Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics 1 Collective Obligations And

Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics

Collective Obligations and Demandingness Complaints

Abstract: It has been suggested that understanding our obligations to address large-scale moral problems such as global poverty and the threat of severe climate change as fundamentally collective can allow us to insist that a great deal must be done about these problems while denying that there are very demanding obligations, applying to either individuals or collectives, to contribute to addressing them. I argue that this strategy for limiting demandingness fails because those who endorse collective obligations to address large-scale moral problems have no grounds for denying that the relevant collectives are obligated to do what is impartially best. Specifically, I argue that appeals to the claim that collective obligations to do what is impartially best would be objectionably demanding cannot succeed, for two reasons. The first is that demandingness complaints cannot be aggregated across the individual members of a collective. And the second is that demandingness complaints cannot plausibly be asserted on behalf of collectives themselves. I conclude by suggesting some reasons to think that collective obligations to address large-scale problems will tend to imply demanding individual obligations.

Keywords: collective obligation, demandingness, aggregation, moral patients

1 Introduction

It is widely believed that there are significant limits on what individuals can be morally obligated to do in response to large-scale moral catastrophes, such as global poverty, or potential moral catastrophes, such as severe climate change. I could give half of my income to effective organizations that aid the global poor, and I could substantially cut back on my energy use at the cost of a notably lower quality of life. But most people believe that I am not obligated to do either of these things, even if doing them would be much better, impartially, than not doing them.

One commonly accepted explanation for my lacking these obligations is that any moral view that affirmed them would be unacceptably demanding. According to proponents of this explanation, individuals can raise what I will call demandingness complaints against moral views that require large sacrifices of them, and these complaints can provide grounds for rejecting those moral views.

1 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics

Despite the widespread rejection of views that require large sacrifices of individuals, however, it is generally accepted that much ought to be done to alleviate global poverty and to address the threat of climate change.1 In particular, it is often suggested that there are collective obligations to respond to these large-scale moral problems; for example, some believe that there are collective obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that apply to governments

(Sinnott-Armstrong 2005, p. 304), and others believe that obligations to aid the global poor should be understood as fundamentally collective (Murphy 2000, p. 96; Wringe 2005, p. 201;

Lichtenberg 2014, pp. 67-70).

It might seem that endorsing collective obligations to alleviate global poverty and avert severe climate change could allow us to maintain our commitment to the view that a great deal ought to be done about these pressing problems while avoiding commitment to very demanding individual obligations. Perhaps, for example, the relevant collective obligations do not give rise to any individual obligations at all (Jackson 1987). Or perhaps they give rise to an individual obligation to contribute one’s fair share to the satisfaction of the collective obligation, but no more than that (Murphy 2000, pp. 76-77).2 They might also give rise to individual obligations to contribute to getting collective entities (e.g. governments) to comply with their obligations

(Sinnott-Armstrong 2005, p. 304), for example by voting for certain candidates or policies, or to individual obligations to contribute to the formation of a collective agent capable of doing whatever it is that collectively ought to be done (Wringe 2014a),3 or to an individual obligation

1 I discuss whether our intuitive responses to demandingness issues raised by the global poverty and climate change cases are defensible in Berkey (2014). 2 Murphy allows that requirements to contribute one’s fair share can be very demanding, and rejects demandingness complaints raised against these requirements (2000, pp. 100-01). 3 Stephanie Collins (2013) also holds that individuals can have duties to contribute to the formation of collective agents that would be capable of performing certain morally important tasks, but on her view these individual obligations are not grounded in prior collective obligations, since she holds that only agents can be the bearers of obligations. Since in the relevant cases the collective agents that can carry out the morally important tasks do not yet

2 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics to contribute to the performance of a required collective action on the condition that enough others are willing to contribute if one does (Goodin 2012). Though individual obligations of some of these types could in principle be very demanding, many seem to think that they would tend not to be, and that in the cases of global poverty relief and climate change mitigation they would be much less demanding than giving up half of my income and substantially reducing my personal energy consumption, respectively. For example, one reason that Judith Lichtenberg offers for conceiving of duties to relieve global poverty as ‘belonging to collectives rather than individuals’ is that ‘such a shift would reduce the demands on individuals’ (2014, p. 68).

I will not attempt to determine the precise content of the individual obligations that we should accept if we endorse the collective obligations that I have described. My aim in this paper is, instead, to suggest that endorsing collective obligations to address large-scale moral problems cannot serve as a principled way to both avoid commitment to the very stringent individual obligations that many appeal to demandingness complaints in order to reject and insist that these problems must, morally speaking, be addressed in a robust way. Indeed, I will argue that even if demandingness complaints generally have normative force,4 accepting that there are collective obligations to address large-scale moral problems can make it more, rather than less, difficult to successfully appeal to such complaints in order to resist the view that our individual obligations can, at least in principle, be extremely demanding.

