In order for states to fulfil (many of) their moral obligations, costs must be passed to individuals. This paper asks how these costs should be distributed. I advocate the common-sense answer: the distribution of costs should, insofar as possible, track the reasons behind the state’s duty. This answer faces a number of problems, which I attempt to solve.

Which kinds of responsibility can we attribute to which kinds of collective, and why? In contrast, which kinds of collective responsibility can we not attribute—which kinds are ‘gappy’? This study provides a framework for answering these questions. It begins by distinguishing between three kinds of collective and three kinds of responsibility. It then explains how gaps—i.e. cases where we cannot attribute the responsibility we might want to—appear to arise within each type of collective responsibility. It argues some of these gaps (...) do not exist on closer inspection, at least for some collectives and some of the time. (shrink)

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties: only groups with sufficient structure—call them ‘collectives’—have the necessary agency. Moreover, if duties imply ability then moral agents (of both the individual and collectives varieties) can bear duties only over actions they are able to perform. It is thus doubtful that individual agents can bear duties to perform actions that only a collective could perform. This appears to leave us at a loss (...) when assigning duties in circumstances where only a collective could perform some morally desirable action and no collective exists. But, I argue, we are not at a loss. This article outlines a new way of assigning duties over collective acts when there is no collective. Specifically, we should assign collectivisation duties to individuals. These are individual duties to take steps towards forming a collective, which then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivisation duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers. (shrink)

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what (...) they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts. (shrink)

Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where the group is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly, obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bear obligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair of conclusions is (...) important, since philosophers who endorse large-scale non-agentive groups’ abilities almost universally endorse their obligations. More importantly, the twin arguments (one for abilities, one against obligations) make the following novel contribution: abilities imply agency-involving explanations, while obligations imply action-guidance. This general conclusion should be of interest beyond social ontology. (shrink)

The recitation of creeds in corporate worship is widespread in the Christian tradition. Intuitively, the use of creeds captures the belief not only of the individuals reciting it, but of the Church as a whole. This paper seeks to provide a philosophical analysis of the meaning of the words, ‘We believe…’, in the context of the liturgical recitation of the Creed. Drawing from recent work in group ontology, I explore three recent accounts of group belief and consider the potential of (...) applying these to the group belief contained in the Creed. (shrink)

In this article, I summarize recent work on the philosophy of liturgy. In part 2 of this article, I consider how liturgy can provide a way of knowing God personally. I outline accounts of acquiring phenomenal knowledge, practical knowledge, and propositional knowledge by participating in liturgy.

How can participating in a liturgy allow us to know God? Recent pathbreaking work on the epistemology of liturgy has argued that liturgy allows individuals to gain ritual knowledge of God by coming to know-how to engage God. However, since liturgy (as it is ordinarily practiced) is a group act, I argue that we need to give an account to explain how a group can know God by engaging with liturgy. If group know-how is reducible to instances of individual know-how, (...) then the existing accounts are sufficient for explaining a group’s knowing-how to engage God. However, I argue, there are good reasons to suppose that reductive accounts of group know-how fail. In this paper, I propose a non-reductive account of common ritual knowledge, according to which the group knows-how to engage God in liturgy. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to show that analytic philosophy can contribute to the theological discussion of ecclesiology. By considering recent analytic work on social ontology, I outline how we might think of the Church as one entity, constituted by many disparate parts. The paper begins with an overview of the theological constraints for the paper, and then proceeds to examine recent work on the philosophy of social ontology and group agency. Drawing on this literature, I outline three models of (...) social ontology from the history of philosophy and suggest reasons why all of them fail to provide an account of the Church’s agency. Finally, I develop an alternative model which, I suggest, better fits the conditions stipulated. (shrink)

Analyses of the theological virtue of hope tend to focus on its interior dispositional structure, shifting attention away from the social dimensions crucial to its formation and exercise. We argue that one can better appreciate the place of hope in Christian thought by attending to communal features that have been peripheral to or excluded from traditional analyses. To this end, we employ resources from the literature on the extended mind and group agency to develop an account of the theological virtue (...) of hope as a socially extended virtue—that is, a virtue scaffolded by and enacted within a community whose practices are ordered toward a shared conception of human flourishing. (shrink)

Should economics study the psychological basis of agents' choice behaviour? I show how this question is multifaceted and profoundly ambiguous. There is no sharp distinction between "mentalist'' answers to this question and rival "behavioural'' answers. What's more, clarifying this point raises problems for mentalists of the "functionalist'' variety (Dietrich and List, 2016). Firstly, functionalist hypotheses collapse into hypotheses about input--output dispositions, I show, unless one places some unwelcome restrictions on what counts as a cognitive variable. Secondly, functionalist hypotheses make some (...) risky commitments about the plasticity of agents' choice dispositions. (shrink)

