Collective Responsibility and Individual Compensation

This paper analyzes distributive justice in the presence of collective responsibility. We consider a society partitioned into groups, where three types of characteristics affect individual outcomes: circumstances for which neither individuals nor groups are responsible, collective responsible factors for which groups, but not individuals, bear responsibility, and personal responsible factors for which individuals are responsible. We propose two allocation rules: (i) group conditional equality and (ii) group egalitarian equivalence. Both solutions use a two-step procedure in which inter-group resource allocation is determined, and intra-group distribution second. This approach respects both individual agency within groups and collective responsibility across groups. We examine the basic properties of these allocation rules and offer axiomatic characterizations of them. For the characterizations, we extend the classical principles of natural reward and compensation developed by Marc Fleurbaey to the collective responsibility setting.