I will proceed in the remainder of the paper as follows. In section 2, I will describe the structure of demandingness complaints, and note the function of appeals to such complaints in arguments against purported individual obligations. In section 3, I will consider two ways in exist, individual obligations to contribute to bringing them into existence cannot, on Collins’s view, be grounded in obligations to perform those tasks possessed by any collective. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to clarify the relationship between Wringe and Collins’s views. 4 For arguments against the view that demandingness complaints have normative force, see Murphy (2000, pp. 9- 62), Sobel (2007), Braddock (2013).

3 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics which it might be argued that demandingness complaints can be raised against purported collective obligations. The first involves aggregating the demandingness complaints that can be made on behalf of the individual members of a collective, while the second involves claiming that non-reducible demandingness complains can be made on behalf of collectives themselves.

Against the first approach, I will argue that demandingness complaints cannot be aggregated across persons, and that because of this the approach cannot ground a demandingness complaint that is any stronger than the strongest one that can be raised on behalf of an individual member of the collective. And this complaint will, I claim, virtually never be strong enough to justify rejecting a purported collective obligation the satisfaction of which would contribute significantly to addressing a large-scale moral problem. Against the second approach, I will argue that non-reducible demandingness complaints can be made only on behalf of moral patients, and that there are strong reasons to reject the view that any collectives are moral patients in the relevant sense. The strongest candidates for being collective moral patients are those that many have argued are moral agents. The most widely discussed examples of collectives that it is plausible to believe are moral agents are highly organized entities with formalized decision-making procedures, such as states and corporations.5 It has been suggested by Stephanie Collins and Holly Lawford-Smith that collectives of these kinds have ‘constitutive ends’ (2016, pp. 52-3), and that these ends can ground demandingness complaints on behalf of the relevant collectives that are similar in both structure and content to the complaints that many accept can be made on behalf of individuals by appealing to the significance of what Bernard

Williams calls their ‘ground projects’ (1981, pp. 12-14).6 Focusing primarily on the example of

5 The case of corporations has perhaps received the most attention - see, for example French (1979), Phillips (1992), Silver (2005), Arnold (2006), Pettit (2007), and List and Pettit (2011), who all argue that corporations can be, and at least often are, moral agents. For a helpful overview of the debate see Sepinwall (2016). 6 See also Williams (1973), Scheffler (1992), and Scheffler (1994).

4 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics corporations, I will argue that this ‘parity argument’ (Collins and Lawford-Smith 2016) succeeds only if the collectives in question are moral patients in the sense that their interests, projects, or

‘constitutive ends’ ground reasons that play a role in determining what other agents are morally required, permitted, and forbidden to do. And I will claim that there are at least two reasons to think that collectives’ constitutive ends cannot ground reasons of this kind. The first is that there are at least fairly strong reasons to believe that even highly structured collectives such as corporations lack properties that are plausibly thought of as necessary conditions of moral patienthood, in particular the capacity for conscious experience. And the second is that accepting that collectives’ constitutive ends ground reasons that are relevant to the moral status of the actions of other agents would have implausible normative implications. I will conclude, in section 4, by describing what the argument in section 3 suggests proponents of collective obligations to address large-scale moral problems are committed to accepting with respect to our individual obligations to contribute to addressing those problems.

2 The Structure of Demandingness Complaints

The most common form of demandingness complaint against a purported requirement to Φ (and the form that I will focus on in this paper) asserts that such a requirement should be rejected, despite the fact that acting as it prescribes would be impartially better, and perhaps very much better, than not Φ-ing.7 The appeal to such a demandingness complaint, then, presumes that Φ-

7 Different impartial moral theories will have different criteria for the impartial betterness of some actions as compared to others. I take no position here on what the correct criteria are. Demandingness complaints can, in principle, also be made against purported obligations to act in ways that are not conceived, within theories that might be thought to ground them, as impartially better than alternative ways of acting. I will not, however, focus on complaints that take this form in this paper. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to clarify the focus of my argument here.

5 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics ing would be morally better than not Φ-ing, but insists that Φ-ing is nonetheless supererogatory rather than required.

This kind of complaint against a purported requirement to Φ differs from those that claim that it is a mistake to think that Φ-ing would be impartially better than not Φ-ing. Consider, for example, the following case, familiar from debates about the aggregation of benefits and burdens across persons:

Life vs. Headaches: I can, at no cost to myself, either prevent each of one billion people from

suffering a mild headache, or prevent one person from dying.8

In this case, what I ought to do depends only on which option is impartially better. If I believe that I ought to prevent the billion headaches, some will object that I am mistaken, since they believe that it is impartially more important to prevent the single death (Scanlon 1998, p. 235).

Whether this objection succeeds depends (assuming that the issue is not simply that it takes more than one billion headaches to outweigh one death) on whether small burdens can be aggregated across persons so as to impartially outweigh a very large burden for a single person.

