The Importance of National Responsibility

I think it's important here to be clear about the kind of responsibility we're talking about. There is a quite specific idea of moral responsibility which does attach to individual actions, and therefore what each person is morally responsible for would depend on what they in particular did. But I think there's another sense, which I call outcome responsibility, where anybody who plays a part in the collective action is going to bear outcome responsibility for the damage. So when it comes to nations, it's quite different because nations are larger than a group of people on the rampage. And inevitably there are people within a nation who oppose what that nation is doing.