On the agency of certain collective entities: An argument from "Normative Autonomy"

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 194-221

  Copp, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 56749129500     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4975.2006.00135.x     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. For a history and analysis of the war, see Lawrence Freedman and Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War: The Falklands Conflict of 1982 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
2. I have discussed the nature of collective entities in a number of publications. I discuss collective entities in general in David Copp, "What Collectives Are: Agency, Individualism and Legal Theory," Dialogue 23 (1984): 249-69.
3. I discuss states in "The Idea of a Legitimate State," Philosophy and Public Affairs 28 (1999): 3-45.
4. Philip Pettit, "Groups with Minds of Their Own," in Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality, ed. Frederick Schmidtt (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 167-93.
5. Gilbert Harman, "Intentionality: Some Distinctions," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 607. For example, one can desire to have something that does not exist. Of course, a belief can take a necessary truth as its "object."
6. Seumas Miller appears to favor an argument of this kind in his "Against Collective Agency," in Social Facts and Collective Intentionality, ed. Georg Meggle (Frankfurt: Dr. Hansel-Hohenhausen Ag., 2002), 273 98.
7. John Searle, "Consciousness. Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 585-96.
8. Searle, "Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," 586. 10. Ibid., 588. The original was in italics.
9. See the peer commentary in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 596-632. Searle worries, for example, that we cannot give sense to the idea that an unconscious intentional state has a certain specific content unless the state can potentially be brought to consciousness as a state with that content, say as an intention that p, or a belief that p. But it is not clear how invoking the potential of bringing an intentional state to consciousness can solve the problem.
10. Ned Block, "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1995): 227 87. I am indebted to Kirk Ludwig for this reference.
11. Searle, "Who is Computing with the Brain?" 635.
12. It appears that Gilbert Harman would agree that the bomb is in an intentional state. He says that a picture say, a picture of a unicorn - is an "intentional phenomenon." Harman, "Intentionality: Some Distinctions," 606.
13. Searle says his usage of the term "intentional" is different from Harman's, but he docs not clarify. See Searle, "Who is Computing with the Brain?" 639. Kirk Ludwig pointed out. in personal correspondence, that Searle would say that if my bomb is in an intentional state, this is only "derived intentionality," since its "aboutness" is derived from the intentional states of its maker or user. Ludwig says that the connection principle is intended to be about states with "original intentionality," such as the intentions of the designer of the bomb.The issues here go beyond those I can address adequately. But note that, if Ludwig is correct, the argument from the connection principle can show at most that collectives do not have intentional states that are instances of original intentionality. They might still have states that are instances of derived intentionality. To support agency individualism, we would need a further argument, perhaps an argument with the major premise that an agent's intentional states must all be original. Note also that the distinction between original intentionality and derived intentionality will need to be subtle. It will have to put the states of the bomb on the side of derived intentionality even though its designers and users might not have intended it to explode at all. It might have been intended solely for use by bomb disposal squads in practice sessions and it might have been an accident that it was set to blow up.
14. See, for example, Ned Block, "What is Functionalism?" in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 171-84.
15. I draw on the discussion in Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 1, esp. 43 52.
16. In thinking about this argument, I was helped by correspondence with Kirk Ludwig and by Ludwig's paper, "Collective Intentional Behavior from the Standpoint of Semantics" (unpublished). Seumas Miller proposes an argument similar to the Semantic Argument in his "Against Collective Agency."
17. I developed this point in David Copp, "Collective Actions and Secondary Actions," American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 177-86.
18. I do not claim that (4) is fully adequate. I am assuming any theory of action will propose some analysis of (3) that we could use in place of (4). The formulation in the text takes ideas from several authors: Donald Davidson, "The Logical Form of Action Sentences," in his Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105-21;
19. Carl Ginet. On Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
20. Gilbert Harman,"Practical Reasoning," Review of Metaphysics 29 (1976): 431-63;
21. Kirk Ludwig, "Collective Intentional Behavior from the Standpoint of Semantics";
22. George Wilson, "Action," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, URL: http://plato. stanrord.edu/archives/sum2002/entries/action/.
23. Jeff King has proposed a theory of philosophical analysis that would allow us to say that (3) and (4) express distinct propositions even if (4) is the analysis of (3). See Jeffrey C. King, "What is a Philosophical Analysis?" Philosophical Studies 90 (1998): 155-79. Nothing in this paper turns on the difference between what I say in the text and what I would say if I were working with King's theory of analysis. King's theory is intended to handle the "paradox of analysis."
24. I developed this idea in Copp, "Collective Actions and Secondary Actions."
25. I discussed Thomas Hobbes's views about the authorization of agents in David Copp, "Hobbes on Artificial Persons and Collective Actions," The Philosophical Review 89 (1980): 579-606. I ignore cases in which a collective acts but its action is not constituted by the actions of individual persons with authority so to act on its behalf. An example might be a case in which a government acts illegally. There are various other complications that I cannot pause here to discuss.
26. An argument of this kind is suggested by Michael Jensen and William Meckling, "Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behaviour, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure," Journal of Financial Economics 3 (1976): 305-60. Jensen and Meckling speak of the firm as a "legal fiction," but their argument seems rather to support the idea that although firms exist, it is gratuitous, for reasons similar to those given in the text, to suppose that they are agents. I owe this reference to David Gindis.
27. See Jensen and Meckling, "Theory of the Firm."
28. Here and in what follows, I follow Pettit, The Common Mind, 24 32, 43 52.
29. Pettit, The Common Mind, 29.
30. For an explanation and defense of nonreductive analysis, see Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 44-54.
31. Gene Witmer has defended "the possibility and fruit-fulness" of certain kinds of circular conceptual analyses. See his "Conceptual Analysis, Circularity, and the Commitments of Fhysiclism." Acta Analytica 16 (2001): 119-33.
32. See John I. Biro, "Persons as Corporate Entities and Corporations as Persons," Nature and System 3 (1981): 173-80.
33. For the distinction between premise-centered and conclusion-centered procedures, see Pettit, "Groups with Minds of Their Own," 168 and throughout.
34. The example is from Christian List, "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason," Ethics 116 (2006): 352-402.
35. Anthony Quinton, "Social Objects," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1975-76): 17.
36. Pettit's argument has been criticized by Seumas Miller and Pekka Makela in "The Collectivist Approach to Collective Moral Responsibility," Metaphilosophy 36 (2005): 634 51. Their objections appear to turn on arguments of the kind I discussed in section 2.1.
37. Russell Hardin presents an example of collective normative autonomy in Morality within the Limits of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 156-58.
38. His example concerns an unorganized group that fails to do something-in his example, a group of people riding on a bus fail to help someone - rather than an institutional group with a collective decision procedure. He does not explicitly take account of excuses that the individuals on the bus might have had for failing to act. Miller and Makela have argued, in "The Collectivist Approach to Collective Moral Responsibility," that Hardin's example is not successful. But they do not consider slightly modified examples in which each of the bus riders has an excuse or justification for failing to act.
39. I present additional examples of collective normative autonomy in David Copp, Individuals, Collectives and Moral Agency (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1976), 166 80.