Consider now a variant of Life vs. Headaches:

My Life vs. Headaches: I can prevent each of one billion people from suffering a mild

headache by sacrificing my own life.

8 Cases of this sort are discussed by Norcross (1997; 1998).

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If a single death is impartially worse than a billion mild headaches, then of course I will not be required to sacrifice my life in this case (at least barring special circumstances – for example, if I promised to give up my life on the condition that it turns out that doing so is necessary to prevent the headaches). But even if it is impartially better to prevent the billion headaches than to prevent the single death in Life vs. Headaches, we may think that I am not obligated to sacrifice my own life in order to prevent the billion from suffering the headaches. This purported requirement may be objectionably demanding, and so a demandingness complaint may provide grounds for rejecting it.9

It is important that it only becomes necessary to appeal to demandingness complaints in order to challenge a purported requirement to Φ once it is granted that Φ-ing would be impartially better than not Φ-ing. If Φ-ing is not impartially better than performing an alternative action that one prefers to Φ-ing, then unless the case involves certain special features (for example, one has made a promise or has a special obligation to a particular person or group), it is clear that one cannot be obligated to Φ.

If, on the other hand, Φ-ing would be impartially better than not Φ-ing, then there is a rebuttable presumption in favor of an obligation to Φ. Those who deny that there is an obligation to Φ must provide a reason for this denial. Demandingness complaints aim to provide such a reason.10 Appeals to demandingness complaints, then, are attempts to overcome the presumption in favor of obligations to do what is impartially best.

9 I discuss the nature and limits of appeals to demandingness complaints on behalf of individuals in Berkey (2016) 10 There are, of course, other reasons that might be appealed to in order to rebut the presumption in favor of an obligation to do what is impartially best.

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3 Collective Obligations and Demandingness Complaints

If there are collective obligations to address global poverty and the threat of severe climate change, then there is a presumption that the collectives that have the relevant obligations are obligated to do what is impartially best with respect to each of these issues (taking into account the need to balance potentially competing moral priorities – e.g. where the most effective means of reducing global poverty in the near term would exacerbate the risk of severe climate change in the long term). There are a number of factors that may override this presumption, at least in certain cases. For example, national governments may be permitted to prioritize the interests of their citizens over the interests of non-citizens in making policy, or, more strongly, they may have a special obligation to do so. But such permissions and/or obligations must be limited if we are to avoid the implication that at least many governments and other relevant collectives (e.g. the governments of wealthy nations like the United States) are not actually obligated to do much at all to help alleviate global poverty or avert severe climate change. Those who hold that we can avoid demanding individual obligations to contribute to addressing global poverty by accepting that the obligations to address this problem are fundamentally collective, and apply to states

(perhaps among other collectives), cannot also hold that states, including wealthy states, are permitted (or required) to prioritize the interests of their own citizens to an extent that is inconsistent with a requirement to make very substantial contributions to addressing global poverty. To do this would, in effect, be to deny that global poverty must, morally speaking, be addressed in a robust way.

It might be thought that, just as we can object to individual obligations to do what is impartially best by appealing to demandingness complaints, we can also resist the view that collectives are obligated to do what is impartially best by appealing to such complaints. If I can

8 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics appeal to a demandingness complaint in order to reject the view that I am obligated to give up half of my income in order to aid the global poor, even if doing so would be impartially best, then we might think that, similarly, a collective made up of people in circumstances similar to mine can object that a requirement that they give up half of their collective income in order to aid the poor is objectionably demanding. Even though the collective’s giving up half of its income would do much more good than my giving up half of my income, the demands of the relevant obligation would also, it might be claimed, be proportionately greater, so that if the force of the demandingness complaint that can be made in the case involving a single individual is sufficient to ground a rejection of the purported obligation, then the force of the complaint that can be made against the purported collective obligation will also be sufficient to reject it.

3.1 Aggregating Demandingness Complaints

One way to develop this line of reasoning is to argue that demandingness complaints can be aggregated across persons to yield a collective demandingness complaint the strength of which is equal to the sum of the strengths of the complaints that can be made on behalf of each of the individuals that make up the relevant collective. There is, however, a compelling reason to think that the relationship between the strength of demandingness complaints that can be made on behalf of individuals and of those that can be made on behalf of collectives cannot be straightforwardly aggregative, and indeed that no aggregation of demandingness complaints is acceptable.

The objection to the view that demandingness complaints can be aggregated across persons appeals to the same thought that underlies the well-known objection to aggregative utilitarian theories that says that such theories fail to take the separateness of persons sufficiently seriously

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(Nozick 1974, pp. 32-33; Scanlon 1998, p. 230; Rawls 1999, pp. 23-24). The key claim of the objection to aggregative utilitarianism is that because there is no single entity that would experience a set of benefits or burdens aggregated across persons, it cannot be better, morally speaking, to, for example, prevent a minor harm from befalling each of many people, than to prevent a much more serious harm from befalling a single person. In Life vs. Headaches, for example, because there is no single entity that would experience the one billion headaches, but rather a billion separate people, each of whom would experience a single headache, we cannot, according to proponents of the objection, take the reason to prevent the headaches to be a billion times stronger than the reason to prevent a single headache, at least when comparing the strength of the reason to prevent the headaches with the strength of the reason to prevent the single death.

