Who’s to Blame? Collective Moral Responsibility and Its Implications for Group Members MARGARET GILBERT I f we are morally responsible for something, what does that say about me and you—distinct individuals whose personal stories may widely differ? 1 In par- ticular, what does it say about my personal moral responsibility, and yours? The phrase “morally responsible” is importantly ambiguous, so I should at once say something to clarify my focus. There are both backward-looking and forward-looking claims of moral responsibility (or so I shall label them). An example of a backward-looking claim is:“We are morally responsible for the war,” where the war in question may be taking place now or may have taken place in the past. An example of a forward-looking claim is: “We are morally responsible for cleaning this place up,” where the cleaning up, it is understood, has yet to be done. These two types of claim may be closely related, but they are clearly distinct.Thus it is intelligible to say: “Though we are not morally responsible for what happened, we are morally responsible for ameliorating its effects.”Think, in this connection, of the consequences of a natural disaster. Roughly, the backward-looking kind of moral responsibility has to do with causation. One can cause something (the breaking of a vase, say) without being morally responsible for it in the backward-looking way (one was pushed so hard by another, that one fell on the vase). One cannot, however, be morally responsible for it in that way if one had nothing whatsoever to do with its coming to be. The 1. Cf. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. H. B.Ashton (New York: Capricorn, 1947), 17: “we differ extraordinarily in what we have experienced, felt, wished, cherished, and done.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXX (2006) © 2006 Copyright The Authors Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 94