Collective responsibility of «homo faber»: is it necessity or the way to irresponsibility?

The idea of collective responsibility is an ethical challenge for the modern global andtechnological society. Actually, our ethical perception needs rethinking to some extent just because we deal with new conditions of life.Scientific and technological rationality is not a sufficient approach to face new problems head on. Technological progress and moralcrisis brought us the recognition that we need a new moral system. Particularly, the idea of moral responsibility can be represented as afilter for technological innovations. However, the notion of moral responsibility has some restrictions when we attempt to apply it fortechnological activities. In other words, the notion of moral responsibility is deeply rooted in traditional ethical systems, which hadfocused on an individual's predictable actions and consequences. Nowadays, the reality is absolutely different, when previous moralconstants are powerless in order to estimate the complicated scientific and technological activity, which has a collective feature.Addressing to the individual responsibility, which is retrospective, does not let us solve issues of long-term effects. Hans Jonasformulated the moral principle of collective responsibility for technological activity, but he just points the sphere where such principlecould be used. The idea of collective responsibility is rather theoretically substantiated, however, the concept has caused manycomplicated questions: firstly, how collective can the morally responsible be? What is the point of speaking about collectiveresponsibility as a form of moral responsibility? Can a collective have intentions? In other words, is a collective capable of beingmorally responsible for its actions as well as certain individuals? Secondly, how is it possible to distinguish responsibility inside acollective? When we discuss the problem of collective responsibility we should acknowledge that its main assumption is that allindividuals in a collective are to be held responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harbouring them, even withoutactively collaborating in these actions. The idea of collective responsibility presupposes that the sources of moral responsibility aresocial groups, such as society, corporations, scientific technological groups, etc. Nevertheless, this idea contradicts the idea of moralduty, which is always individual. The main controversy of collective responsibility, which some thinkers emphasize, has been based onthe idea of methodological individualism. This idea supposes that all social processes can be explained by reference to a set of principlesgoverning individual human behaviour. In order to accept the idea of collective responsibility we have to reject anthropologicalprejudice of personality. This is an approach to get over the main objection against the collective responsibility. In this article the authorattempts to base on the necessity of collective responsibility and to show some ways to overcome contradictions which opponentsusually use.

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