Collective responsibility

Responsibility of organizations, groups and societies

For the constitutional convention, see Cabinet collective responsibility.

Collective responsibility or collective guilt is the responsibility of organizations, groups and societies.[1][2] Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g., boarding schools (punishing a whole class for the actions of one known or unknown pupil), military units, prisons (juvenile and adult), psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society.[3][4]

In ethics, both methodological individualists and normative individualists question the validity of collective responsibility.[5] Normally, only the individual actor can accrue culpability for actions that they freely cause. The notion of collective culpability seems to deny individual moral responsibility.[6] Contemporary systems of criminal law accept the principle that guilt shall only be personal.[7] According to genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses, "The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking."[8]

## In business

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See also: Corporate personhood

As the business practices known as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability mature and converge with the responsibilities of governments and citizens, the term "collective responsibility" is beginning to be more widely used.[citation needed]

Collective responsibility is widely applied in corporations, where the entire workforce is held responsible for failure to achieve corporate targets (for example, profit targets), irrespective of the performance of individuals or teams which may have achieved or overachieved within their area.[9] Collective punishment, even including measures that actually further harm the prospect of achieving targets, is applied as a measure to 'teach' the workforce.

## In culture

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The concept of collective responsibility is present in literature, most notably in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem telling the tale of a ship's crew who died of thirst after they approved of one crew member's killing of an albatross.

1959's Ben-Hur and 1983's prison crime drama Bad Boys depict collective responsibility and punishment. The play An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley also features the theme of collective responsibility throughout the investigation process.[10]

## In politics

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Main article: Cabinet collective responsibility

In some countries with parliamentary systems, there is a convention that all members of a cabinet must publicly support all government decisions, even if they do not agree with them. Members of the cabinet that wish to dissent or object publicly must resign from their positions or be sacked.[11]

As a result of collective responsibility, the entire government cabinet must resign if a vote of no confidence is passed in parliament.

## In law

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Main article: Joint and several liability

Where two or more persons are liable in respect of the same obligation, the extent of their joint liability varies among jurisdictions.

## In religion

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Main article: orthopraxy

See also: divine retribution

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The Jewish faith recognizes two kinds of sin, offenses against other people, and offenses against God. An offense against God may be understood as a violation of a contract (the Covenant between God and the Children of Israel). Ezra, a priest and a scribe, was the leader of a large group of exiles. On his return to Jerusalem, where he was required to teach the Jews to obey the laws of God, he discovered that the Jews had been marrying non-Jews. He tore his garments in despair and confessed the sins of Israel before God, before he went on to purify the community.[12] The Book of Jeremiah (Yirmiyahu [ירמיהו]) can be organized into five sub-sections. One part, Jeremiah 2–24, displays scorn for the sins of Israel. The poem in 2:1–3:5 shows the evidence of a broken covenant against Israel.[13]

This concept is found in the Old Testament (or the Tanakh). Some examples of it are the account of the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah and in some interpretations, the Book of Joshua's Achan. In those records, entire communities were punished for the actions of the vast majority of their members. This was accomplished in as much as it is impossible to state whether there were no other righteous people, or that there were children who were too young to be responsible for their deeds.

Through this framework of inductive reasoning, both the account of the Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah do identify righteous people who happen to be the immediate or prospective family members of a prophet or prophet's nephew, along with them. These sequences of events are reconciled for the former example afterwards as the etiological basis for the reader's presumed good fortunes in the Noahic covenant[14] with all living creatures, in which God promises never again to destroy all life on Earth (a category implicitly broader than the unrighteous) by flood[15] and creates the rainbow as the sign of this "everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth",[16] and for the latter example pre-empted with an explicitly stated numerical target of 9 other community members' lives to be put in peril (and to have an ostensibly lower number of homes destroyed, being located in Sodom) due to a hypothetical 10th's evaluation as unrighteous.[17]

The practice of blaming the Jews for Jesus' death is the longest-lasting example of collective responsibility. In this case, the blame was not only cast upon the Jews of Jesus's time, it was also cast upon successive generations of Jews. This practice is documented in Matthew 27:25-66 New International Version (NIV) 25: "All the people answered, 'His blood is on us and on our children!'"

