This book focuses on the complex phenomenon of group morality and collective responsibility. It provides an analytic understanding of moral culpability of collective entities implicated in some of the most pressing contemporary ethical issues such as institutional injustice, corporate scams, organized crimes, gang wars, group-based violence, genocide, xenophobia, and the like. Delving deeper into the concept of collective responsibility, it asks--Who is responsible when a collective is held responsible? Is collective responsibility merely a façon de parler, a rhetoric of talking about individual moral responsibility, or more than that? The volume develops a non-individualist account by using some of the latest resources from philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, and social ontology. It interprets collective responsibility as the responsibility of a collective without either reducing it to shared and individual responsibility of the group members or making it a case where their moral positions are completely blurred.
An important intervention in moral philosophy, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of moral philosophy, philosophy of action and mind, philosophy of social sciences, and political philosophy. It will also be a theoretical resource for legal theorists, just war theorists, game theorists, business ethicists, and policy makers.
About the Author: Bhaskarjit Neog is Assistant Professor at the Centre of Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He was educated in IIT Kanpur, Utrecht University (the Netherlands), Linkoping University (Sweden), and Gauhati University (India). His primary research interest is in ethics, social ontology, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. He has been an Endeavour Research fellow at the Australian National University and Charles Sturt University Australia. He also received Erasmus Mundus fellowship by the European Union for research masters. He has also been a Visiting Resident scholar in the Centre for Human Values at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM Calcutta).
