Moral Responsibility and the Problem of Representing the State

Abstract

There are two points in particular that I wish to make in this chapter. First, if states as they exist in the modern world are to be identified with moral agents,1 this only makes sense in the terms of what I will call `corporate agency'. In proposing this argument, I am relying on a distinction between the `corporate' and `collective' character of groups. According to this distinction, a collective entity is nothing more than the sum of its parts, whereas a corporate entity is somehow separate from these, and has an irreducible identity of its own.2 The corporate character of the state is what helps to determine its character as a moral agent. Second, making sense of the state's agency also requires some engagement with the mechanism on which most modern political activity has come to depend; that is, the mechanism of representation. It is precisely because it is so hard to understand modern state action as a form of collective action that states need representatives to act for them. Yet, it is also because states can be acted for by their representatives that it is possible to see state action as consistent with a form of moral agency, albeit of a very distinctive kind.