Abstract

Olle Blomberg and Björn Petersson (2023) argue that collective moral obligations, at least in some cases, are irreducibly collective. By this they mean the subject of the obligation is a group and their having a moral obligation collectively cannot be analyzed into individual obligations of its members to do their parts in what the group has an obligation to do. The main argument focuses on a choice situation that looks like a moral Hi-Lo game, in which we have the intuition that the group is responsible for pursuing the best moral outcome. Blomberg and Petersson argue that we cannot account for this intuition by deriving it from individual obligations of the parties to do their parts in bringing about the best moral outcome. In contrast, I will argue that the case has not been made and that we can plausibly account for the intuition that the group has a moral obligation while seeing it as grounded in the independently derived obligations of the members to do their parts.