Collective responsibility is a concept or doctrine, according to which individuals are to be held responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, without actively collaborating in these actions.
In religion
This concept is found in the Old Testament (or Tanakh), some examples include the account of the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah and in some interpretations, the Book of Joshua's Achan. In those records entire communities were punished on the act of the vast majority of their members, however it is impossible that there weren't any innocent people, or children too young to be responsible for their deeds.
The practice of blaming "the Jews" for Jesus' death is the longest example of collective responsibility. In this case, the blame was cast not only on the Jews of the time but upon successive generations. However, the Second Vatican Council essentially absolved the Jewish people from the charge of deicide in Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions.
In Western literature and society
The concept is also present in Western literature, most notably in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem telling the tale of a ship's crew who died of thirst because they approved of one crew member's killing of an albatross.
Collective responsibility, in the form of group punishment, is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools, military units, prisons, (juvenile and adult), psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severeity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members, and is almost always a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society. For example, in the Soviet Gulags, all members of a brigada (work unit) were punished for bad performance of any of its members.
Collective guilt, or guilt by association, is the controversial collectivist idea that groups of humans can bear guilt above and beyond the guilt of individual members, and hence an individual holds responsibility for what other members of their group have done, even if they themselves didn't do this. Advanced systems of criminal law accept the principle that guilt shall only be personal.
The mass shootings of Nicholas II's family in 1918 is one real life example, while 1959's Ben-Hur and 1983's prison drama Bad Boys are two cultural examples of this. Likewise collective punishment is often practiced in different settings, including schools (punishing a whole class for the actions of a single unknown pupil) and, more transcendentally, in situation of war, economic sanctions, etc, presupposing the existence of collective guilt.
In libertarian philosophy
The principle of collective guilt is totally denounced in libertarian social thinking. However, there are those who consider such judgements on collective guilt to be overly reductionistic and accept the existence of collective guilt, collective responsibility, etc.[citation needed] Sometimes the idea of collective guilt can be a form of association fallacy. History is filled with examples of a wronged man who tried to avenge himself, not only on the person who has wronged him, but on other members of the wrongdoer's family, ethnic group, religion, nation, tribe, or military.
This attitude is not usually shared by other legal systems. Assumption of collective responsibility is common for feuds. Such systems tend to judge the guilt of persons by their associations, classifications or organizations, which often gives rise to racial, ethnic, social and religious prejudices. Collective guilt is regarded by some as impossible because it seems to presuppose that collections of humans can have traits, such as intentions and knowledge, that strictly speaking are claimed to be truly possessed only by individuals.[citation needed]
It has been suggested by Werner Cohn that the accusation that others apply "guilt by association" is itself a fallacy, for two reasons:
- The term "guilt" is ambiguous. Sometimes it applies to criminal guilt, which requires a very high standard of proof ("proof beyond a reasonable doubt"). But more often, "guilt" refers to various shortcomings that require lesser standards.
- "Association" is also ambiguous. Sometimes "association" may be totally innocent, such as the association of fellow travelers on a train. But other kinds of association, for instance criminal conspiracy, are not at all innocent.
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