Indeed, because each of the headaches would be experienced by a separate person, the case for preventing the headaches rather than the death may be no stronger when there are a billion headaches at stake than it would be if there were only one (Scanlon 1998, p. 235).11

It is clear that a similarly motivated objection can be made against the view that demandingness complaints can be aggregated across persons. If we are considering whether a collective made up of well off people has an obligation to, for example, give up half of its collective income in order to aid the global poor, we cannot, we might think, allow that a demandingness complaint can be asserted on its behalf the strength of which is equal to the sum of the strengths of the complaints that could be made on behalf of each of the individuals of whom the collective is composed. This is because there are strong reasons to believe that collectives, even highly organized collectives with formal decision-making procedures such as

11 For arguments that there must be some number of headaches such that one ought to prevent the headaches rather than saving one person’s life, see Norcross (1997; 1998).

10 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics corporations, are not experiencing subjects.12 If it is true that collectives are not experiencing subjects, that is, if they lack conscious experiences, then there is no entity that would experience the sum of the burdens that would follow from the satisfaction of a (purported) collective obligation. And if there is no entity that would experience the sum of burdens that would follow from the satisfaction of a purported collective obligation, then facts about the sum of those burdens cannot, it would seem, ground a single, unified demandingness complaint against the purported obligation.

Importantly, this objection to the aggregation of demandingness complaints does not presume or require the success of the objection to the aggregation of benefits and burdens in the determination of which acts or outcomes are impartially best. There may be reasons to think that we must aggregate benefits and burdens across persons in order to properly assess the impartial betterness and worseness of acts or states of affairs, despite the fact that there is no entity that will experience any aggregated set of benefits or burdens (Norcross 1997; Norcross 1998). Even if this is true, however, because the function of demandingness complaints is to rebut the presumption in favor of obligations to do what those who press such complaints agree would be impartially best, the grounds that might provide a basis for endorsing aggregation in the assessment of impartial betterness and worseness cannot also provide a basis for endorsing the aggregation of demandingness complaints. Since the structure of demandingness complaints itself ensures that there can be no impartial grounds for endorsing their aggregation across persons, the separateness of the persons of whom collectives are composed, along with the

12 The view that corporations are not experiencing subjects, and are not moral patients in the sense that their interests, projects, or constitutive ends ground reasons that play a role in determining what other agents are required, permitted, or forbidden to do, is defended by Hess (2013) and Pasternak (2017), and essentially assumed by List and Pettit (2011, p. 227, note 128). In a more recent paper, List (2018) reaches a slightly less skeptical conclusion. For a defense of the view that corporations can plausibly be considered moral patients, see Silver (forthcoming).

11 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics plausible claim that collectives are not themselves experiencing subjects, appear to provide decisive reasons to deny that they can be so aggregated.

If demandingness complaints cannot be aggregated across persons, however, then the strength of the demandingness complaint that can be made against, for example, a purported obligation that a collective made up of many well off people give up half of their collective income in order to aid the global poor, will, it would appear, be equal to the strength of the strongest demandingness complaint that can be made on behalf of an individual who is a part of the collective. But such a complaint will, in all but perhaps the most unusual cases (e.g. a case in which losing half of her income would somehow render an otherwise well off person very badly off), be far too weak to overcome the presumption in favor of the obligation. This is because the amount of good that would be done by the collective if it satisfied the obligation would be enormous, and the strongest demandingness complaint that could be made on behalf of an individual member of the collective would not be strong enough to undermine the presumption that she is obligated to accept her share of the collective burden in order to bring about all of the benefits that would result from the collective sacrifice.

Consider, for example, a case in which it would be impartially best for each individual member of a collective composed of 100,000 well off people to give up half of her income in order to aid the global poor, and also impartially best for the collective itself to give up half of its income for the same purpose. It may be that each individual’s sacrifice of half of her income would result in (the moral equivalent of) the saving of 10 lives. It seems at least plausible that the presumption in favor of an individual obligation to give up half of one’s income might, in this case, be overcome by a demandingness complaint. Perhaps such a complaint would have

12 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics sufficient force to limit each individual’s obligation such that she is only required to sacrifice

1/3rd of her income.

If we claim that the collective itself is a bearer of obligations, however, then its doing what would be impartially best would result in the saving of one million lives. Since demandingness complaints cannot be aggregated across persons, in order for a complaint to have sufficient force to overcome the presumption in favor of the collective obligation to sacrifice half of the collective’s income, a single individual’s complaint against an obligation to sacrifice half of her income in order to save a million lives would have to have sufficient force to overcome the presumption in favor of such an obligation. It is, however, implausible that a well off individual could justify refusing to give up half of her income if doing so would save a million lives, even if she could justify refusing to do in order to save 10 lives.

