Abstract

"Who's responsible?" has become a pressing question in the wake of the financial crisis. While the answer will obviously be very complicated, the question itself seems relatively simple. But each of the two words comprising the question is importantly ambiguous, and the way we interpret them will have significant implications for the answers we come up with. Here I focus on the complexities of the “who”: does it include collective agents, like firms? If we hold the collective agents responsible, do we thereby hold their members responsible for too much, or too little? How are they responsible at all? There are individualist, collectivist, and holist answers to those questions. The first two approaches refuse to recognize the firms and rely on a distributive approach to moral responsibility that yields implausible results. The holist approach recognizes the firms themselves as potentially responsible, but critics object that this forces us to either blame their members for things they haven’t done or excuse them entirely. I reply that using a suitably robust account of corporate agents and a non-distributive paradigm of moral responsibility (“collateral responsibility”) avoids both outcomes. I close by considering the implications for Countrywide and its members.