Group Identity and Responsibility

There is a wide agreement that identity is a necessary condition for responsibility. In the case of the individuals that mean that a person can be held responsible only for his own actions. Things get much more complicated when it comes to relation between identity of group persons and responsibility of individual members of the group for the actions taken in their name. In the first part of the presentation I will give an account of conditions for the identity of group person who is composed of many individual human beings. This account centres on a normative concept of identity according to which a person’s identity is formed by his or her commitment to achieving overall rational unity. In the second part of the presentation I will argue that only those group persons that achieve overall rational unity are to be held responsible for their actions. In addition I will argue that individuals cannot be held responsible for group’s actions in virtue of their being members of the group, but only as enactors of the group’s plans.