This article addresses our failing ability to hold business corporations to the public interest, or even to bare legality. It defends, in brief compass, the reasonableness of the expectation that corporations provide public benefits as consideration for their public privileges. But as succeeding sections recount, the traditional instrument for holding corporations to the public interest has gradually been undermined; and our standard, punitive tools for holding them even to bare legality, suffer from inherent limitations and fail adequately to deter corporate (...) misconduct. A more adequate approach would be to supplement the current punitive regime with reform of corporate governance in directions that would decrease the temptation of managers to engage in misconduct in the first place. Several possibilities are considered, with the most promise found in allowing corporations to be owned by Danish-style “industrial foundations.” Among its advantages, the reform is realizable and would reduce incentives to corporate misconduct without compromising on performance. Industrial foundations also customarily direct a portion of corporate profits to charity, in effect reinstating the norm that for-profit corporations provide public benefits. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the concept of alienation should be mobilized to develop a ‘geo-social’ critique of the generic forms of life that sustain contemporary capitalist societies, in a time when the stability of the Earth system is increasingly at risk. I contend that retrieving the full heuristic potential of the concept demands engaging the fields where it has been traditionally discussed (notably social philosophy and environmental philosophy) to demonstrate how their insights on alienation can be fruitfully combined. (...) By putting greater emphasis on how society and nature are mutually embedded, this new approach to alienation highlights the anthropocentrism that critical theory has long conveyed and indicates how it could be at least partially corrected. (shrink)

Those who argue that corporations can be morally responsible for what they do help us to understand how autonomous corporate agency is possible, and those who argue that they cannot be help us maintain distinctive value in human life. Each offers something valuable, but without securing the other's important contribution. I offer an account that secures both. I explain how corporations can be autonomous agents that we can continue to be justified in blaming as responsible agents, but without it also (...) being the case that corporations are morally responsible for anything that they do. The upshot is that we can make sense of the reality of corporate agency and the value that we derive from our sophisticated interactions with them as autonomous agents, while vindicating the idea that they are not members of the moral community. (shrink)

In this paper, I advance a counterexample to the collective agency thesis.

Knowledge-how often appears to be more difficult to transmit by testimony than knowledge-that and knowledge-wh. Some philosophers have argued that this difference provides us with an important objection to intellectualism—the view that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that. This article defends intellectualism against these testimony-based objections.

If individual knowledge and justification can be vanquished by epistemic defeaters, then the same should go for group knowledge. Lackey (2014) has recently argued that one especially strong conception of group knowledge defended by Bird (2010) is incapable of preserving how it is that (group) knowledge is ever subject to ordinary mechanisms of epistemic defeat. Lackey takes it that her objections do not also apply to a more moderate articulation of group knowledge--one that is embraced widely in collective epistemology--and which (...) she does not challenge. This paper argues that given certain background premises that are embraced by orthodox thinking in collectivist epistemology, the more moderate account of group knowledge cannot make sense of either psychological or normative epistemic defeaters. I conclude by offering some suggestions for how the more moderate proposal might avoid this result. (shrink)

It is commonplace to speak of social groups as if they were capable of the same sorts of activities as individuals. We say, “Germany won the World Cup”; “The United States invaded Iraq”; and “The world mourned the passing of Nelson Mandela”. In so doing, we attribute agency, belief, and emotional states to groups themselves. In recent years, much literature devoted to analyzing such statements and their implications has emerged. Within this literature, the issue of “intentionalism,” whether individuals must have (...) a certain self-conception in order to constitute a collectivity, has received surprisingly little attention. While Paul Sheehy has criticized this view, claiming that individuals may be related in such a way as to constitute a collective without their realizing it :377–394, 2002), little other scholarship on the topic exists. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this debate. I will argue, drawing on Edith Stein’s phenomenology of social groups, that intentionalism, as Margaret Gilbert defines it, is false. I begin by establishing Gilbert’s account, Sheehy’s criticism of intentionalism, and what I take to be its shortcomings. I then explicate Stein’s phenomenology of collectives and argue that plural subjects who do not meet intentionalist requirements can exist. Given this, intentionalism must be rejected. Because the intentionalism debate presupposes that there are irreducibly social agents, I do not argue for this claim. (shrink)

