Is the group responsible for the individual's crime? Collective sanctions have ancient roots, and are used more widely today than is often realized. But are they ethical? And do they work?

• Author: Liptak, Adam
• Position: Ethics

The Pakistani Army not long ago gave tribal elders near the Afghan border a choice: Either turn over 72 men wanted for sheltering Al Qaeda members, or soldiers would demolish houses in their town. Holding a group responsible for the actions of its members is not a new idea. Consider the pitcher who retaliates for a beanball thrown at one of his teammates by throwing at the next batter he faces. Or the granchmother evicted from public housing because her grandson sold drugs from their apartment. Or the class that loses the privilege of eating off school grounds because one student got into trouble.

In each case, people were threatened or punished not for their own actions but for their failure to control the actions of others. Some recent legal scholarship defends this approach.

"Group members might be punished not because they are deemed collectively responsible for wrongdoing," Daryl J. Levinson, who teaches law at New York University, wrote last November, "but simply because they are in an advantageous position to identify, monitor, and control responsible individuals, and can be motivated by the threat of sanctions to do so."

UTILITY VS. MORALITY

Others accept the utility of such sanctions but question their morality.

"It's possible to say that tribes are supposed to help the government," says George P. Fletcher, a law professor at Columbia University in New York. "It doesn't follow that you can threaten mass destruction as a method of coercing the tribe. It doesn't follow from collective guilt that you can impose collective punishment."

The main objection to collective sanctions put forward by legal scholars and philosophers is that moral responsibility should rest with the individual, not the family, tribe, or nation.

But those who defend such sanctions say that there is often little difference, in terms of responsibility, between someone who acts wrongfully--commits a crime, say--and a person around him who fails to stop the crime, warn others about it, or report it afterward. "It's not so obvious to me that the people who bear the burden of many of these punishments are truly innocent," says Levinson.

Collective sanctions have ancient roots. Two examples in the Bible are the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and blood feuds. Modern examples are international sanctions, like those imposed by the United Nations against Iraq in the 1990s. And war itself may be seen as a collective sanction. In justifying the invasion of Afghanistan in...