The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility comprehensively addresses questions about who is responsible and how blame or praise should be attributed when human agents act together. Such questions include: Do individuals share responsibility for the outcome or are individuals responsible only for their contribution to the act? Are individuals responsible for actions done by their group even when they don’t contribute to the outcome? Can a corporation or institution be held morally responsible apart from the responsibility of its members?

The Handbook’s 35 chapters--all appearing here for the first time and written by an international team of experts--are organized into four parts:

Part I: Foundations of Collective Responsibility

Part II: Theoretical Issues in Collective Responsibility

Part III: Domains of Collective Responsibility

Part IV: Applied Issues in Collective Responsibility

Each part begins with a short introduction that provides an overview of issues and debates within that area and a brief summary of its chapters. In addition, a comprehensive index allows readers to better navigate the entirety of the volume’s contents. The result is the first major work in the field that serves as an instructional aid for those in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, as well as a reference for scholars interested in learning more about collective responsibility.

Saba Bazargan-Forward is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He works on issues in normative ethics, including complicity, defensive violence, war-ethics, and the morality of benefitting from injustice. He is currently authoring a book on individual responsibility for cooperatively committed harms.

Deborah Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. She is the author of more than 40 articles on topics such as group agency, group epistemology, and collective responsibility, as well as the book Groups as Agents (2015).