Stephanie Collins

Collectives' duties and collectivization duties

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties: only groups with sufficient structure—call them ‘collectives’—have the necessary agency. Moreover, if duties imply ability then moral agents (of both the individual and collectives varieties) can bear duties only over actions they are able to perform. It is thus doubtful that individual agents can bear duties to perform actions that only a collective could perform. This appears to leave us at a loss when assigning duties in circumstances where only a collective could perform some morally desirable action and no collective exists. But, I argue, we are not at a loss. This article outlines a new way of assigning duties over collective acts when there is no collective. Specifically, we should assign collectivization duties to individuals. These are individual duties to take steps towards forming a collective, which then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivization duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers.

The Present and the Future of the Research Excellence Framework Impact Agenda in the UK Academy: A Reflection from Politics and International Studies:

One of the most extensively discussed requirements introduced in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework was impact. In this review piece, we focus on the linear and temporal consequences of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) impact system. We link such consequences to our own research agendas to provide a sense of empirical richness to the broad concerns that arise from the impact agenda and to highlight the effects of the Research Excellence Framework’s linear focus and, crucially, the types of alternative narratives it potentially silences. This ‘silencing’ does not render alternative narratives impossible, but rather makes them difficult to articulate as ‘safe’ options within the existing framework. We highlight how a focus on direct impact could miss the collective nature of impact endeavours, as well as the broader social and cultural benefits of research, and potentially shape and limit the possible research questions posed within this national system. We conclude by opening up some broader questions for the future of impact raised through the consideration of linearity, including the question of ‘measurement’.

Collectives’ and individuals’ obligations: a parity argument

Abstract Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts.

The Value of Relationships

My development of the second claim of care ethics starts from the following observation: care ethicists tend to reserve a central part of their theory for personal relationships. Some of their most crucial insights are developed from a starting point that acknowledges the central role of these relationships in our moral experience. This is unsurprising, given care ethicists’ concern to vindicate the moral experiences normally most closely associated with the ‘private sphere’ of the home and family. Of course, demarcating the relevant relationships is crucial to clarifying this aspect of the theory. But before doing that, it will be useful first to give a relatively broad characterisation of the relationships at issue and the role these relationships have in the writing of care ethicists. Once we have this initial characterisation of the relationships and their role within care ethics, we will be in a position to critically interrogate the role these relationships play in the theory and to further clarify exactly which relationships are at issue.

'The Government Should Be Ashamed': On the Possibility of Organisations’ Emotional Duties

When we say that ‘the government should be ashamed’, can we be taken literally? I argue that we can: organisations have duties over their emotions. Emotions have both functional and felt components. Often, emotions’ moral value derives from their functional components: from what they cause and what causes them. In these cases, organisations can have emotional duties in the same way that they can have duties to act. However, emotions’ value partly derives from their felt components. Organisations lack feelings, but can have duties to increase the likelihood that their members have relevant emotions (with the right felt components), in virtue of and in accordance with their role in the organisation. To systematise these conclusions, I provide a taxonomy of organisations’ – and individuals’ organisationally situated – emotional duties. This taxonomy will enable scholars of electoral politics, international politics and public policy to systematically integrate emotions into the study of organisations.

When Does 'Can' Imply 'Ought'?

ABSTRACT The Assistance Principle is common currency to a wide range of moral theories. Roughly, this principle states: if you can fulfil important interests, at not too high a cost, then you have a moral duty to do so. I argue that, in determining whether the ‘not too high a cost’ clause of this principle is met, we must consider three distinct costs: ‘agent-relative costs’, ‘recipient-relative costs’ and ‘ideal-relative costs’.

Unifying, Specifying, and Justifying Care Ethics

To find out whether the dependency principle is a good unifying, specifying explanation of care ethics, we must answer three questions with regard to each claim from Part I. First, does the dependency principle give us some responsibilities of the kind alluded to in the claim? Second, does the dependency principle give us enough responsibilities of the kind alluded to in the claim? And third, does the dependency principle give us the right explanation of the responsibilities alluded to in the claim? The present chapter will answer each of these three questions, for each of the four care ethical claims. (This method may seem rather too much like ticking boxes. But it seems to me the clearest way of ensuring that all objections are answered and no positive claims are omitted.)

The Dependency Principle

The aim of this chapter is to develop the principle that, I will argue, constitutes care ethics’ normative core. This principle will allow us to justify, unite, and further specify the four claims of care ethics that were developed in Part I. In developing this principle, the current chapter will take leave of the care ethics literature. We will return to that literature in Chapter 8, where I will combine this chapter’s principle with the claims of care ethics.

Collective Dependency Duties

It is impossible to do justice to care ethics without discussing the duties of groups — whether those groups are highly organised, extremely ad hoc, or somewhere in between. This is because care is not simply a dyadic relationship. Although some prominent pieces in the tradition (e.g. Noddings 1984) tend to treat the caring relationship as one between two natural individuals, in everyday life individual carers tend not to be able to do care work without certain social or institutional structures in place.

Scepticism about Principles

Care ethicists tend to see principles — understood as conditionals with an imperative consequent — as at best insufficient, and at worst distortive, for proper moral justification and deliberation. This thought is expressed differently by different theorists, but the general idea is that a full and accurate specification of the moral reasons to perform an action, φ, in a context, C, will include so much detail about C that none of the reasons will apply to other contexts. So, we cannot generalise beyond C if we are to explain why the moral reasons to φ in C are (or are not) weighty enough to generate a moral reason (even a non-decisive one) to φ. Care ethicists’ view here has a cousin in the particularism made famous by Jonathan Dancy (2004; see also Hooker and Little (eds) 2000), according to which a reason can favour φ-ing in context C, and disfavour performing an action of φ’s type in context C’. This is arguably a different particularism to that of at least some care ethics, for whom the categorisation of actions into types, and the idea that the reason is the ‘same’ between contexts, is already too general and abstract. For them, the reason is unique to this particular person or situation, and derives directly and irreducibly from the concrete things (or people or events) in this situation. In any case, despite the possible close parallels to Dancy’s view, I will here focus on the view as it is presented by care ethicists.