BBC: Collective Responsibility

What this lecture covers

This excerpt from the BBC documentary "Justice: A Citizen's Guide to the 21st Century" explores whether moral responsibility can be collective as well as individual. Sandel interviews a German who feels his generation remains morally responsible for the Holocaust, regardless of whether his own grandparents committed any crimes, because the genocide was a crime of an entire society. Sandel then asks whether Kant's ethics, which ground responsibility in what a person freely chooses, can make sense of that claim, and uses the discussion to introduce the course's turn toward Aristotle and the question of whether justice can be separated from ideas about the good life.

After watching, you should be able to state the argument for collective responsibility given in the interview and explain why Sandel thinks it sits uneasily with a strictly Kantian view of moral responsibility.

Key ideas

• Collective responsibility: the claim that a generation can bear moral responsibility for wrongs committed by its society, independent of individual guilt or direct participation.
• Kant's individualist limit: for Kant, a person is responsible only for what they freely choose, which makes it hard to justify inheriting responsibility for a nation's past crimes.
• Identity and obligations of solidarity: the interview connects back to the course's broader question of whether obligations tied to nationality, history or culture are real moral obligations or something Kantian ethics can't fully capture.
• Transition to Aristotle: the clip closes by posing whether justice can be defined without first addressing questions about the good life, setting up the course's turn to Aristotle's more demanding, purpose-driven idea of politics.

Before you watch

• This clip connects to the course's lectures on Kant and on the communitarian critique of the "unencumbered self," and works best with that context already in mind.

Check your understanding

1. What reason does the interviewee give for feeling morally responsible for the Holocaust despite not personally living through it?
2. Why does Sandel suggest Kant's ethics has difficulty making sense of collective or inherited responsibility?
3. How does this discussion of collective responsibility connect to the course's later turn toward Aristotle?