Introduction In the previous chapter, I introduced the proportionality challenge, which calls for a principle in virtue of which some degree of shared blameworthiness for an individual is proportionate while other degrees are too great or too small. At a minimum, the answer to the proportionality challenge must be a principle that is not redundant, arbitrary, or ambiguous. I examined several individualist principles according to which someone’s degree of shared blameworthiness is proportionate to some fact about her, e.g., how much she benefited from the outcome, how much she contributed to the outcome, or how much authority she has over other agents who share blameworthiness, but each candidate principle failed to meet at least one of the three requirements.

In this chapter, I examine candidate principles in which someone’s degree of shared blameworthiness is proportionate to a fact that is not specific to her. I argue that “set-based” principles that make an agent’s degree of shared blameworthiness proportionate to the number of people in some set are either implausible or collapse into individualist principles that fail the redundancy restriction.1

The general form of set-based principles: Monotonic functions of the number of members of a morally relevant set

Set-based principles are those principles according to which someone’s level of shared blameworthiness is proportionate to the number of people in a particular set. This is a broad category, but the prohibitions on arbitrary and ambiguous principles of proportionality narrow the field considerably. A principle of proportionality is arbitrary if it grounds proportionality in morally irrelevant facts, and so the only set-based principles that qualify for consideration are those that identify sets of people that are at least plausibly relevant to shared blameworthiness. A principle will also be arbitrary if changes in someone’s level of blameworthiness depend on morally irrelevant differences. A principle like “Shared blameworthiness increases as the number of people in the set increases,

1 James Fishkin (1982) endorses a set-based principle for blameworthiness. Amy Sepinwall (2011 239 n. 30) explicitly rejects set-based principles in her argument for individual Americans’ accountability for war crimes in virtue of their status as citizens. (“[M]oral responsibility is not a zero-sum matter, with the portion of responsibility for each individual turning on the number of people sharing it.”) Lawford-Smith (2012) also rejects set-based principles in determining individual liability for group wrongs, but allows a role for them in determining group members’ individual obligations in satisfying a group obligations. Jason Brennan (2011) invokes a set-based principle in passing when he claims that, “A democracy with a voting population of size n grants each citizen a de jure 1/nth of the total political authority.” unless there are more than n members in the set, in which case it decreases, all else being equal” counts as a set based principle, but it fails the arbitrariness criterion unless there is something morally special about a set having a specific number of members. Just what (if anything) makes some number of members morally special may vary from principle to principle, and so is a matter of the content of the principle rather than the general form.

Finally, a principle is ambiguous if it can be satisfied by more than one level of blameworthiness in relevantly similar circumstances. This rules out principles like “The more people who share blameworthiness, the less blameworthiness any of them share” because it would be satisfied by any lesser level of blameworthinesss---“a lot,” “a little,” or “none”---when n + 1 people share blameworthiness, all else being equal.2

Taken together, this means that set-based principles must at least 1) identify a plausibly morally relevant set of people and 2) specify a monotonic function to translate the number of people in that set into one and only one level of shared blameworthiness for a given person in a particular circumstance.3 Despite the mathematical terminology, set-based principles need not represent blameworthiness numerically or precisely. A principle that only recognizes degrees of blameworthiness of “none,” “a little,” “a lot,” and “full” could satisfy the ambiguity and arbitrariness conditions despite the vague descriptions of levels of blameworthiness so long as a) it assigned one and only one of those levels of blameworthiness to a person for any given number of people in the morally relevant set and b) incremental increases in the number of people who share blameworthiness would not increase someone’s level of blameworthiness in some cases and decrease it in others, all else being equal.

For the sake of simplicity, I assume that the relevant formula for calculating the proportionate level of blameworthiness is 1/n, where n is the number of people in

2 The prohibition on ambiguous principles does not necessarily rule out vague principles, however. Consider the principle, “Someone’s level of blameworthiness is a function of the number of people who share it, such that for each n, one and only one level of blameworthiness is proportionate in virtue of sharing blameworthiness with n people, all else being equal” This principle is vague because it does not define the level of blameworthiness that would satisfy it, but it is not ambiguous because it can only be satisfied by one (unspecified) level of blameworthiness for any number of people who share it. Vagueness and ambiguity often coincide, but with vague principles there may at least be a fact of the matter about which level of blameworthiness is proportionate. 3 More precisely, monotonic for values greater than 2. The only set-based principles that are eligible for consideration are those according to which someone’s degree of shared blameworthiness is a strict monotonic function of the number of people in a morally relevant set for sets with more than two members. 3

the morally relevant set.4 This is not the only plausible candidate formula, but it has the advantage of being commonly used formula and is easy to calculate, making it a convenient way of representing the consequences of the general features of unambiguousness and monotonicity that any candidate set-based principle must share.5 The success of set-based principles will depend on whether proponents can identify a morally relevant set that holds up under closer scrutiny when paired with an unambiguous, monotonic formula represented by 1/n.

