This concept examines whether moral responsibility can extend collectively to a group or generation for historical wrongs it did not personally commit, contrasting an intuitive notion of collective/inherited responsibility (grounded in shared identity, culture, or nationhood) with Kant's deontological position that moral responsibility attaches only to acts an individual freely chooses. The tension raised is whether a strictly autonomy-based ethics—which locates moral agency in individual free will and rational choice—can coherently accommodate obligations of solidarity that arise from historical, national, or communal identity rather than from an individual's own free acts. This sits within moral and political philosophy, at the intersection of theories of moral responsibility, collective/group agency, and debates over whether justice and political theory can or should remain neutral on questions of identity, history, and the good life.
This concept examines whether moral responsibility can extend collectively to a group or generation for historical wrongs it did not personally commit, contrasting an intuitive notion of collective/i…