## Collective punishment

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Main article: Collective punishment

The announcement of the execution of 100 Polish roundup (Polish: łapanka) hostages as revenge for the assassination of five German policemen and one SS man by Armia Krajowa's guerrilla fighters (referred to in the text as: a Polish "terrorist organization in British service"). Warsaw, 2 October 1943.

Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools (punishing a whole class for the actions of one known or unknown pupil), military units, prisons (juvenile and adult), psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian and/or totalitarian tendencies in the institution and/or its home society.[3] For example, in the Soviet Gulags, all members of a brigada (work unit) were punished for bad performance of any of its members.[4]

Collective punishment is also practiced in the situation of war, economic sanctions, etc., presupposing the existence of collective guilt.[18] Collective guilt, or guilt by association, is the controversial collectivist idea that individuals who are identified as a member of a certain group carry the responsibility for an act or behavior that members of that group have demonstrated, even if they themselves were not involved.[19] Contemporary systems of criminal law accept the principle that guilt shall only be personal.[7]

During the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany, the Germans applied collective responsibility: any kind of help which was given to a person of Jewish faith or origin was punished with death, and not only the rescuer, but his/her family was also executed.[20][21][22] This was widely publicized by the Germans.[23][24] During the occupation, for every German killed by a Pole, 100–400 Poles were shot in retribution.[25] Communities were held collectively responsible for the purported Polish counter-attacks against the invading German troops. Mass executions of łapanka hostages were conducted every day during the Wehrmacht advance across Poland in September 1939 and thereafter.[26]

Another example of collective punishment was applied after the war, when ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe were collectively blamed for Nazi crimes, resulting in the committing of numerous atrocities against the German population, including killings (see Expulsion of Germans after World War II and Beneš decrees).[27]

## Perception

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Entitativity is the perception of groups as being entities in themselves (an entitative group), independent of any of the group's members.[28]

## Ethics

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In ethics, individualists question the idea of collective responsibility.

> Methodological individualists challenge the very possibility of associating moral agency with groups, as distinct from their individual members, and normative individualists argue that collective responsibility violates principles of both individual responsibility and fairness.

— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy[5]

Normally, only the individual actor can accrue culpability for actions that they freely cause. The notion of collective culpability seems to deny individual moral responsibility.[original research?] Does collective responsibility make sense? History is filled with examples of a wronged man who tried to avenge himself, not only on the person who has wronged him, but on other members of the wrongdoer's family, tribe, ethnic group, religion, or nation.[6]

According to A. Dirk Moses, "The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking."[8]

## See also

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* Society portal

* Crimes against humanity
* Diffusion of responsibility
* Extreme careerism
* Frankpledge
* Frith-borh
* German collective guilt
* Gonin Gumi
* Kin punishment
* Milgram experiment
* Moral disengagement
* NotAllMen
* Privilege (social inequality)
* Reprisal
* Self-hating Jew
* State responsibility
* War crime
* White guilt