The relevance challenge: Why is set size relevant?

It is one thing to argue that benefiting from a harm is relevant to one’s degree of blameworthiness but it is quite another to argue that the number of people who benefit is relevant. The purpose of the relevance challenge is to weed out set- based theories that lack a minimally adequate explanation of the relevance of the number of people in the putatively morally relevant set.

Most set-based principles cannot offer such explanations. Consider set-based principles that appeal to the number of people who are members of a group agent or the number of people who are members of an ethnic, cultural, social, or political group. It is difficult to see why the number of members in a group or group agent could be relevant to an individual’s level of shared blameworthiness for the harm without conceiving of blameworthiness for the harm as a finite resource given to the group or group agent to be doled out to its members like slices of a pie.6 On this conception of blameworthiness, the number of members is relevant to an individual’s level of blameworthiness because the number of members determines how many people must get a slice. The more people who

4 I am skeptical that our intuitions about cases are so finely tuned that we can reach 2 decisive conclusions about the relative merits of 1/n and, say, 1/n , 1/(n+1), or something else more complicated when asking what formula we ought to use, but see Gerstenberg and Lagnado (2010) for an empirical study of the formula people actually use. According to Gerstenberg and Lagnado, 1/(n+1) is close to the formula people actually use. p. 167, 170. 5 See, e.g., Mellema (2016, 1988), Parfit (1984), Fishkin (1982) and Nozick (1974) for uses of 1/n. 6 Contrast this with the previous chapter’s discussion of individualist principles according to which facts about someone’s membership in a group are relevant to her level of shared blameworthiness but the number of members are not. e.g., Sepinwall (2011), Abedel-Nour (2003), Banks (2013), Silver (2006). must get a slice, the smaller any one person’s slice may be.7 Call this the pie view of shared blameworthiness.

The pie view is coherent, but it is a significant departure from the way we usually think about blameworthiness. In the first place, we do not typically think of moral properties like blameworthiness as finite resources. While not strictly about blameworthiness, the saying “There is plenty of blame to go around” represents the more common view that blameworthiness is not the sort of thing we can run out of. In the second place, we do not usually think that blameworthiness is a free- standing resource that can be shifted from one agent to another as the number of members changes. On the pie view, there will be at least some circumstances where adding or subtracting one person from the morally relevant set would change the amount of blameworthiness that other people shared. People would have “donated” pieces of their own slices to the additional member, or the missing member’s slice would have been divided up and redistributed to those who remain. Shifting blameworthiness in that way is the province of scapegoats and sin-eaters, according to whom blameworthiness can be detached from one agent, packaged up, and reattached to others.8 To say that the pie view is a departure from traditional conceptions of blameworthiness is not to say that it is false, but there is little to recommend biting the bullets the pie view requires beyond a desire to save a set-based principle at any cost, and many proponents of shared blameworthiness find that prospect sufficiently unpalatable that they explicitly reject it.9

Similar considerations apply to set-based principles that appeal to the number of people who perform (or fail to perform) some action.10 If there is an alternative to

7 It is possible to endorse a set-based theory on which the proportionate level of blameworthiness increases as the number of members increases, but such a view holds little appeal for those who think the only plausible principle of proportionality is one that can diminish individuals’ levels of blameworthiness, whether they are proponents of shared blameworthiness like May or Striblen or skeptics like Lewis or Narveson. For those who are willing to entertain principles of proportionality that cannot diminish individuals’ levels of blameworthiness, there are better options modeled after accomplice liability, e.g., each person is blameworthy for what they jointly do; each person is blameworthy for her own actions and vicariously blameworthy for the actions of each other person. On the accomplice liability model, someone’s proportionate level of shared blameworthiness increases as the blameworthiness of other agents’ actions increases rather than the simple number of members. 8 For an interesting discussion of scapegoats, see Mellema (2000). 9 E.g., Mellema (2016, 1988), Nozick (1974), Striblen (2014), May (1992), Sepinwall (2011, p239 n. 30), Kutz (2000). 10 To the extent that “being a member” reduces to the act of joining or the omission of disassociating or repudiating, the same analysis applies to them. May (1992) sees membership this 5

