Collective Moral Responsibility

Chapter 6 builds on the argument of Chapter 5. Whereas Chapter 5 shows that people can be morally responsible as individuals for actions outside of their core agency, Chapter 6 extends this argument to groups. It first shows that it makes intuitive sense to think of European-descended people as a group. Then, philosophically, the chapter develops the views of Christopher Kutz and Tracy Isaacs, to show that having an implicit intention is sufficient to satisfy a participatory intention in a collective action. And even if European-descended people are prevented by white ignorance from understanding how their actions contribute to a historical pattern of racial domination, still this does not shield members of this group from responsibility for this collective undertaking. Individuals in this collective undertaking are responsible not only for their own contributions to the project but also for the collective's contribution as a whole. And so, in this way, contemporary European-descended people are responsible for the overall actions of the group and the larger project of racial domination.