For centuries in the UK and elsewhere, charities have been widely regarded as admirable and virtuous organisations. Business corporations, by contrast, have been characterised in the popular imagination as entities that lack a capacity for moral judgement. Drawing on the philosophical literature on the moral agency of organisations, we examine how the law shapes the ability of charities and business corporations headquartered in England to exercise moral agency. Paradoxically, we find that charities are legally constrained in exercising moral agency in (...) ways in which business corporations are not. Implications for charities and business corporations are then explored. (shrink)

Research seeking to explain the perpetration of violence and atrocities by humans against other humans offers both social and individualistic explanations, which differ namely in the roles attributed to empathy. Prominent social models suggest that some manifestations of inter-human violence are caused by parochial attitudes and obedience reinforced by within-group empathy. Individualistic explanations of violence, by contrast, posit that stable intra-individual characteristics of the brain and personality of some individuals lead them to commit violence and atrocities. An individualistic explanation argues (...) that the chief cause of violence is the perpetrator’'s lack of empathy with the victim. To offer the rudiments of a critique of the individualistic approach, I critically examine a model stating that violence is caused by empathy erosion. Specifically, the discussion of the empathy-erosion model is applied to the case of honour-based violence, a type of violence known for its communal character. Building from prior enquiries into violence and social cognition, I argue that an empathy-erosion explanation of HBV is defective because it does not consider important cultural and historical enablers of violence. Finally, as an alternative to individualism, I propose a psychohistorical approach to HBV in the migration context. This alternative combines psychological and philosophical enquiry with historical and ethnographical analysis. The psychohistorical approach hypothesises that distinct processes of cultural learning of honour codes both scaffold HBV and modulate the perpetrators’ emotions and empathy. (shrink)

To explain agent-identification behaviours, universalist theories in the biological and cognitive sciences have posited mental mechanisms thought to be universal to all humans, such as agent detection and face recognition mechanisms. These universalist theories have paid little attention to how particular sociocultural or historical contexts interact with the psychobiological processes of agent-identification. In contrast to universalist theories, contextualist theories appeal to particular historical and sociocultural contexts for explaining agent-identification. Contextualist theories tend to adopt idiographic methods aimed at recording the heterogeneity (...) of human behaviours across history, space, and cultures. Defenders of the universalist approach tend to criticise idiographic methods because such methods can lead to relativism or may lack generality. To overcome explanatory limitations of proposals that adopt either universalist or contextualist approaches in isolation, I propose a philosophical model that integrates contributions from both traditions: the psycho-historical theory of agent-identification. This theory investigates how the tracking processes that humans use for identifying agents interact with the unique socio-historical contexts that support agent-identification practices. In integrating hypotheses about the history of agents with psychological and epistemological principles regarding agent-identification, the theory can generate novel hypotheses regarding the distinction between recognition-based, heuristic-based, and explanation-based agent-identification. (shrink)

The theory of collective agency and intentionality is a flourishing field of research, and our understanding of these phenomena has arguably increased greatly in recent years. Extant theories, however, are still ill-equipped to explain certain aspects of collective intentionality. In this article we draw attention to two such underappreciated aspects: the failure of the intentional states of collectives to supervene on the intentional states of their members, and the role of non-human factors in collective agency and intentionality. We propose a (...) theory of collective intentionality which builds on the ‘interpretationist’ tradition in metasemantics and the philosophy of mind as initiated by David Lewis and recently developed further by Robbie Williams. The collective-level analogue of interpretationism turns out to look different in some ways from the individual-level theory, but is well-suited to accommodating phenomena such as hybrid collective intentionality. Complemented with Kit Fine’s theory of variable embodiment, such a theory also provides a diachronic account of intentional collectives. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate what it is for a group to believe something for a reason. I defend a non-summative account on which a group can believe that p for a reason even though none of its members believe that p for that reason. By contrast, a summative account would hold that the reason for which a group believes that p is a function of the reason for which its members believe that p. I argue that the proposed non-summative (...) account deals better with cases in which members of a group believe that p for different reasons. I also defend it against a range of objections, including that it conflicts with epistemic norms for assertion and action. (shrink)

A significant part of contemporary social ontology has been focused on understanding forms of collective intentionality. It is suggested in this paper that the contested nature of some institutional matters makes this kind of approach problematic, and instead an alternative approach is developed, one that is oriented towards a micro-level analysis of the institutional constraints that we face in everyday life and which can make sense of how there can be institutional facts that are deeply contested and yet still real. (...) The model is applied to two main examples, sexism and racism, and it is argued that on this approach it can make sense to understand both of them as institutions in our societies. (shrink)

