Caroline Allard
Doctoral Candidate, Département de philosophie, Université
de Montréal
My goal in this paper is to apply
to the case of pandemics (like SARS or AIDS) an analysis made by Virginia Held
in a 1970’s article called « Can a Random Collection of Individuals Be
Morally Responsible? » (Journal of Philosophy, 23). The author
holds that a random collection of individuals (e.g. individuals who do not
share a decision procedure that will lead to an action) can be held morally
responsible for doing or omitting to do certain actions, but only if the
following conditions are met: (i) the participation of a large majority of the
individuals is to undertake the action; (ii) the individuals have the choice to
act or not; (iii) the individuals are aware of the moral content of the action.
If these criteria are met, it will be possible to hold an arbitrary group of
individuals morally responsible as a
group. This responsibility will also be distributive: it also belongs to
all individuals because without one of them, the group couldn’t act.
I would like to apply this analysis to the case of nations
vulnerable to epidemics. That is to say, in a world where transportation makes
the spread of epidemics fast and multidirectional, to all nations. By using the
SARS and the AIDS examples, I would like to show that, when facing epidemics,
all nations form a group constituted of a random collection of entities for
which no decision procedures concerning prevention, detection and health care
exist. I will examine if a majority of nations are subject to the three
criteria which would assign them, individually and as a group, a moral
responsibility to act. The failure of some nations to meet the conditions could
lead to an argument saying that all nations facing epidemics are of a type of
random collection of entities that cannot be held responsible for omitting to
act together against epidemics. The second criterion in particular will pose
problem: certain nations just cannot choose to act with the others or not due
to their extreme poverty.
But, still following Held, we can also examine the question
from a different perspective. Maybe the nations, as an arbitrary collection of
entities, don’t have a moral responsibility, but not just because they fail to
respond to the three conditions. The problem is maybe that epidemics can only
be countered by an organized
collection of entities equipped with a decision procedure concerning
prevention, detection and health care. The responsibility would thus only be
assignable to an organized ensemble of nations, which the nations confronting
epidemics are not. Nonetheless, an arbitrary group could still be held
responsible: it could be responsible for not
giving itself a decision procedure when there is a need for it. Following
this argument, the nations, although not responsible of acting together to stop
the epidemics because of the arbitrary nature of their group, could be held
responsible for not forming an organization that would give them the tools
(decision procedures) that would allow them to act. And if this kind of
organized collaboration is built, the capacities or incapacities of certain
nations will not be a criterion for their responsibility or lack thereof, but
shall be dealt with inside the group’s decision procedures.