The citizenry as a collective agent: ontology, morality, and boundaries

Abstract

This thesis develops a comprehensive account of the citizenry as a genuine collective agent in representative democracies and explores the moral responsibilities that flow from this status. I argue that the citizenry satisfies core criteria for agency—autonomy, persistence, rationality, and reasoning—through joint commitments to democratic norms, diachronic public deliberation (through informal political discussions, protests, demonstrations, partisanship, social media activism, and participation in opinion polls), and institutional procedures that yield emergent judgments. Building on this account, I develop a collectivist framework of citizen responsibility, which shows how the citizenry bears collective blame for unjust state actions and shares task-responsibilities—such as bearing reparative costs—via an ongoing cycle of electoral appointment, informal guidance, and retrospective evaluation. Finally, I apply this framework to the Responsibility Dilemma in war ethics, proposing non‐lethal, symbolic, structural, and functional harms as appropriate forms of citizen liability in unjust conflicts. By recognising the citizenry as an agent, this thesis offers a richer foundation for understanding political accountability, collective responsibility, and the possibilities of democratic self‑rule. It also offers a novel challenge to the dominant individualistic paradigm in normative political philosophy.