The collective moral autonomy thesis

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 369-388

  Copp, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77949600409     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00386.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (14)

1. See David Copp, "What Collectives Are: Agency, Individualism and Legal Theory," Dialogue 23, no. 2 (1984): 249-69.
2. See David Copp, "Collective Actions and Secondary Actions," American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 177-86. There can be cases of "automated actions" such as cases in which a country's "doomsday machine" is programmed to launch missiles automatically against enemy cities when an attack is detected. Even in such cases, however, I would argue that a country acts only in virtue of the actions of some persons. I owe this example to Dan Hausman, in personal conversation.
3. See Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 180-81.
4. There are other uses of the expression "morally responsible." For example, a person can be said to be "morally responsible" for doing something where what is meant is that the person has a duty with respect to that thing. This sense of "morally responsible" is relevant to thesis O rather than R. Below I mention the idea of "role responsibility." In note 3 above, I mention "agency responsibility." For useful discussion, see Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970).
5. That is, I stipulate, a proposition p is "conceptually possible" just in case it is not the case that not-p is a conceptual truth. I discuss the notion of conceptual truth in chap. 4 of my Morality in a Natural World: Selected Essays in Metaethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
6. Christian List, "The Discursive Dilemma and Public Reason," Ethics 116 (2006): 362-402, at 367.
7. See also 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.
8. Also, Philip Pettit, "Responsibility Incorporated," Ethics 117 (2007): 171-201.
9. This objection was suggested by Kirk Ludwig in his commentary at the Helsinki Conference. Seumas Miller offered a similar objection in "Collective Moral Responsibility: An Individualist Account," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30 (2006): 176-93, note 24.
10. See Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963). See also the literature on the discursive dilemma cited above in note 9.
11. See Raimo Tuomela, The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 10.
12. But see David Copp, "On the Agency of Certain Collective Entities: An Argument from 'Normative Autonomy'," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30 (2006): 194-221.
13. See Kirk Ludwig, "Collective Intentional Behavior from the Standpoint of Semantics," Noûs 41 (2007): 355-93.
14. For this idea, see Feinberg, Doing and Deserving.