The fact that demandingness complaints cannot be aggregated across persons, then, means that accepting that there are collective obligations to alleviate global poverty and avert severe climate change threatens to make it more, rather than less difficult to appeal to such complaints in order to reject purported obligations the satisfaction of which would entail large losses for well off people. The view that a well off individual can raise a demandingness complaint that has sufficient force to undermine the presumption that she is obligated to give up half of her income in order to save the few lives that doing so could save may be defensible. But the same complaint surely has nowhere near the force necessary to undermine the presumption that she would be obligated to give up half of her income if doing so could save millions of lives. Since at least most of the collectives to which proponents of collective obligations to alleviate global poverty and avert severe climate change ascribe such obligations would save millions of lives by doing what it would be impartially best for them to do, there is no available demandingness complaint

13 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics on behalf of a single individual member of such a collective with anywhere near sufficient force to overcome the presumption that the collective is obligated to do what is impartially best.

3.2 Irreducibly Collective Demandingness Complaints

A second approach to defending the claim that purported collective obligations can be rejected by appeal to demandingness complaints involves arguing that collective demandingness complaints should not be understood as consisting in the aggregated complaints of the individual members of the collective, but instead can be made on behalf of the collective itself, in a way that is irreducible to any complaints that individual members might have. On a view of this kind, the separateness of the persons of whom the collective is composed cannot be an objection to collective demandingness complaints, because neither the content nor the strength of the complaints is determined by aggregating the complaints of members, or the interests that underlie those complaints. Instead, the collective is treated as an autonomous source of irreducible morally significant claims, and these claims are taken to underlie demandingness complaints that can rebut the presumption that a collective that is obligated to contribute to addressing large-scale moral problems is obligated to do whatever it would be impartially best for it to do.

Stephanie Collins and Holly Lawford-Smith suggest an approach of this kind, claiming that we can understand collectives such as corporations as having ‘constitutive ends’ that can ground demandingness complaints in a way that parallels the complaints that it is widely accepted can be advanced on behalf of individuals (2016, pp. 51-3). Here is how they explain the central idea:

collectives are created for the specific purpose of pursuing certain ends. These are its ‘constitutive ends’: ends that are deeply important to the collective and serve to underpin

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many of the collective’s more specific ends and plans. This suggests it’s overdemanding for them to do much to sacrifice those ends (Collins and Lawford-Smith 2016, p. 52).

The claim that it seems objectionably demanding to hold that collectives can be required to ‘do much’ that would involve sacrificing their constitutive ends suggests that Collins and Lawford-

Smith think that the demandingness complaints that are grounded by collectives’ constitutive ends are quite powerful, and that therefore not only will collectives not generally be obligated to do what is impartially best, they will also be permitted to act in ways that are very far from being impartially best, so long as doing so is necessary for them to successfully pursue their constitutive ends. Indeed, they claim that the fact that collectives are created for specific purposes may provide a reason for thinking that, all else equal, less can be demanded of collectives than individuals. This interpretation is also suggested by their discussion of an example involving an oil company:

while there is a pro tanto moral demand for corporations…to have environmentally friendly practices, we tend to think this obligation is overridden if it is incompatible with the full pursuit of their (permissible) constitutive ends.13 Thus, it seems an oil company cannot have an obligation to stop searching for oil and pursue green energy instead – even if the company is perfectly able to pursue green energy, and would cause harm if it searches for oil, has caused rectification-requiring harm through oil drilling, is able to help others through pursuing green energy, and so on. The oil company cannot have an obligation to pursue green energy, one might think, simply because this is not its raison d’être (Collins and Lawford-Smith 2016, p. 52).

13 The claim that constitutive ends ground demandingness complaints only if they are permissible, and that if they are permissible the complaints grounded are generally strong enough to make the ‘full pursuit’ of a collective’s constitutive ends permissible, seems to me problematic as a way of understanding the relationship between constitutive ends and the demandingness complaints that they might ground. This is because whether it is permissible for a collective to have a particular constitutive end is best understood as dependent on whether it is objectionably demanding to require that it not have it. In other words, there is no independent fact about whether a particular constitutive end is permissible that can determine whether it is the sort of end the having of which could ground a demandingness complaint capable of rebutting a presumption in favor of an obligation to do what is impartially best. In addition, it seems implausible to think that if it is permissible for a collective to have a particular constitutive end, that it is generally objectionable to think that it can be required to do anything that would limit its ‘full pursuit’ of that end. After all, we do not tend to think that it is objectionable to hold that morality can require individuals to sacrifice the pursuit of their most valued ends to some extent when sufficiently important moral considerations are at stake, even if we do think that they cannot be required to sacrifice the pursuit of those ends whenever doing so would be impartially better.

