Group excuse from blameless ignorance

We routinely treat groups, such as governments and corporations, as agents with beliefs and aims who are morally responsible for their actions. For instance, we might blame the government for its response to the coronavirus pandemic. If groups are morally responsible agents, then it’s plausible that they can have an excuse for wrongdoing from ignorance in just the way individuals can. For instance, a government might attempt to excuse its performance in the coronavirus pandemic by saying that it didn’t know how infectious the new variant was. In this paper, I assume that groups are morally responsible agents to develop an account of what it is for a group to have an excuse from blameless ignorance.

Citation

Brown , J 2022 , ' Group excuse from blameless ignorance ' , Philosophical Topics , vol. 49 , no. 2 , pp. 1-16 . https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics202149212

Publication

Philosophical Topics

Status

Non peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics202149212

ISSN

0276-2080

Type

Journal article

Rights

Copyright © 2022 Board of Trustees of the University of Arkansas. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics202149212

Description

Thanks to the Leverhulme Trust for a Major Research Fellowship to work on group responsibility.

Collections

University of St Andrews Research

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/25725