the pie view for principles that appeal to individuals’ acts and omissions, it is the view that someone is more or less blameworthy to the extent that she adheres to or departs from common practices. The more people who contribute to, benefit from, or endorse a harm, the more typical---and to some extent, less blameworthy---any one of them is in that respect.11 Claiming that blameworthiness is graded on a curve in this way is contentious, but this conception of blameworthiness would does explain the relevance of the number of people who benefit, endorse, or contribute without requiring the sort of radical revisions that the pie view did.

The deeper problem with grading acts and omissions on a curve is that explains the wrong phenomenon. Recall that the non-reductionist account of shared blameworthiness distinguishes between an agent’s non-shared blameworthiness for things like contributing to a harm and her shared blameworthiness for the harm itself. The fact (if it is a fact) that someone’s contributions were typical may make her less blameworthy for contributing, but the non-reductionist denies that that is the same as making her less blameworthy for the harm itself. No matter how many people contribute to, benefit from, or endorse the harm, the relevant question for the non-reductionist here is “How many people share blameworthiness?”

As a result, the only principles that pass the relevance challenge by conceiving of blameworthiness as something that is graded on a curve are set-based principles that appeal to the number of people who share blameworthiness. On these views, the number of people who share blameworthiness for a harm is relevant because the more people who share blameworthiness for something, the more typical--- and to some extent, less blameworthy---each one of them is in that respect.

Set-based Principles that Appeal to Shared Blameworthiness: Ethical dilutionism

Passing the relevance challenge is not the same as establishing that the number of people in that set does, in fact, affect anyone’s level of shared blameworthiness. In this section, I argue that set-based principles that appeal to the number of people who share blameworthiness do not hold up to further scrutiny. “Pure” set-based principles that appeal to the number of people who share blameworthiness assign way, and Mellema (1997) and (2006) treats membership as a “qualifying act” in virtue of which someone becomes responsible. But see Räikkä (1997) on dissassociation not being sufficient to avoid responsibility, and Oshana (2006) and Silver (2006) for discussions of being tainted in virtue of one’s heritage. 11 For an analysis of this sort of view, see Husak (1996). See also May (2005, 160-64). too little blameworthiness in cases of large-scale harms like climate change and cannot adequately distinguish themselves from the pie view. Hybrid principles can escape these objections, but only at the cost of sharing blameworthiness ceasing to do doing any work.

At the heart of principles that appeal to the number of people who share blameworthiness is the claim blameworthiness can be diminished in virtue of being shared, a view that Gregory Mellema calls “ethical dilutionism.” If blameworthiness cannot be diminished in virtue of being shared, no such principle can succeed. The most straightforward application of ethical dilutionism identifies “all the people who share blameworthiness for the harm” as the morally relevant set, such that the n people who share blameworthiness are each be 1/nth blameworthy. Call this “Pure ethical dilutionism.” Pure ethical dilutionism claims that blameworthiness not only can be diminished in virtue of being shared, a) blameworthiness is always diminished in virtue of being shared, and b) the more people who share it, the more it is diminished. As the number of people who share blameworthiness increases, the proportionate level of blameworthiness approaches zero.12

Some may find blameworthiness diminishing to zero to be sufficiently counter- intuitive that any principle that entails it can be rejected as absurd. This objection has some force, but it only goes so far. Intuitions about absurdity are not universally shared, and the people who share the intuition that blameworthiness diminishing to zero is absurd are not likely to endorse pure ethical dilutionism in the first place. A more pressing objection is that pure ethical dilutionism gives the wrong result in large-scale harms like climate change, structural racism, or global economic inequality. Millions if not billions of people are caught up in the production and perpetuation of these harms, and so blameworthiness will be very widely shared if it is shared at all. Because each person’s level of blameworthiness diminishes to zero as the number of people who share blameworthiness increases, the level of blameworthiness any one is likely to bear will be too small to be of any significance. Advocates of widely shared blameworthiness for these sorts of harms hope that one’s blameworthiness will play a role in our moral and prudential deliberations, but the near-zero level of blameworthiness I might bear for climate change would be swamped by even the most trivial countervailing moral considerations.13 Finally, one might worry that

