I defend the view that individual agents have instrumental moral reasons for and against contributing to collective actions. I distinguish three versions of this view found in the literature and argue that only one withstands scrutiny: the version on which each individual contribution to a collective action is a cause of the latter’s large-scale outcomes. The central difficulty with this view is its apparent incompatibility with leading theories of causation. Against these theories I motivate a general structural principle about causation which enables instrumentalism to deliver the intuitively correct verdicts about individual agents’ moral reasons in cases of collective action.

中文翻译：

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集体行动、个人原因和后果的形而上学

我捍卫这样一种观点，即个体代理人有工具性的道德理由支持和反对为集体行动做出贡献。我区分了文献中发现的这种观点的三个版本，并认为只有一个版本经得起审查：每个个人对集体行动的贡献是后者大规模结果的原因的版本。这种观点的主要困难在于它与主要的因果理论明显不相容。与这些理论相反，我提出了一个关于因果关系的一般结构原则，它使工具主义能够在集体行动的情况下对个体行为者的道德理由做出直观正确的判断。