking place if we do not act or even that we are not sure of the probability in question.
- 5.
I will not concern myself in what follows with the common resource or “sink” issue; roughly, the issue of the injustice arising from the fact that the citizens of developed economies have exhausted the limited capacity of the earth to absorb carbon emissions and, thereby, denied others from their “fair share” of that common resource (Gardiner 2004).
- 6.
I realize that the latter claim, in particular, is disputable. However, given that those in the developed world were responsible for the lion’s share of carbon emissions during this period, and given the dependence of most citizens on current institutions and technologies, it is surely plausible that reshaping institutions and developing new technologies would have been necessary. For example, return to a more primitive economic and technological system is not for modern citizens a feasible option.
- 7.
Designing a public policy (on my account) is in essence a process of finding out a complex – and hitherto unknown – means to achieve a prior, given collective end e.g. the end of reducing carbon emissions. Moreover, a policy is simply a linguistic structure of propositions describing the means to achieve that end – as such it is essentially an epistemic structure – and if the alleged means are not actually means then it has failed epistemically. (And if the policy maker is not aiming at actually finding a means but simply (say) pretending to find one then this is deception.) Accordingly, many policies are not implemented and remain only as documents in the filing cabinets of bureaucrats. So I am distinguishing between a policy and its implementation. Implementation is principally a behavioural matter. I reiterate that joint epistemic action typically involves joint behavioural action and vice-versa.
- 8.
And in so far as the notion of a government includes the bureaucracy which implements its policies, this is an instance of the collective moral responsibility that can attach to a multilayered structure of joint action.
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Miller, S. (2011). Collective Responsibility, Epistemic Action and Climate Change. In: Vincent, N., van de Poel, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) Moral Responsibility. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1878-4_13
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