Responsibility for group transgressions

This dissertation seeks to develop a novel account of the responsibility members of a group bear for transgressions in which they did not participate. More specifically, the dissertation argues that individual members of a group may be blamed for group transgressions independent of their participation in those transgressions, and it grounds their blameworthiness in a normative conception of membership. The account developed here is intended to apply to any institutional group - the university, corporation, advocacy group, nation-state, etc. Throughout the dissertation, I make reference to each of these kinds of groups (and some others) but the account has been developed with an eye to a special problem - viz. the problem of assigning responsibility to American citizens for U.S. wrongdoings in the course of the war in Iraq. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I address this problem, contemplating the responsibility borne by not only the generic citizen who neither supported nor opposed the war but also the citizen who did everything in her power to protest, and thereby prevent, the war and the abuses committed in its course.;The dissertation has four main objectives: First, the dissertation seeks to ground skepticism about the notion of collective responsibility (Chapter 1). Second, the dissertation seeks to offer a critical examination of existing theories of shared responsibility, and to argue that they are ill equipped to elucidate the nature of a group member's responsibility in cases where the group is large and longstanding, and its aims diverse and sometimes even contested by the group's members (Chapter 2).;The third and central ambition of the dissertation is to provide an account of shared responsibility for institutional groups. Along the way, the dissertation develops a normative understanding of group membership (Chapter 3). The dissertation then builds on this normative understanding to describe its implications for assigning responsibility for group transgressions (Chapter 4).;Finally, the dissertation ends by seeking to apply the account of shared responsibility to the question of Americans' responsibility for human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government in the course of the war in Iraq (Chapter 5).