1. What Collectives Are: Agency, Individualism and Legal Theory
2. An agent is sometimes said to be "morally responsible" for having done something where what is meant is that the agentperformedthe action and had the kind ofcontrolover it that is a necessary condition of being deserving of a positive or negative moral response for having done it. Call "responsibility" in this sense "agency responsibility." The thesis that collectives are not independent agents seems to entail that if a collective has agency responsibility for some action then some persons have agency responsibility for having done whatever they did that constituted the collective's so acting. The CMA thesis is compatible with this claim.
3. See Shelly Kagan,Normative Ethics(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 180-81.
4. There are other uses of the expression "morally responsible." For example, a person can be said to be "morally responsible" for doing something where what is meant is that the person has a duty with respect to that thing. This sense of "morally responsible" is relevant to thesis O rather than R. Below I mention the idea of "role responsibility." In note 3 above, I mention "agency responsibility." For useful discussion, see Joel Feinberg,Doing and Deserving(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).