## References

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1. ^ Collective Responsibility in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
2. ^ Gregory Mellema (1997). Collective Responsibility. Rodopi. ISBN 90-420-0311-1.
3. ^ a b "Personality traits predict authoritarian tendencies, study finds". PsyPost. 29 September 2017. Retrieved 6 March 2019.
4. ^ a b Alexopoulos, Golfo (January 2008). "Stalin and the Politics of Kinship: Practices of Collective Punishment, 1920s–1940s". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 50: 91–117\. doi:10.1017/S0010417508000066. S2CID 143409375.
5. ^ a b Smiley, Marion (1 January 2011). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University - via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
6. ^ a b Larry May; Stacey Hoffman (27 October 1992). Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 36–. ISBN 978-0-7425-7402-1.
7. ^ a b Edwards, James (2018), "Theories of Criminal Law", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 6 March 2019
8. ^ a b Anderson, Margaret Lavinia; Reynolds, Michael; Kieser, Hans-Lukas; Balakian, Peter; Moses, A. Dirk; Akçam, Taner (2013). "Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' crime against humanity: the Armenian genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)". Journal of Genocide Research. 15 (4): 463–509\. doi:10.1080/14623528.2013.856095. S2CID 73167962. "This is a telling slip; Lewy is talking about 'the Armenians' as if the defenceless women and children who comprised the deportation columns were vicariously responsible for Armenian rebels in other parts of the country. The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking. It fails to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, on which international humanitarian law has been insisting for over a hundred years now."
9. ^ "Building a culture of Responsibility in CEP Plant Timișoara – Continental". Retrieved 6 March 2019.
10. ^ Christie, William (13 October 2006). Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-0-230-62785-7 (inactive 11 July 2025). ISBN 978-0-230-62785-7.`{{cite book}}`: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link)[page needed]
11. ^ tutor2u (22 December 2018). "Collective Cabinet Responsibility". tutor2u. Retrieved 22 December 2018.`{{cite web}}`: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
12. ^ Ezra 7–10
13. ^ O'Connor 2007, p. 491.
14. ^ Gen 9:1–17
15. ^ 9:11
16. ^ 9:12–17
17. ^ Collective responsibility at the Encyclopædia Britannica
18. ^ Dickson, Eric. "On the (in) effectiveness of collective punishment: An experimental investigation" (PDF). NYU.edu.
19. ^ Fletcher, George (January 2004). "Collective Guilt and Collective Punishment". Theoretical Inquiries in Law. 5 (1): 163–178\. doi:10.2202/1565-3404.1089. S2CID 59937653.
20. ^ "Jozef & Wiktoria Ulma – The Righteous Among The Nations". Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 13 August 2013. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
21. ^ "Vasiuta Wegrzynowska and her children – Righteous Among the Nations". Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 2 June 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
22. ^ "Malgorzata Wolska and her children – Righteous Among the Nations". Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 16 May 2015. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
23. ^ "Info". Citinet. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
24. ^ "The Nazi abuse of the Polish people continues". WWII Today. 19 June 2013. Archived from the original on 9 May 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2013.
25. ^ "Forgotten Survivors. Polish Christians Remember The Nazi Occupation". Project InPosterum.
26. ^ Chodakiewicz, Marek Jan (2004). Between Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939–1947. Lexington Books. pp. 92, 105, 118, and 325. ISBN 0739104845.
27. ^ Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, "The Expulsion of 'German' Communities from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War". Archived 1 October 2009 at the Wayback Machine, cadmus.iue.it, European University Institute, Florence. HEC No. 2004/1, pp. 53–54; accessed 26 May 2015.
28. ^ Hamilton, David L.; Sherman, Steven J.; Castelli, Luigi (1 January 2002). "A Group By Any Other Name—The Role of Entitativity in Group Perception". European Review of Social Psychology. 12 (1): 139–166\. doi:10.1080/14792772143000049. ISSN 1046-3283. S2CID 144009376.

### Works cited

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* O'Connor, Kathleen M. (2007). "23. Jeremiah". In Barton, John; Muddiman, John (eds.). The Oxford Bible Commentary (first (paperback) ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 487–533\. ISBN 978-0199277186. Retrieved 6 February 2019.

## Further reading

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* Baldwin, Matthew (1 November 2017). "Nostalgia for America's past can buffer collective guilt". European Journal of Social Psychology. 48 (4): 433–446\. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2348.
* Mallett, Robyn K. (September 2004). "Collective Guilt in the United States: Predicting Support for Social Policies that Alleviate Social Injustice". Collective Guilt: 56–74\. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139106931.006. ISBN 978-0-521-81760-8.
* Salles, Denis (2011). "Responsibility based environmental governance". S.A.P.I.EN.S. 4 (1). Retrieved 15 June 2011.

## External links

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Wikiquote has quotations related to Collective responsibility.

* "Collective Moral Responsibility". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
* Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). "Collective Responsibility". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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