12 Note that using 1/n2 or 1/(n+1) or any other strictly decreasing monotonic function with a limit of zero would have the same result. 13 The problem here is that the level of blameworthiness is insignificant, not the individual’s contribution or harm is insignificant. There is no guarantee that small contributions carry small degrees of blameworthiness, or even that they are proportionate. As a result, this 7

the pie view has crept back into the pure ethical dilutionist’s account. The fact that more people sharing blameworthiness always means less blameworthiness for anyone to share is very much in line with conceiving of blameworthiness as a finite resource to be distributed like slices of a pie. Even if pure ethical dilutionism endorses a conception of blameworthiness as something to be graded on a curve, the pie view is an uncomfortably natural fit.14

These are good reasons to reject pure ethical dilutionism, but none of them are objections to ethical dilutionism as such. Ethical dilutionism only claims that blameworthiness can be diluted by being shared. It is open to the ethical dilutionist to say that sharing blameworthiness does not dilute blameworthiness until some threshold number of people is reached or that sharing blameworthiness with more people only dilutes blameworthiness up to a point, after which it makes no difference how many more people share it. The ethical dilutionist will need to offer some justifications for setting those thresholds (whatever they happen to be), but she will have an appealing alternative to pure dilutionism if she succeeds.

Call this alternative to pure dilutionism “threshold dilutionism.” (Threshold dilutionism is another term of Mellema’s, but I am using it more broadly than he does for the sake of making the contrast with pure dilutionism clearer.) In Mellema’s version of threshold ethical dilutionism, the blameworthiness of anyone who cooperates in bringing about a harm is always diluted, but only to the point that the cooperation of more agents is unnecessary to bring about the harm. Dilution of blameworthiness does not begin until enough people cooperate to bring about the harm (since there is no harm to share blameworthiness for), and the dilution stops as soon as no more agents are needed to bring it about.

Mellema borrows the following example from Michael Zimmerman (1985) to illustrate the threshold ethical dilutionist’s view. Suppose that ten teenagers are pushing a rock off a cliff to destroy a car below. The effort of seven teenagers is necessary and sufficient to move the rock off the cliff. According to the threshold ethical dilutionist, each teenager’s degree of blameworthiness would be diluted problem is distinct from much-discussed disputes about the moral significance of minor contributions or imperceptible harms. On these issues, see especially Parfit (1984) discussing imperceptible contributions generally and Lawford-Smith (2016) discussing small contributions with respect to individual responsibility for climate change. See also Morgan-Knapp and Goodman (2015) Zoeller (2015), Hiller (2011); Kagan (2011); Nefsky (2011); Sinnott-Armstrong (2005).. 14 There is a weaker version of the pie objection that claims ethical dilutionism treats blameworthiness as a finite resource, but not necessarily one that must be completely distributed. Nozick (1974/2013, 130) comes closest to raising this objection but even he seems to regard it as part of the pie objection. because enough are cooperating to bring about the harm. But because only seven teenagers are required to push the rock onto the car, no one’s blameworthiness is any more diluted by the eighth, ninth, or tenth teenager sharing blameworthiness. Once the threshold number of teenagers necessary to bring about the harm is crossed, there is no further dilution, no matter how many more teenagers are added to the scenario.

Mellema presents these thresholds as side-constraints on the more general principle that blameworthiness is reduced in virtue of being shared, but the same outcome can be achieved by a set-based principle that accepts ethical dilutionism while identifying “the number of agents whose cooperation is necessary to bring about the harm” as the morally relevant set for determining the proportionate level of blameworthiness. Once threshold ethical dilutionism is expressed in set-based terms, it is easy to generate variations on Mellema’s threshold dilutionism by selecting different morally relevant sets, like “people who benefit from the harm” or “people who are citizens of the country that caused the harm.” Threshold ethical dilutionism, then, is better treated as a class of hybrid theories that claim that blameworthiness is diluted in virtue of being shared, but the morally relevant set that determines how much it is diluted is something other than “everyone who shared blameworthiness.”

