Collective responsibility (doctrine)
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- For the British Parliamentary discipline, see Collective responsibility
Collective responsibility is a concept, or doctrine, according to which people are to be held responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, without actively collaborating in these actions.
This concept is found mostly in the Old Testament (or Tanakh), some examples include the account of the Flood, the Tower Of Babel and Sodom and Gomorrah. In those records entire communities were punished on the act of the vast majority of their members, however it is impossible that there weren't any innocent people, or children too young to be responsible for their deeds.
The concept is present in Western literature too, most notably in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem telling the tale of a ship's crew who died of thirst because they approved of one crew member's killing of an albatross.
The term also refers to the policy of criminal deterrence implemented by the government of North Korea in which immediate neighbours and family members of convicted criminals are subject to similar punishment [citation needed]. Israel had a similar policy, demolishing houses of the families of Palestinians accused of participating in terrorist acts that had killed Israeli civilians.
Collective responsibility, in the form of group punishment, is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, such as boarding schools, military units, etc. The severity and effectiveness of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds suspicion and isolation among the members, and is almost always a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society. For example, in Soviet Gulag, all members of a brigada (work unit) were punished for bad performance of any of its members.
