PHIL663 FA25
Seminar in Ethics (PHIL663)
Topic: Collective Harms
Dr. Patrick Dieveney
Tuesdays · 5:30pm–8:15pm · LA1–310
This course explores collective harms. These are cases where producing some negative consequence requires that enough people act in a certain way, but no single act makes a difference. Each individual person can reasonably claim that, insofar as their contribution makes no difference, they did not do anything wrong. In this seminar, we will investigate collective harms in general, along with proposals for distributing moral responsibility in these controversial cases. Much of our discussion will focus on two specific cases of collective harms that have drawn considerable attention: corporate responsibility and environmental responsibility. Some of the questions that we will explore in this course include: To what extent are individual employees morally responsible for large-scale corporate harms? Is moral responsibility attributable to corporations (or groups generally)? Can groups be moral agents? To what extent are individuals morally responsibility for global warming? Or is moral responsibility for such complex, large-scale collective harms only properly attributable to governments, corporations, or other collectives?