Unfortunately for threshold ethical dilutionists, they only avoid the objections to pure ethical dilutionism at the expense of sharing blameworthiness being less relevant to the dilution of blameworthiness than other features of the scenarios. If the rock were heavier so that more teenagers were needed to move it, they could each be 1/8th or 1/10th blameworthy even though they share blameworthiness with the same number of people. The fact that blameworthiness is shared does not change, nor does the number of people who share it, but the proportionate level of blameworthiness does. Sharing blameworthiness is not diluting their blameworthiness. The number of people required to bring about the harm is.15

15 Mellema (1988) objects to threshold dilutionism on different grounds. The ethical dilutionist, Mellema says, lacks the resources to explain what makes the thresholds special. If sharing blameworthiness with seven people does not dilute anyone’s blameworthiness, why would sharing it with eight? If sharing blameworthiness with eight people dilutes blameworthiness less than sharing it with nine, why would sharing blameworthiness with nine not dilute blameworthiness less than sharing it with ten? It seems to me that the ethical dilutionist has a natural answer: the threshold is special because the number of people required to bring about a harm is morally significant. Sharing blameworthiness with enough people to cause a harm dilutes blameworthiness, and sharing it with more or fewer does not. I argue below that this view does not hold up under scrutiny, but it is plausible enough that there is nothing mysterious about where the threshold is set. 9

To the extent that sharing blameworthiness does play a role in diluting individuals’ blameworthiness, it makes threshold ethical dilutionism less plausible. Suppose that nine of the ten teenagers have a perfect defense against sharing blameworthiness for crushing the car. Perhaps they were hypnotized or drugged, so that their actions were not their own. The tenth is unaware of this, and has no defense .16 She alone is blameworthy for crushing the car, so she blameworthiness cannot be diluted in virtue of being shared. All else being equal, she should be more blameworthy in this scenario than in the previous scenario, when none of the teenagers had a defense.

That is a strange view. Why should the fact that others have a defense have any bearing on her own blameworthiness? More troubling for the threshold ethical dilutionist, however, is that any explanation requires a substantial concession to the pie view. Threshold dilutionism does not straightforwardly endorse the pie view insofar as it allows the sum of agents “slices” of blameworthiness to exceed one (e.g., eight agents who are each 1/4th blameworthy), but it does treat blameworthiness as a free-standing resource that can be detached from one agent and redistributed to another. The unlucky tenth teen gets an extra helping of blameworthiness because the others get none. It is difficult to see how to explain why blameworthiness would be shifted from one person to another in this way without conceiving of blameworthiness as a finite resource to be distributed like slices of a pie.

Counterfactual Dilutionism

Unlike ethical dilutionism, counterfactual dilutionism is not committed to claiming that blameworthiness is diluted in virtue of being shared. Counterfactual dilutionism claims that blameworthiness is diluted in virtue of how close an individual is to making a difference in whether or not a harm occurs. The challenge for the counterfactual dilutionist is to identify the morally relevant set that establishes how close someone is to making a difference.

That set will not be “the people necessary to bring about the harm.” Mellema offers the following counterexample: Imagine that 50,000 people are in a stadium where a prisoner is about to be tortured. If any one of the audience members object, the prisoner will not be tortured. Since the harm will only occur if everyone in the stands does nothing, the set of people necessary to bring about the

16 Mellema’s own view is something close to this: sharing blameworthiness does not diminish one’s blameworthiness below what it would have been had everyone else who shares blameworthiness not been morally responsible. (2016, 52-53). harm contains 50,000 people. It seems wrong to conclude that each person in the stadium is only 1/50,00th blameworthy since any one could prevent it, and it seems wrong that any would be less blameworthy if there were more people in the stands.

Mellema (1988, 96-97) takes the stadium case to be a counterexample to ethical dilutionism, but the counterfactual dilutionist will fall to the same objections unless she can identify a plausibly relevant set that does not get larger whenever the number of people in the stadium example increases. The only sets that meet that condition in the stadium case are the ones that track the number of people who are required to prevent the harm. (For now I will suppose that this refers to the number of people in the smallest set sufficient to prevent the harm.) The more people who must act to prevent the harm, the less blameworthy any one of them is for it occurring.

