Moral agents in modern society and types of collective responsibilities

In this article, I focus on the complicated notion of Collective Responsibility, which, on the one hand, needs some philosophical implications due to the appearance of new social changes and, on the other hand, allows me to reconstruct the whole discussion context. First of all, I attempt to show the main issues, which appear when researchers use this idea in their investigations. Simultaneously, I describe the state of moral responsibility in philosophy in the whole, where I define the individual notion of responsibility, which is deeply rooted in the West philosophical way of thinking. So using the idea of Collective Responsibility today has a lot of controversial statements. This situation has different causes and the main of them is the principle of methodological individualism (M. Weber), when the idea of collective responsibility is presented as needless for describing social actions. Actually, it is not difficult to find the guilty of action by using the method of reduction. The second point, which is fixed in philosophical objections, is the principle of personality and autonomy. The idea of Collective Responsibility eliminates personal responsibility, so we have the situation when nobody takes responsibility. However, today's social changes, when to define real person's action is impossible due to many reasons, researches have to investigate other types of responsibility, for instance, collective. Collective agents are a nation, corporations, social institutions. Human beings need a moral state, just because their actions have extensive impact, and the consequences of their actions have long-term effects. My goal is to present a fragmented discourse of Collective Responsibility, so it can allow classifying some types of the notions. As a result, I define three discourses, which present Collective Responsibility in different aspects, and solve the main objections against the idea of collective responsibility. Every direction found its own approach how to get over the negative meaning of the idea. The first type of Collective Responsibility is called vicarious, it was initiated by K. Jaspers. The philosopher formulates the question of guilt and moral responsibility of the German nation for the crimes committed by the fascists. The second type of Collective Responsibility is corporate social responsibility, which is presented in American researches (P. French). The third variant is the solidarity responsibility formulated in discursive and communicative ethics (K.-O. Apel).

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