Rewiring Ethics: Collective Action, Recognition, and Fractal Responsibility

Many moral theories hold individuals responsible for their marginal impact on massive patterns (for instance overall value or equality of opportunity) or for following whichever rules would realise that pattern on the whole. But each of these injunctions is problematic. Intuitively, the first gives individuals responsibility for too much, the second for too little. This article offers a new approach to ethics in collective action contexts. It defends a new collaborative principle that assigns recognisably worthwhile responsibilities to agencies wherever possible. This principle supports a fractal model of moral responsibility, that favours restructuring divisions of labour to enhance the prospects of recognition at every level of social organisation. This article is programmatic: starting from a conjecture about the moral significance of recognition, it sketches a new way of approaching a range of collective action problems that combines the importance of the perspectives of both moral and political philosophy.