When Everyone Does Only One Part, Who Is Responsible for the Whole?

An agency uses an automated system to assess welfare applications. Programmers build the model, managers set its goals, procurement staff choose the vendor, and frontline workers follow the results. When the system repeatedly rejects valid claims, each person can say they handled only one small part. This is the “problem of many hands”: harm is produced by an organised structure, yet seems difficult to place in any one pair of hands.

Methodological individualists argue that only individuals can form intentions and be blameworthy; assigning responsibility to an “organisation” may also burden members who did nothing wrong. Other theories hold that an organisation with stable decision procedures, capable of receiving reasons and acting on them, is more than an accidental collection of people and may bear collective responsibility. The central issue is not whether an organisation has human-like consciousness, but whether it can form policies, control action and answer criticism.

My view is that collective and individual responsibility need not compete. The agency should answer for its decision structure, continuing effects and capacity to provide a remedy. Each person's responsibility should depend on their actual authority, knowledge, participation and reasonable ability to intervene. Collective harm must not become nobody's responsibility, but equal blame should not be spread indiscriminately across every member. Responsibility should identify who must explain, repair and redesign the system, rather than merely supply a scapegoat.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-responsibility/