Versions of counterfactual dilutionism that track the number of people required to prevent a harm in this sense give different answers to the rock-pushing case than before, but the answers are still plausible. Recall that the threshold ethical dilutionist concluded that each of the ten teenagers was 1/7th blameworthy for the destruction of the car because seven teenagers’ cooperation was required to bring about the harm. The analysis changes when tracking the number of people required to prevent the harm. Since seven of the ten can bring about the harm by pushing the rock, any four of them can prevent the harm from occurring by refusing to push. None do, and so each of the ten is 1/4th blameworthy instead of 1/7th. More significantly, each teenager becomes less blameworthy as more teenagers push the rock. In the first version of the rock-pushing case, each teenager was 1/7th blameworthy no matter how many more teenagers were pushing the rock. That does not hold on this version. If 100 teenagers are pushing, 94 of them would have to refuse to prevent the harm, making each 1/94th blameworthy. This will not satisfy someone who thinks that individuals’ degrees of blameworthiness should never diminish to nearly zero as more and more people share blameworthiness. The counterfactual dilutionist, however, need not accept that claim. Her intuitions about the appropriate level of blameworthiness in the rock-pushing case may not be universally shared, but she is not so obviously wrong about the rock-pushing case that her view can be dismissed on those grounds alone.

Counterfactual dilutionism only runs into serious problems when the people the proportionate level of blameworthiness could depend on are not equivalently positioned. In the rock-pushing and stadium cases, nothing distinguished one 11

teenager or audience member from another. Cases of shared blameworthiness in the real world seldom have that structure. Imagine a mid-sized company is considering developing a new product. The product cannot be manufactured without producing a toxic byproduct that is significantly harmful to the environment, even when disposed of legally. The company will not produce the product if either 1) three of the five members of the board of directors vote not to develop the product; or 2) fifty of the hundred employees refuse to do any work related to the production of the new product. If the board unanimously votes in favor of developing the product, the smallest set of people required to prevent the harm was three. Any three of the five board members could have prevented the company from producing the product. On the counterfactual dilutionist view just described, each person who shares blameworthiness would be 1/3rd blameworthy for the harm.

That is a plausible outcome for the board members, but not for any workers who might share blameworthiness for the harm. In the first place, 1/3rd blameworthiness for the harm seems to be too much blameworthiness for any one worker. More importantly, it seems wrong that a worker’s degree of blameworthiness depends on the number of members of the board rather than the number of workers. If the board had three members rather than five, any two members could have prevented the harm, and each worker who shared blameworthiness would share ½ blameworthiness. If the board had ten members, any six members could have prevented the harm and each worker would have been 1/6th blameworthy. The number of workers only becomes relevant when the number of board members required to prevent the harm exceeds the number of workers required to prevent it. But it is a problem that the workers’ degrees of blameworthiness ever depends on the number of board members.

Adjusting the counterfactual dilutionist’s claim to accommodate differences among the people who share blameworthiness is more difficult than it might seem at first glance. The counterfactual dilutionist needs to specify the morally relevant set in such a way that each person’s degree of blameworthiness is fixed by others who are equivalently positioned. Here’s one way that will not work: a person’s degree of blameworthiness is a function of the number of people in the smallest set that a) can prevent the harm and b) includes her. The smallest set that satisfies these criteria for any worker is the set of her and three board members. Each worker is now 1/4th blameworthy, and her degree of blameworthiness is still hostage to the number of people on the board. Suppose we further stipulate that c) the set must not not include any smaller set that is sufficient to prevent the harm. This excludes sets that pair workers with three board members, since those three board members would be sufficient to prevent the harm on their own. Now each worker is only 1/50th blameworthy. This is an improvement, but the scope of this solution is limited. Its success depends on members of each set that satisfies a) b) and c) being interchangeable. In this case, it does not matter which three board members vote against developing the product, or which 50 workers refuse to work on producing it. That will not always be the case.

Suppose that one worker, Alice, happens to be positioned such that the company would not be able to produce the new product if she and any other worker refused to work on it. Any 50 workers could still prevent the company from producing the new product, but now the smallest set that satisfies a) b) and c) for any worker is the set of that worker and Alice. Each worker is ½ blameworthy in virtue of Alice’s position.17 That may seem like the right answer if Alice is willing to cooperate with any other willing worker, but suppose instead that Alice is not willing to cooperate, maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad ones. Each worker is still ½ blameworthy in virtue of Alice’s powerful position.18

Those who find ½ blameworthiness to be excessive in cases like this might be inclined to say that anyone willing to cooperate in preventing the harm is not blameworthy for it in the first place. That way, the question of the appropriate degree of blameworthiness (and the relevance of the number of people required to prevent the harm) never gets off the ground. The strategy of arguing that these workers should not share blameworthiness because they are at least willing to cooperate will cause problems for the counterfactual dilutionist down the road. If the mere fact someone is willing to cooperate under some circumstances, however narrow, is enough to exclude them from sharing blameworthiness, shared blameworthiness will not be able to handle cases like climate change. Imagine that a small coalition of countries could prevent disastrous climate changes at little cost to themselves by cutting their emissions, but they are only willing to cooperate if many other countries also agree to cut emissions, often at great cost to themselves. This view would deny that the members of the small coalition share blameworthiness, simply because because they are willing to cooperate with the large coalition.