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The suggestion here appears to be that collectives’ constitutive ends can ground demandingness complaints that are similar in both structure and content to the complaints that Bernard Williams claims individuals have in virtue of their commitments to their ‘ground projects’ (1981, pp. 12-

14). Williams describes an individual’s ground projects as those that ‘are closely related to his existence and…to a significant degree give a meaning to his life’ (1981, p. 12). These projects, he continues, ‘provid[e] the motive force which propels him in to the future, and give him a reason for living’ (p. 13). Both utilitarian and Kantian moral theories are, according to Williams, objectionable because they imply that individuals are obligated to give up their ground projects, or at least to act in ways that inconsistent with their pursuit, whenever doing so is required by the theories’ impartial principles (p. 14). This is not, on Williams’s view, a reasonable demand. Any theory that includes such a requirement is, on his view, objectionably demanding.

It seems clear that Collins and Lawford-Smith are, in effect, suggesting that we should understand collectives’ constitutive ends as being at least roughly analogous to individuals’ ground projects,14 and allow that, just as Williams claims in the case of individuals, they can ground demandingness complaints on behalf of collectives. And since collectives can have constitutive ends that are not the constitutive ends or ground projects of any individual members, the demandingness complaints that the collectives’ constitutive ends ground cannot, on this view, be reducible to the complaints or interests of individual members.15

14 They don’t themselves refer to Williams’s notion of a ground project, but do claim that individuals also have constitutive ends that can ground demandingness complaints (Collins and Lawford-Smith 2016, pp. 52f). 15 To see that collectives can have constitutive ends that are not shared by any members, consider Collins and Lawford-Smith’s oil company example. Imagine, as they suggest, that an oil company has a constitutive end of searching for and extracting oil. It seems clear that this can be the case without any individual member having searching for and extracting oil as a constitutive end or ground project. Indeed, it would seem at least somewhat absurd for an individual to have this as an end that gives meaning to her life, or provides her with a reason for living. Presumably most individual members of the oil company will view searching for and extracting oil as at most a

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There is something plausible about viewing collectives as having projects that are bound up with their identities in roughly the same way that individuals have such projects. To allow that the fact that collectives have such projects can ground demandingness complaints that can rebut the presumption in favor of obligations to do what is impartially best, however, would require accepting that collectives are moral patients, in addition to being moral agents, and that therefore their interests and projects generate reasons that are relevant the moral status of other agents’ actions. This is because demandingness complaints can have force only on behalf of interests that are independently morally significant, and only moral patients have such interests. If it is objectionable to hold that an oil company is obligated to give up searching for and extracting oil because that obligation is too demanding, then it must be the case that the company’s interest in searching for and extracting oil matters morally. If that interest did not matter morally, then even if it would, in some sense, be demanding for the company to be required to sacrifice the pursuit of its project, it could not be objectionably demanding in a way that could ground a demandingness complaint. And since no individual member of the company needs to have the project of searching for and extracting oil in order for the company to have that project, if we accept that a collective’s projects can ground demandingness complaints, we must accept that they do so independent of any effects on individual members’ interests, and so even when no individual members’ interests would be negatively affected if the collective complied with a purported obligation. The possibility of such complaints is entailed by any view on which there can be irreducibly collective demandingness complaints.

Collins and Lawford-Smith claim that the fact that collectives lack phenomenal experience can plausibly be thought to imply that, all else equal, more can be demanded of collectives than

means to other ends that they have, such as earning a living (which is itself likely to be only a means to pursuing other ends, including perhaps her ground projects) or helping to provide energy to others.

17 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics individuals (2016, p. 52). This is because a collective would not itself experience the sacrifice of the pursuit of its projects as demanding, if it were to comply with purported obligations that require that sacrifice. The fact that collectives do not experience demands in the way that individuals typically do,16 Collins and Lawford-Smith suggest, might be thought to serve as a counterweight to the greater barrier to accepting demanding obligations that derives from the fact that collectives (unlike individuals) are created for specific purposes (2016, p. 52).

It is, however, more plausible to think that the fact that collectives do not experience obligations as demanding, and the more general fact that they are not experiencing subjects at all, simply rules out the possibility that demandingness complaints can be made on their behalf. It is unclear why we might think that it could matter, morally speaking, if a collective is unable to pursue its constitutive ends, apart from the potential effects on the interests of experiencing subjects such as individual members.17 If it did matter, then we would have moral reasons to ensure that, for example, oil companies can continue to search for and extract oil, even if their doing so is not in the interests of any experiencing subjects. These reasons might, of course, be outweighed by reasons to prevent them from doing so that are grounded in the interests of experiencing subjects, but this doesn’t, it seems to me, significantly reduce the implausibility of accepting that collectives such as oil companies are moral patients whose ability to pursue their

16 Collins and Lawford-Smith rightly point out that it is possible for individuals to fail to experience requirements that they sacrifice their constitutive ends as demanding (2016, p. 53). 17 Collins and Lawford-Smith suggest that the fact that collectives have ‘constituent parts’ – that is, individual members – who would experience a requirement that their collective sacrifice the pursuit of its constituent aims as demanding is a reason to think that there is not a fundamental difference in the nature and content of the demandingness complaints that can be made on behalf of individuals and collectives, respectively. But the fact that collectives will often have members that will experience requirements on the collective as demanding cannot support the view that there can be irreducibly collective demandingness complaints, since such complaints cannot be grounded in the interests of individual members.

