Conference on Collective Responsibility and launch of ASAP-Nepal,

Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, March 13, 2019.

Moderator and respondent: HARI TIMALSINA 

PAULA CASAL on “Sea-Access for the Landlocked”. 

Outside Europe landlocked states are poor: 16 are extremely poor and another 16 very poor. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognise their lack of sea-access as a major cause of their reduced chances of escaping poverty and reaching the stated goals. This paper proposes including corridors to the sea and other forms of sea-access among the SDGs. It also discusses objections to doing so that appeal to the rejection of global egalitarian arguments, to the possibility of compensating those countries for their disadvantage rather than removing it, and to the territorial rights of the coastal countries. The paper concludes that none of these objections to the corridors, and a fortiori to the less ambitious remedies of the Almaty and Vienna Programmes, withstands scrutiny. The paper raises the issue of collective responsibility for a country’s landlocked condition, and for seeking a solution.

JEFF McMAHAN “Against Collective Responsibility”

Many people believe that collectives of certain kinds, such as corporations and states, are entities capable of having values, desires, beliefs, and intentions, and that they can act in ways for which they are morally responsible and even blameworthy.  Many also believe that none of these facts about collectives are wholly reducible to the psychological states or acts of individual persons.  According to views of this sort, collectives themselves can be liable to defensive action or deserving of punishment.  And our ability to recognize these forms of collective responsibility and collective guilt is, many philosophers claim, especially important in cases in which there is a “shortfall” of individual responsibility for bad outcomes – for example, when a disaster occurs but no individuals in the causal chain leading to it have acted in ways that seem more than minimally culpable.  Such views are also thought to be foundational for traditional beliefs about the morality of war.  I will argue against these collectivist views and also suggest that their implications for the morality of war are different from what they are commonly supposed to be. 

ANDREW WILLIAMS on “Fertility and Collective Responsibility”

It is often true that living standards within a territory depend to a large degree on various earlier political decisions that influenced the design of local institutions and rates of saving and fertility. Given their deep and lasting impact, it is worth asking which agents are entitled to make those decisions, and how the consequences of particular decisions (or non-decisions) should be distributed across states and over time. A standard answer claims that, at least in worlds like ours, global institutions should enable the decisions to be made by a plurality of self-governing states rather than a single global planner, and collective liability for those decisions should be borne primarily by present and future members of the decision-making state rather than spread between members and non-members. This paper examines David Miller’s defense of the standard answer and explores one way of developing it inspired by T. M. Scanlon’s account of individual liability.

BHARAT NEPAL “Collective responsibility, Population and Health”.