17 The Alice example is not an unusual scenario. Consider the United States’ electoral col- lege. California and Texas have the two largest numbers of electors, 55 and 38, respectively in 2008. The smallest set of states sufficient to elect a candidate (or put another way, to prevent the other candidates from winning) will include both states. Texas and California have not voted for the same candidate since 1988. Texas could vote for the Democratic nominee in 2020, but it will not. California could vote for the Republican, but it will not. No matter who wins the election, the electors (and perhaps the citizens who elect them) will be more blameworthy just because one of the two largest states could have voted with them, even though it did not. 18 For a related argument about the distinction between what people are unwilling to do and what people are unable to do, see Estlund (2011). 13

We could try adding another criterion that requires every member of the set (other than the individual being evaluated) pass some threshold level of willingness to cooperate with the other members. It is not enough to be willing to cooperate in some circumstances. Someone must be sufficiently willing to cooperate in a relevant range of circumstances. Suppose that Brett is one of the 100 workers at the company. He is willing to cooperate with Alice to prevent the product from going to market, but not with any other 49 workers, even though at least 49 are willing to cooperate with him. The smallest set that a) can prevent the harm; b) includes Brett; c) does not include any smaller set that is sufficient to prevent the harm; and d) other than Brett, only includes members sufficiently willing to cooperate with every other member to prevent the harm. is the set of Brett and the 49 workers who are willing to cooperate with him. The set of Alice and Brett does not satisfy criterion d) because Alice is unwilling to cooperate with Brett. Instead of being ½ blameworthy, Brett is 1/50th. (Notice that if Alice were willing to cooperate with Brett but not vice versa, Brett would be ½ blameworthy. Criterion d) does not allow someone to dilute her blameworthiness through her own intransigence.)

These criteria still fail. Recall each of the board members could have voted against developing the product but none were willing to do so, much less to cooperate with two others to prevent the product from being developed. No member, then, is a member of a set that satisfies d). The counterfactual dilutionist might take this result to show that the members of the board are fully blameworthy rather than 1/3rd blameworthy as it at first seemed. Counterfactual dilutionism is a principle of partial blameworthiness, and so it is open to her to claim that those who share blameworthiness but do not meet its criteria are simply fully blameworthy. This strategy fails because of the perverse results it generates for board members and workers. Suppose that two members of the board were willing to vote against developing the product, but each of the other three board members refuses to join their coalition. Now each of the remaining members is a member of a three-person set that a) can prevent the harm; b) includes herself; c) does not include any smaller set sufficient to prevent the harm; and d) other than herself, only includes members sufficiently willing to cooperate with every other member to prevent the harm. Board members are each 1/3rd blameworthy when they spurn cooperation, but fully blameworthy when they could not have cooperated with anyone had they tried. This strategy also has counter-intuitive consequences for the workers. No set of workers satisfies a), b), c), and d) unless at least 50 are willing to cooperate. On this strategy, the workers who share blameworthiness share full blameworthiness unless one more worker becomes willing to cooperate, in which case they share 1/50th.

The counterfactual dilutionist may eventually be able to accommodate cases like Alice’s with enough refinements, but rather than adding another epicycle to the counterfactual dilutionist’s claim, it is worth stepping back and examining the intuitions that drove the counterfactual dilutionist to add the epicycles in the first place. Through these examples, I have assumed that the counterfactual dilutionist thinks that the board members are more blameworthy than the workers, excepting Alice, who is most blameworthy of all. The counterfactual dilutionist wants criteria that will divide the participants in a way that will reflect those intuitions about different degrees of blameworthiness. But why should Alice be more blameworthy than other workers on the counterfactual dilutionist’s account? The counterfactual dilutionist, remember, thinks that blameworthiness is proportionate to the number of participants in some morally relevant set that she specifies. In the examples above, Alice’s powerful position and her unwillingness to work with others drove the counterfactual dilutionist’s specification of the set. Why should those facts about Alice be relevant to counterfactual dilutionist, a set-based theorist who argues that the number of people in a set is relevant to someone’s degree of blameworthiness, not the properties of a particular person?

