Redefining Group Belief for Collective Responsibility

Abstract

Group-belief ascriptions in ordinary language are polysemous: "G believes p" can express any of several distinct propositions, and neither speaker nor context reliably signals which is intended. Pettigrew (2022) states that these ascriptions generate testimonial failure and epistemic harm and concludes that they should be abandoned. This thesis argues, on the contrary, that the concept of group belief should be retained. Following the spirit of ameliorative analysis (Haslanger, 2000, 2012), it proposes an engineered use of the concept designed to track collective responsibility. Sections §1 and §2 establish this diagnosis and motivate the shift to an ameliorative approach, showing that Pettigrew's own therapy—abandonment—is not the only option his diagnosis supports. Section §3 grounds collective responsibility as a real moral and legal phenomenon, independently recognized across legal systems and by the philosophical literature on collective agency, and argues that belief is indispensable to this phenomenon in the same way it is indispensable to responsibility at the individual level. Building on this, in §4, §5 and §6 an engineered definition of group belief is proposed and tested against real cases of both negligent and intentional collective fault.