Suffering for others", or on the notion of vicarious moral responsibility

In this article, I focus on the complicated variant of collective moral responsibility, which is presented as the idea of vicarious responsibility. Using the idea of collective responsibility today has a lot of controversial statements. The main 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 a situation when nobody takes responsibility. However, today, when to define real person action is impossible due to many reasons, researches have to investigate other types of responsibility, for instance, the collective one. Collective agents are the nation, corporations, social institutions. People need a moral state, just because their actions have an extensive impact, and the consequences of their actions have long term effects. The theoretical and practical gap is the source of a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the paradigm of individual responsibility cannot be used for collectives; on the other hand, group activity avoids moral evaluation. In this article, it seems that the idea of vicarious responsibility has a chance to connect individual and collective measurement of responsibility because it can be characterized as the space where an individual and a collective exist simultaneously. Vicarious responsibility deals with moral senses such as guilt, shame, repentance of a person when other members of group have done something wrong. It is thought that the reason for this kind of experience becomes a moment of identification of the individual with the group on the basis of national, religious, professional or other interests. The first fundamental issue of collective responsibility and collective guilt was presented in the works of Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt. The philosophers formulated the issue of responsibility and guilt of a nation for universal crimes, actually identifying the guilty subject with a people. The German people was presented as the subject of collective moral responsibility. Further, the idea of vicarious moral feelings was worked out through the question of when and under what conditions vicarious responsibility could occur.

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