Why should I refrain from going for a pleasure drive in a gas-driven car or buying a steak for dinner if my act will not worsen climate change or cause more animals to suffer on factory farms?
The problem of collective harm is the challenge of identifying moral reasons for individual action in situations where many individual acts together bring about a harmful outcome, but no single act seems to make any significant difference. This project will provide a comprehensive theory of moral reasons for individual action in collective harm situations.
The project is necessary for overcoming a central, long-standing challenge in normative ethics, and for deepening people’s thinking about the collective harm situations that they are part of, which may in turn influence their actions in response to these issues. In the first part of the project (year 1), at the University of Toronto, I will raise and answer two foundational questions about which situations raise the problem of collective harm and what moral reasons are relevant in response it. In the second part (year 2), at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, I will develop a novel, pluralist account of moral reasons for individual action in collective harm situations. In the third part (year 3), at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, I will demonstrate the implications of the proposed account for the moral evaluation of individual wrongful acts, such as individual acts of violence against members of oppressed social groups.