There has been little debate in political philosophy about whether the intentions of governments matter to the legitimacy of their policies. This paper fills this gap. First, I provide a rigorous statement of political anti-intentionalism, the view that intentions do not matter to political legitimacy. I do so by building on analogous debates in moral philosophy. Second, I sketch some strategies to defend political anti-intentionalism, which I argue are promising and available to a wide range of theories of legitimacy. Third, (...) I show that the distinction has implications for debates surrounding neutrality and political liberalism. (shrink)

The present paper attempts to look at on the genealogy of both shared intentionality and collective intentionality, comparing Michael Tomasello’s concept with Max Scheler’s threedimensional concept of intentionality: ens amans, ens volens, ens cogitans, as affective, conative, and cognitive intentionality. I focus on various forms of affective collective intentionality — Schelerian forms of sympathy — to show collective subjectivity from the whole spectrum of emotional intentionality, presented by Scheler’s example of parents standing over the corpse of a child. Even though (...) Tomasello’s works seem to empirically corroborate Scheler’s intuitions about the emotional genealogy of collective intentionality, they will differ in the horizons within they locate intentionality. In the case of the evolutionary psychology of Tomasello, we can talk about the horizon of cooperation, in the case of Scheler’s Scheler’s phenomenology of acts about the horizon of responsibility or co-responsibility, which gives intentionality its unique character. The similarities of both concepts concern the following pillars: 1) genealogy of intentionality covering the dimension of affective intentionality, conative intentionality, and the level of cognitive intentionality; 2) Imitation or, as Scheler would say, following someone. Because a person is recognized by the author of Formalism as an act, or a bundle of acts, the way to understanding and communication with another person is the maieutic coperformance of their acts — i.e., imitation. The maieutic co-execution of acts of others triggers the constitution process of a person, both on an individual and community level. We can speak, in the case of Tomasello, about the ontho- and sociogenetic function of co-executing acts or imitating; however, in the case of Scheler, we are dealing with the clearly axiological nature of such a constitution of both the individual and collective subjectivity ; 3) collaborative engagement as a driving force behind collective intentionality in one case in form of co-responsibility, a nature of a collective person ; in the other case in form of collaboration developing intentionality to various units of community life. (shrink)

Decision-making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals' causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments, and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explore the possibility of aggregating causal judgments independently of probabilistic ones. Formally, we introduce the problem of causal-network aggregation. (...) Finally, we revisit the aggregation of probabilistic judgments when this is constrained by prior aggregation of qualitative causal judgments. (shrink)

A review of Jennifer Lackey's "The Epistemology of Groups".

While social epistemologists have recently begun addressing questions about whether groups can possess beliefs or knowledge, little has yet been said about whether groups can properly be said to possess understanding. Here I want to make some progress on this question by considering two possible accounts of group understanding, modeled on accounts of group belief and knowledge: a deflationary account, according to which a group understands just in case most or all of its members understand, and an inflationary account, according (...) to which a group’s understanding does not depend solely on whether its members understand. I argue that both accounts face problems. The deflationary account has two such problems: aggregation problems that are familiar from discussions of group belief, and the problem of different bases, wherein members possess understanding for different but consistent reasons. The inflationary account faces what I call the problem of distributed grasping: while it is widely accepted that understanding requires a kind of “grasping”, it is hard to make sense of how this requirement could be met at the group level while not necessarily being met by any individual member. Despite its problems, I make a case for the inflationary account. This will require addressing the problem of distributed grasping: to do this, I propose a different way of thinking about the grasping relation at the group level, such that it is constituted by a dependency relationship between members. (shrink)

There have been many discussions recently from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists about group polarization, with online and social media environments in particular receiving a lot of attention, both because of people's increasing reliance on such environments for receiving and exchanging information and because such environments often allow individuals to selectively interact with those who are like-minded. My goal here is to argue that the group epistemologist can facilitate understanding the kinds of factors that drive group polarization in a way (...) that has been overlooked by the existing research. Specifically, I argue that polarization can occur in part because of the ways that members of a group treat the group itself (as opposed to an individual member within that group) as a source of information, and in doing so makes their own position, as well as that of the group, more extreme. I refer to this as a structural factor in driving polarization, and argue that such factors can contribute to explanations of polarization that occurs specifically in an important subset of groups, namely online and social media groups in which little is known about other members within the group, what I refer to as anonymous, semi-anonymous and pseudonymous (ASAP) groups. (shrink)

According to some accounts, an individual participates in joint intentional cooperative action by virtue of conceiving of him- or herself and other participants as if they were parts of a single agent or body that performs the action. I argue that this notional singularization move fails if they act as if they were parts of a single agent. It can succeed, however, if the participants act as if to bring about the goal of a properly functioning single body in action (...) of which they would be parts. This latter version of the move manages to capture the cooperative character of joint intentional cooperative action. It does this without requiring of participants that they act on higher-order interlocking intentions. (shrink)

