Collective responsibility and international relations

International relations is a dense web of interacting and overlapping collectives—from states, to intergovernmental organizations, to multinational corporations, to international non-governmental organizations, to civil society movements, to ad hoc collectivities like “the rich.” To which of these groups can we properly attribute moral responsibility? This chapter starts by providing an account of what it takes for an entity to be a candidate for moral responsibility. It then suggests that—according to this account—entities that can be assigned responsibility include (some) states and intergovernmental organizations, while entities that cannot be assigned responsibility include “the affluent” and “the West.”