Moral Agency and Moral Responsibility in Humanitarian Intervention

This paper sets out a preliminary taxonomy of potential collective moral agents in humanitarian intervention, based on six recent cases involving international organisations. The settings for the cases are Northern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haiti, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Attributing moral responsibility to a group actor requires first discovering whether its characteristics are enough like an individual moral agent's to support an analogy. Groups in humanitarian intervention that appear to choose between one course of action and another, and have a clear structure of leadership and a capacity to control their collective activities, meet criteria that characterise individual moral agents. If they can also distinguish between policies using the language of morality we can call them collective moral agents, and hence subject to some moral responsibilities.     

Books in review

He is the co-author, with William G. Scott, of Organizational Values in America.     

Human service reorganization and its effects: a preliminary assessment of Florida's services integration 'experiment.'

The present discussion reports on some of the first statewide data gathering and analysis to assess the consequences of the 1975 reorganization of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. Two major concepts guiding the reorganization were: (1) integration of services in order to cover more adequately the needs of clients, including "multi-problem" clients, and (2) decentralization of administrative authority of all programs under a single, district-wide management structure. Despite widespread interest in the Florida system, and two previous studies, no systematic, detailed study of the impact of reorganization at the service delivery level has been conducted until now. The results of this study indicate that departmental employees perceive substantial decentralization of authority and progress toward integration of services since the 1975 reorganization. Perceived improvement in client services is also indicated. Major factors cited as influential in the change are the move toward collocation of services, the establishment of administratively interlinked service networks, and to a lesser extent, the development of generalist managers.