18 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics constitutive ends matters morally.18 And if collectives are not moral patients, then demandingness complaints simply cannot be made on their behalf.

Even if, however, we accepted that collectives are moral patients, it is unclear how we could hold, as Collins and Lawford-Smith appear to, that the demandingness complaints that can be made on their behalf are strong enough to significantly limit their obligations. I argued above that even if individuals can raise demandingness complaints that limit how much they can be required to sacrifice in order to save a relatively small number of lives, such complaints will not undermine the presumption in favor of an obligation to make large sacrifices in order to save a very large number of lives. The collectives that are widely argued to have obligations to contribute to addressing large-scale moral problems, however, would typically have effects that look more like saving millions of lives if they were to do what it is impartially best for them to do. So in order to accept that demandingness complaints can be raised on behalf of those collectives that are strong enough to rebut the presumption in favor of obligations to do what is impartially best, we would have to think that collectives’ interests in pursuing their constitutive ends are vastly more important, morally speaking, than individuals’ similar interests. And this should seem deeply implausible to anyone, including those who find it plausible to think that collectives are moral patients.19

There are strong reasons, then, to accept that even if irreducibly collective demandingness complaints can be made, they will rarely be strong enough to substantially limit a collective’s

18 Bill Wringe (2014b) considers whether collective agents such as corporations should be thought of as moral patients despite the fact that they lack the capacity for conscious experience, on the broadly Kantian ground that they possess the capacity for rational agency. He appeals to considerations similar to those that I have noted to argue that we should reject any view according to which collectives are moral patients, since, at least for Kantians, this would imply, implausibly, that it is impermissible to treat collective agents as mere means. 19 The most obvious reason for finding this unacceptable is that it would imply that individuals will often have very strong moral reasons, and likely obligations, to sacrifice their interests in order to ensure that collectives can pursue their constitutive ends, even in cases in which the collectives’ pursuit of their ends is not in the interests of any individuals.

19 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics obligation to do what is impartially best, at least in cases involving large, powerful collectives’ obligations to contribute to addressing large-scale moral problems. I am inclined to think, however, that we should accept the stronger claim that there can be no irreducibly collective demandingness complaints, since collectives are not experiencing subjects, and only experiencing subjects can be moral patients.20

4. Collective and Individual Obligations

It is clear that, on most plausible views about the composition of the collectives that are claimed to be the bearers of obligations to contribute to addressing large-scale moral problems such as global poverty and the threat of climate change, their doing what is impartially best with respect to these issues would involve radical departures from current practice, and would entail substantial losses for well off people of precisely the sort that many proponents of collective obligations (e.g. Lichtenberg 2014, p. 67) claim that individuals cannot be obligated to accept because such an obligation would be objectionably demanding. The arguments in section 3, however, provide strong reasons for concluding that those who endorse collective obligations have little, if any, basis for denying that, at least in cases like those involving poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation, where the amount of good that the relevant collectives can do is enormous, these obligations are to do what is impartially best.

While there are many possible views about the precise content of the individual obligations that we must accept if we accept these collective obligations, a few implications seem fairly clear. First, if a collective of which an individual is a member is obligated to give up half of its collective income in order to help alleviate global poverty, then that individual is obligated not to

20 For challenges to this view, see Silver (forthcoming).

20 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics oppose attempts to satisfy that obligation by means that are otherwise morally unproblematic,21 even though the satisfaction of the collective obligation would entail that she loses, say, half of her personal income. Second, if certain efforts on her part (e.g. work toward organizing the relevant collective action) are necessary for the collective obligation to be satisfied, then, at least in cases in which there is a sufficient probability that her action would contribute to its being

(better) satisfied, she is obligated to make those efforts, even though they would be directed at, among other things, the sacrifice of, say, half of her income, and might be demanding for other reasons as well. In addition, it is difficult to see how it might be denied that individuals have very strong moral reasons (which in at least many cases will not be outweighed by countervailing considerations, and so will generate obligations) to make similar efforts when they are not strictly necessary for the satisfaction of the collective obligation, but are sufficiently likely to improve the chances of the collective obligation being satisfied.22 Lastly, though somewhat more controversial, there are reasons to think that individuals may be obligated to directly sacrifice their share of the resources necessary to satisfy the collective obligation, either because doing so may increase the likelihood that others will do so, and therefore increase the likelihood that the collective obligation will be satisfied, or merely because their contribution would make the collective obligation better satisfied than it otherwise would be, even if it remains far from fully

