Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability

How should we decide a single employee's accountability in a corporation that commits egregious wrongs? What about a single solider fighting in an unjust war? Or a single participant in a lynching? We need a way to make sense of individual moral accountability in cases where multiple individuals are cooperating in a way that results in a wrongful harm.

Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability develops a novel strategy for addressing this issue. Saba Bazargan-Forward makes the case for thinking that distinct aspects of human agency, normally wrapped up in a single person, can be 'distributed' practically across different people. He argues that we 'distribute' agency routinely, by forming promises, by making requests, by issuing demands, and by undertaking shared action. The resulting division of agential labour makes possible a distinctive way in which one person can be accountable for the actions of another. Bazargan-Forward highlights that what matters morally is not just our causal contributions to wrongful cooperative activity. In addition, the purposes we confer upon one another can inculpate us as well. The result is an account that can help us make sense of individual moral accountability in a bureaucratized world.

The first half of the book develops a theory of accountability in the context of cooperation. The second half applies this theory to war ethics, criminal law, business ethics, and institutional racism.

About the Author

Saba Bazargan-Forward, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, UC San Diego

Saba Bazargan-Forward earned his PhD in philosophy at Rutgers University in 2009, after which he earned tenure at UC San Diego's department of philosophy where he currently serves as an associate professor. He has published two dozen articles and chapters on a variety of issues in normative ethics, with a focus on collective responsibility and on the morality of defensive violence, and has co-edited volumes on those topics. His 2014 paper on moral coercion was awarded the Philosopher's Annual Top Ten. He is currently writing a book on the morality of benefiting from injustice.