The most obvious answer I see is that it is much easier for Alice to find one other cooperator than for someone to find 49 others. Similarly, it seems easier for any board member to persuade two others to vote against developing the project than it does for the workers to organize 50 people to refuse to produce it.

If that is right, blameworthiness is proportionate to something like the difficulty someone faces in organizing a group to prevent a harm rather than, as set-based principles claim, the number of people in the set. To test this, compare two versions of the company case. In the first version, the workers are spread out across the country with little contact with each other and no easy means of communicating. They are all willing to organize a campaign against the new product in principle, and they could do so if they tried. But organizing would be very difficult, enough so that no one is willing to expend the considerable effort that would be required of her. In the second version, the workers see each other every day, pursue shared hobbies outside of work, have overlapping social circles, and often meet in large groups to discuss company policies. They are all in principle willing to organize a campaign against the new product and could do so if they tried. Organizing would be relatively easy for them, but no one is willing to expend the modest effort that would be required of her. It seems to me that the 15

workers in the second scenario are more blameworthy than the workers in the first even though there is no difference in the two cases from the perspective of counterfactual dilutionism.

The counterfactual dilutionist might claim that counterfactual dilutionism nevertheless plays a role in both scenarios by providing a baseline level of shared blameworthiness, while the workers’ willingness to expend effort and the amount of effort required of any one of them adjusts their degrees of shared blameworthiness up or down.19 If the counterfactual dilutionist’s baseline is to do more than preserve a nominal role for set-based principles in her theory, she needs to show that the baseline does some real work in setting degrees of blameworthiness. Furthermore, she will need to give an account of counterfactual dilutionism that is independent of the willingness of workers to organize and the ease with which they could do so if they tried. I do not see any sets that offer promising alternatives to those already surveyed, but more importantly, the number of workers in any set no longer seems relevant to someone’s degree of blameworthiness once their willingness to organize and the effort it would require are considered. The prospects of saving a counterfactual dilutionism in this way are dim.

The set-based theorist is left with an account according to which someone’s degree of shared blameworthiness proportionate to the difficulty of causing or preventing the harm. This is not a set-based solution since difficulty can vary without any variation in the size of any morally relevant set, as the organizing example shows. Nor does it yield a plausible theory. Consider the difference in a case in which Alice refuses to cooperate because the board of directors is paying her to resist organization efforts (Payoff) and a case in which Alice refuses because she blamelessly but incorrectly believes that her cooperation would be productive (Mistake). It is just as easy for Alice to organize a group to prevent the harm in Payoff as Mistake, and so she would bear the same degree of shared blameworthiness for the harm. Worse yet, the ease with which Alice can organize and prevent the harm makes her more blameworthy than the board members who refused to organize because it would have reduced the company’s profits, even when she refuses to organize out of a blameless but mistaken belief that doing so would cause greater harm.

In order to generate plausible answers about shared blameworthiness in these cases, the principle must track an agent’s blameworthiness for not attempting to

19 Mellema (1988) suggests the possibility of a baseline in passing but does not develop the view further. organize a group to prevent a harm. The difficulty of organizing such a group--- measured either by the number of people who must cooperate or some other metric---is relevant insofar someone’s reasonable expectations about the difficulty of a task mitigate their blameworthiness for not attempting it even when they ought to attempt it. Alice is less blameworthy, all else being equal, if she reasonably believes that she could never convince anyone to cooperate with her than she would be if she reasonably believed that anyone would cooperate if she only asked. However, Alice’s blameworthiness for her (and only her) failure to attempt to organize a group is non-shared blameworthiness. The non-reductionist denies Alice’s non-shared blameworthiness for her own acts and omissions is the same as the blameworthiness she shares with others for the harm. Shared blameworthiness must have a non-redundant role in the account, but this account gives every reason to think that it is reducible to non-shared blameworthiness. The plausibility of Alice’s shared blameworthiness rests on the plausibility of her non- shared blameworthiness, but not vice versa. If she has a defense that reduces her non-shared blameworthiness for not attempting to organize, her shared blameworthiness is also diminished, but not vice versa. These relationships would be mysterious if shared blameworthiness for the harm does not reduce to non- shared blameworthiness for not attempting to organize, but if shared blameworthiness does reduce in that way, it is no answer in a dispute about non- reducible shared blameworthiness. The most plausible set-based principles, then, collapse into individualist principles that can only explain agents’ degrees of non- shared blameworthiness. 17

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