Choose carefully who, and how many people, you are accountable to
Importantly, these mostly won’t be individuals. Instead, we mostly have groups, and the composition of those groups is not subject to our decisions, eg: our own families, our spouse’s families, the other employees at work, the other congregants at church, the other members of the club, etc.
I feel strongly that selecting and acting within groups is a badly neglected area of moral reflection.
Part of the point as I saw it was that being accountable to a group limits the complexity of the types of moral logic you can be guided by.
i.e, if I’m accountable to all employees at work, my moral principles have to be simpler, and probably have to account for asymmetric justice. This doesn’t necessarily mean I shouldn’t be accountable to all the employees at work (if I’m their employer, or a fellow employee). But I saw the point of this post as “be wary of how exactly you operationalize that.”
I’m inclined to agree that we need to be wary of how we operationalize accountability to groups.
But if it reduces the complexity of the moral logic, it should be simpler to express and abide by that logic. And yet, I see huge amounts of analysis for all the permutations of the individual case, and virtually none for the group one.
I am deeply and generally confused by this, not just in the context of the post. Why not reason about the group first, and then extend that reasoning as needed to deal with individual cases? This causes me to expect that the group case is much more difficult, like it has a floor of complexity or something.
I like this part best:
Importantly, these mostly won’t be individuals. Instead, we mostly have groups, and the composition of those groups is not subject to our decisions, eg: our own families, our spouse’s families, the other employees at work, the other congregants at church, the other members of the club, etc.
I feel strongly that selecting and acting within groups is a badly neglected area of moral reflection.
Part of the point as I saw it was that being accountable to a group limits the complexity of the types of moral logic you can be guided by.
i.e, if I’m accountable to all employees at work, my moral principles have to be simpler, and probably have to account for asymmetric justice. This doesn’t necessarily mean I shouldn’t be accountable to all the employees at work (if I’m their employer, or a fellow employee). But I saw the point of this post as “be wary of how exactly you operationalize that.”
I’m inclined to agree that we need to be wary of how we operationalize accountability to groups.
But if it reduces the complexity of the moral logic, it should be simpler to express and abide by that logic. And yet, I see huge amounts of analysis for all the permutations of the individual case, and virtually none for the group one.
I am deeply and generally confused by this, not just in the context of the post. Why not reason about the group first, and then extend that reasoning as needed to deal with individual cases? This causes me to expect that the group case is much more difficult, like it has a floor of complexity or something.