Individual Responsibility
- work in progress*
Consequentialism based exclusively on individual behaviors can become murky when we deal with behaviors that require group effort to have results, particularly when we assume it as a given that the group either will or will not do something.
Take, for example, the execution with ten gunmen firing on a target:
If we assume that nine gunshots would be just as lethal as ten, and that every gunman will certainly fire if he has no moral reason not to, then all of the gunmen will fire and nobody is at all culpable for the murder.
This can be shown by looking at it from the perspective of any one gunman: if the others fire then the target will certainly die either way, so there's no reason not to fire. Since we know the other gunmen are in the same situation and equally without moral reason to fire, we know they will fire.
Thus, the gunman fires and is free of blame in the murder. The exact same reasoning is equally viable for every single gunman, each having nine others who would fire if he did not leaving him blameless. Thus, following that reasoning, in the end nobody is culpable for the murder and it is without moral significance to individual action.
Obviously that should raise some serious red flags.
This is similar to the unexpected execution paradox:
A prisoner is told that he will be executed some time in the next week, and the execution day will come as a surprise. He reasons it could not happen on the last day, Friday, because then he would know it was coming and it would NOT be a surprise. And once Friday is ruled out, he knows it can't happen on Thursday because then it wouldn't be a surprise. Then he reasons it could happen on Wednesday when Thursday and Friday are ruled out, and so on it couldn't happen on Tuesday, Monday, or Sunday.Thus the prisoner reasons he will not be executed because there's no day on which the execution could occur.
The punchline is the the executioner comes for him on Wednesday, and the prisoner is taken completely by surprise.
The first and most obvious problem with ignoring individual culpability is metaphysical: this absolute determinist view of the situation (e.g. that nine gunshots will certainly be as lethal as ten, or that the other gunmen are completely predictable) is actually a mistunderstanding of statistics, and even physics as a whole, see #Small Chance of a Big Difference below.
However, even in the context of this implausible world-view, we can understand a notion of shared culpability for group actions.
If ten people, collectively, commit murder we don't have to call them all innocent, but can equally call them all guilty or understand that they all have a share of guilt.
