COMPLEX COLLECTIVE DUTIES & ACTION-GUIDANCE

We can often find in the literature (both popular and academic)ascriptions of complex collective duties to extensive unstructured collectionsof individuals. By ‘complex collective duties’, I mean collective duties that,plausibly, require that the individual members of an extensive unstructuredcollection should enact different contributory act-types to achieve an end jointly– for example, the alleged universal collective duty to end global poverty. Inthis paper, I argue that these duties are not action-guiding. The reason is thatthey do not pass what I call the ‘test of action-guidance’. This test assumesthe intuitive belief that a moral duty is action-guiding only if it is clear to theduty-bearer the act-type that she should enact after the ascription of the duty.Complex collective duties ascribed to extensive unstructured collections fail topass this test because, even though each duty-bearer (that is, each member ofthe collection) receives guidance on the end that they should achieve jointly, it isnot clear to these agents the act-type that each of them should put into practice.