Collective Responsibility - Collective Punishment

Collective Punishment

Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools (punishing a whole class for the actions of a single unknown pupil), military units, prisons (juvenile and adult), psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severeity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members, and is almost always a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society. For example, in the Soviet Gulags, all members of a brigada (work unit) were punished for bad performance of any of its members.

Collective punishment is also practiced in situation of war, economic sanctions, etc., presupposing the existence of collective guilt. Collective guilt, or guilt by association, is the controversial collectivist idea that groups of humans can bear guilt above and beyond the guilt of individual members, and hence an individual holds responsibility for what other members of their group have done, even if they themselves didn't do this. Contemporary systems of criminal law accept the principle that guilt shall only be personal. Others view groups as being entities in themselves (an entitative group), capable of holding guilt or responsibility independent of any of the group's members.

The mass shootings of Nicholas II's family in 1918 may be regarded as an example of such an approach. Another example is when ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe were held collectively responsible for Nazi crimes, resulting in numerous atrocities against the German population, including killings (see Expulsion of Germans after World War II and Beneš decrees). La grosse ...