Reflecting on such events as the Holocaust and apartheid, these essays consider how they could have been prevented and who may be to blame. A debate between individualists and collectivists is applied in the second half to cases involving harm in professional and business contexts.

Part 1 Conceptual issues: collective responsibility (a critique) H.D. Lewis; collective responsibility - a defense, Joel Feinberg; morality and collective liability, Howard McGary; collective responsibility (another defense), D.E. Cooper; collective responsibility (a reply to Cooper), R.S. Downe; can a random collection of individuals be morally responsible?, Virginia Held; the responsibility of random collections (a reply to Held), Stanley Bates. Part 2 Applications: why corporations are not morally responsible for anything they do, Manuel Velasquez; the corporation as a moral person, Peter French; ethical responsibilities of engineers in large organizations - the Pinto case, Richard T. De George; collective responsibility and the nursing profession, James Muyskens; conduct and responsibilty in war, Richard Wasserstrom; guilt and responsibility, Kurt Baier; racism and moral pollution, Anthony Applah; metaphysical guilt and moral taint, Larry May; measuring responsibility, A. Zvie Bar-on; organized guilt and moral responsibility, Hannah Arendt.