On Tuesday, 6 July 2021 at 4:30pm Bangkok time, Thammasat University students are cordially invited to join an online presentation of the book Getting Our Act Together: A Theory of Collective Moral Obligations by Dr. Anne Schwenkenbecher. Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Murdoch University, Western Australia.

As Dr. Schwenkenbecher’s book description notes,

Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by herself. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral agents hold jointly, but not as unified collective agents. To think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of “massively shared obligations” to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty.

The Thammasat University Library collection includes a number of books about the concept of collective moral obligations to achieve social advancement.

The word compossible means being able to exist with something else.

Compossibility is a concept by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. According to Leibniz, the existence of one individual may contradict the existence of another, but if individuals are compossible, they can coexist.

Dr. Schwenkenbecher’s academic profile explains,

I am a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the School of Arts at Murdoch University, Western Australia. Before joining Murdoch University (named after Sir Walter Murdoch, not Rupert Murdoch!) in June 2013, I have held appointments at The University of Melbourne, the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Australian National University, University of Vienna, and Potsdam University. My PhD in Philosophy (2009) is from Humboldt University of Berlin, my hometown.

Sir Walter Murdoch (1874 –1970) was an Australian academic and essayist, founding professor of English and former Chancellor of the University of Western Australia (UWA) in Perth, Western Australia. Murdoch University is named in Sir Walter’s honour; as is Murdoch, the suburb surrounding its main campus, located in Perth, Western Australia.

He was the great uncle of international media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

The event will be hosted by the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, a centre of research that addresses global challenges.

As its website observes,

Humanity stands at a crossroads; the sheer speed of change across sectors and systems, including technology, population, health and climate, means that we now have the power to destroy possibilities for future generations. Equally, we have the potential to dramatically improve the wellbeing of people across the planet.

It is this combination of urgency and optimism that characterises all our work at the Oxford Martin School.

Our academics work across more than 30 solutions-focused, pioneering research programmes that cut across disciplines to find solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. From renewable energy to ocean sustainability, and from the future of work to tackling inequality, we foster ground-breaking collaborations between researchers working at the frontiers of knowledge. The unifying theme is that the research must be of the highest academic calibre, tackle issues of global significance, and could not have been undertaken without our support.

Underpinning all our research is the need to translate academic excellence into real-world impact, from innovations in science, medicine and technology, through to expert advice and policy recommendations.

Students are advised to register for the event at this link:

To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/getting-our-act-together

The talk will also be streamed on YouTube at this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXf-kFwcAaI

However, to participate in the interactive question and answer session, it is recommended to register for online access instead by CrowdCast.

The discussant for the occasion will be Professor Julian Savulescu of the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease.

The TU Library owns some books written by Professor Savulescu. 

For further information or with any questions, students may write to this email address:

events@oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk

Dr. Schwenkenbecher specializes in research in moral, social and political philosophy, more specifically on

the moral status of groups

group action and joint action

collective moral obligations

social epistemology

ethics of political violence (terrorism and war)

environmental philosophy: ethics and climate change, social justice implications of conventional and renewable energies

public goods and global commons (public health, natural environment)

philosophy of public policy including the philosophical challenges of translating scientific findings into public policy

Last year in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Dr. Schwenkenbecher distinguished between

two basic types of collective action: cooperative joint action and distributive action. Cooperative joint action is highly interdependent collaboration between individuals. We cooperate in this way if we play a duet, or jointly carry a pram up the stairs at the train station or if we run a business together. In order for those actions to succeed, we must have some knowledge of the others’ actions and intentions…  

But global moral problems are not like that. We – ordinary citizens – cannot directly communicate with most other people across the globe and even though our means of connecting with others at a distance are greater than ever, the kind of interaction we can have with them is still fundamentally different from the interaction that is possible and common in small-scale, direct cooperation.

At a distance, however, we can engage with others in distributive action. This type of collective action takes place where we share a goal and a plan – where each of us knows what that plan is and that plan specifies how we can achieve that goal and we each act accordingly. And we do this all the time: For instance when we reduce our meat consumption because we want to minimize our environmental or antimicrobial footprints.

In isolation, our behavioural change will not have much of an effect on the problem. But we often make those decisions with a view to contributing to a larger movement away from harmful practices, knowing that it is our contribution in conjunction with those of others that can make a real difference. In this sense, then, we can share a goal with people across the globe, the overwhelming majority of whom we do not and will never know. And we can share a plan with them: we can know what individual steps are necessary for us to collectively realise our goal. And when we do that we partake in distributive action.

A recent example for (national-scale) distributive action was the collective boycott of a Trump Rally in Tulsa by users of the platform TikTok. The plan to collectively buy up enough tickets with the intention of not showing up at the rally served the immediate goal of reducing the number of spectators and the mediate goal of protesting Trump’s political agenda…

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)