21 For example, if one’s country has this obligation, then she is obligated not to campaign against a fair tax increase proposal that would raise the funds necessary to meet this obligation and ensure that they are distributed appropriately. She at least may, however, be justified in campaigning against, for example, an attempt by some members of the collective to satisfy the collective obligation by unfairly placing all of the burden of providing the necessary funds on a subset of the collective’s membership. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to clarify this, and to the guest editors for suggesting the type of case that I use to illustrate the point. 22 Wringe (2016, p. 488) endorses a claim with essentially the same structure, although he leaves it somewhat more open how often the reasons (or, in his terms, pro tanto obligations) that individuals have to act in ways that make it more likely that a collective obligation will be satisfied might be outweighed by countervailing considerations. This should not necessarily be taken to indicate any substantial disagreement between us, however, since he is concerned with collective obligations in general, while my focus is on collective obligations to contribute to addressing large- scale moral problems such as global poverty and climate change. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to clarify the relationship between Wringe’s view and my claim here.

21 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics satisfied.23 Even the most uncontroversial of these implications involves individual obligations that many proponents of conceiving of obligations to address large-scale problems such as global poverty and climate change as fundamentally collective are likely to find objectionably demanding.

Endorsing collective obligations to respond to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty and the threat of climate change also threatens to make at least some appeals to demandingness complaints on behalf of individual members of the relevant collectives more, rather than less difficult to consistently defend. For example, if we conclude that a collective of which we are members is obligated to give up half of its income in order to benefit the global poor, then it is difficult to see how we can claim that it is objectionably demanding for the individual members of the collective to be obligated to endorse and comply with a system that requires them to contribute half of their income to the collective effort. If we accepted that no individual member can be obligated to give up half of her income to such a collective effort because that obligation would be objectionably demanding, then it would seem that we would have to abandon the view that the collective is obligated to give up half of its income as well.

After all, it is not clear what it could mean to say that the collective is obligated to give up half of its income if it is not even permitted to adopt a system that would raise and distribute the necessary funds. Of course, we might reject certain purported collective obligations because we are convinced that the individual members have sufficiently strong demandingness complaints against the individual obligations that accepting them would commit us to endorsing. But if we limit what we take collectives to be obligated to do for these reasons, then we run the risk of endorsing an overall set of obligations that is inconsistent with thinking that large-scale moral

23 This list is meant to be representative, rather than exhaustive.

22 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics problems must be addressed in a robust way. This is another reason that appealing to collective obligations to respond to large-scale moral problems cannot serve as a principled way of maintaining that these problems must be addressed in a serious way while t the same time avoiding commitment to potentially demanding individual obligations.

I suspect that those who are led to endorse collective obligations because they think that doing so can substantially limit the demands on individuals fail to recognize the challenges that this strategy faces because they assume that it is unproblematic to deny that the collectives to which they ascribe obligations are obligated to do what is impartially best. They assume, for example, that these collectives consisting of well off people are obligated only to do what is necessary to relieve the very worst forms of poverty, but not to act so as to improve the lives of those in somewhat less dire poverty, despite the fact that doing so would clearly be much better, impartially, than not doing so. But the fact that demandingness complaints cannot be aggregated across persons, and the reasons for skepticism about the possibility of irreducibly collective demandingness complaints, strongly suggest that this assumption cannot be defended, since it is unclear what other grounds might justify it. Far from showing that we can insist that a great deal must be done about large-scale moral problems without ascribing demanding obligations to individuals, then, endorsing collective obligations to address such problems renders it, if anything, more difficult to deny that individuals can have demanding obligations to contribute to addressing them.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to audiences at the Collectivity Conference at the University of Bristol, the 2015 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, the 2017 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, the Individual and Collective Duties to Rescue Workshop at the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm, and the Demandingness in Practice Workshop at the University of Münster. Patrick Fleming provided helpful comments at the Pacific APA meeting, as did Sara Ghaffari at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress. Amy Sepinwall provided helpful written comments. I have also benefitted from discussions with

23 Forthcoming in Moral Philosophy and Politics

Rachelle Bascara, Jelena Belic, Amy Berg, Megan Blomfeld, Joe Bowen, Vince Buccola, Mark Budolfson, Stephanie Collins, Peter Conti-Brown, Simon Derpmann, Helen Frowe, Gwen Gordon, Anna Hartford, Rob Hughes, Matthew Kramer, Holly Lawford-Smith, Alex Levitov, Hallie Liberto, Sarah Light, Kiam Mintz-Woo, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Kieran Oberman, Ingmar Persson, Liam Shields, Patrick Taylor Smith, Susanne Uusitalo, Marcel van Ackeren, and David Zaring.

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