This article addresses a question that the ATTS series has left open: who bears responsibility when a decision is made collectively and its consequences are distributed across many subjects? The starting point is the Closure Theorem of the Moral Field (T1), established in the article "The Asymmetry Problem: Causal Action Without Moral Agency in Delegated Systems" (Hlynskyi, 2026d; PhilArchive: HLYTAP), and the mechanism of structural tension (S6), described in "Structural Tension and the Visibility of Loss" (Hlynskyi, 2026e; PhilArchive: HLYSTA). Both were formulated for the individual subject. The problem of many hands (Thompson, 1980) captures the phenomenology of responsibility diffusion in complex organisations — but offers no ontological explanation for why that responsibility does not simply disappear. The central thesis is this: corporations, states, and similar collective structures can be ontological subjects under the Axiom of the Subject (A1), provided they possess a constituted state-space and that irreversible changes to that space are ontologically non-neutral for them as bearers of a given type. Collective responsibility is not a metaphor, nor is it reducible to the sum of individual responsibilities. It arises from the collective structure's capacity for irreversible loss as a whole. At the same time, collective responsibility does not replace individual responsibility — both levels exist simultaneously. The article derives Lemma 3 (the indestructibility of the collective connection) and unfolds the structural requirements for accountability of collective subjects, following from the principles of responsibility locus (S2), diffusion (S3), structural tension (S6), and legitimacy (S7). The boundary case of a distributed AI system is tested against A1. Readers unfamiliar with ATTS terminology may consult the glossary of abbreviations at the end of this article before reading.
Volodymyr Hlynskyi (Tue,) studied this question.