Group Duties

Moral duties are regularly attributed to groups. In the media or on the street we might hear that a specific country has a moral duty to defend human rights that environmentalists have a moral duty to push for global systemic reform or that the affluent have a moral duty to alleviate poverty. Do such attributions make conceptual sense or are they mere political rhetoric? And what does that imply for the individual members of these groups? <em>Group Duties </em>offers the first comprehensive answer to these questions. Stephanie Collins defends a Tripartite Model of group duties - so-called because it divides groups into three fundamental categories. First we have <em>combinations</em> - collections of agents that don't have any goals or decision-making procedures in common. These groups cannot bear moral duties. Instead we should re-cast their purported duties as a series of duties one held by each agent in the combination. Each duty demands its bearer to 'I-reason': to do the best they can given whatever they happen to believe the others will do. Second there are groups whose members share goals but lack decision-making procedures. These are <em>coalitions</em>. Coalitions also cannot bear duties but their alleged duties should be replaced with members' several duties to 'we-reason': to do one's part in a particular group pattern of actions on the presumption that others will do likewise. Third and finally <em>collectives</em> have group-level procedures for making decisions. They can bear duties. Collectives' duties imply duties for collectives' members to use their role in the collective with a view to the collective doing its duty. With the Tripartite Model in-hand Collins argues that we can target our political demands at the right entities in the right way for the right reasons.<br>