This paper assesses employees’ moral agency within corporate capitalism from a politically liberal standpoint. While political liberalism has spelt out its key institutional implications at state level, it has neglected moral agency at work, assuming that a rights-based state that secures freedom of contract, free choice of occupation and a free labour market within a fair context would protect it sufficiently. Yet two features of corporate capitalism constrain employees’ moral agency: the relation of authority that forms part of the work (...) contract and organisations’ fragmented decision-making processes. Both seem at odds with the liberal ideal of allowing people to live by their own conception of the good. Consequently, this paper examines whether political liberalism should recommend greater safeguards for protecting workers’ moral agency. It proposes a criterion for assessing corporate capitalism: the ‘moral space’ defined as the socially shaped opportunities for action that can be enacted or endorsed from a comprehensive perspective. It argues that liberals should favour arrangements that widen workers’ moral space and suggests institutional designs that may achieve this while remaining within liberal boundaries. (shrink)

This paper lists a number of puzzles for shared obligations – puzzles about the role of individual influence, individual reasons to contribute towards fulfilling the obligation, about what makes someone a member of a group sharing an obligation, and the relation between agency and obligation – and proposes to solve them based on a general analysis of obligations. On the resulting view, shared obligations do not presuppose joint agency.

Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “ corporate ” agents. Individuals embodying such agents can of course be ashamed, proud, or indignant about what (...) the agent has done. But just as an entity needs to have its own beliefs, desires, and intentions to qualify as a bona fide agent, the required capacity for reactive attitudes is a capacity to have one’s own reactive attitudes. If fully-fledged moral agency requires reactive attitudes, the corporate agent must itself be capable of guilt and indignation. In this paper, we argue that at least certain corporate agents are. Or, more precisely, we argue that if there are bona fide corporate agents, these agents can have the capacities that are both associated with guilt and indignation and plausibly required for moral agency; in particular certain epistemic and motivational capacities. (shrink)

When two agents engage in a joint action, such as rowing together, they exercise joint know-how. But what is the relationship between the joint know-how of the two agents and the know-how each agent possesses individually? I construct an “active mutual enablement” account of this relationship, according to which joint know-how arises when each agent knows how to predict, monitor, and make failure-averting adjustments in response to the behaviour of the other agent, while actively enabling the other to make such (...) adjustments. I defend the AME account from three objections, and I then use this account as the platform for an examination of the reducibility of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge. A summative account of joint propositional knowledge is incompatible with the reduction of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge, whereas a distributive account is not. I close by highlighting some open questions the AME account brings into view concerning the evolutionary origin and scaling up of joint know-how. (shrink)

When an employee’s off-duty conduct generates mass social media outrage, managers commonly respond by firing the employee. This, I argue, can be a mistake. The thesis I defend is the following: the fact that a firing would occur in a mass social media outrage context brought about by the employee’s off-duty conduct generates a strong ethical reason weighing against the act. In particular, it contributes to the firing constituting an inappropriate act of blame. Scholars who caution against firing an employee (...) for off-duty conduct have thus far focused primarily on due process related issues or legal concerns pertaining to free speech, lifestyle discrimination, and employment at-will. However, these concerns amount to only a partial, and contingent, diagnosis of what is at issue. I argue that even when due process considerations are met, firings in these contexts can be unjustified. Moreover, even if a business is not concerned with the unethical conduct per se, but is rather strictly concerned with PR, the argument I advance nevertheless provides one important ethical reason that counts against firings in mass social media outrage contexts. Given that managers are often under significant pressure to respond swiftly in cases where an employee is at the center of mass social media outrage, it is especially important that scholars begin to clarify the normative issues. This article builds on the burgeoning philosophical literature on the ethics of blame and provides a novel account of a distinctive ethical concern that arises with firings in mass social media outrage contexts. (shrink)

It is widely thought that firms that employ workers in “sweatshop” conditions wrongfully exploit those workers. This claim has been challenged by those who argue that because companies are not obligated to hire their workers in the first place, employing them cannot be wrong so long as they voluntarily accept their jobs and genuinely benefit from them. In this article, I argue that we can maintain that at least many sweatshop employees are wrongfully exploited, while accepting the plausible claim at (...) the core of many defenses of sweatshops, namely that engaging in a voluntary and mutually beneficial transaction with a person in need cannot constitute morally worse treatment of that person than doing nothing at all to benefit her. We can do this, I claim, by accepting that wealthy multinational corporations have positive duties to employ or otherwise benefit the global poor. I argue that these duties can be plausibly grounded in the fact that potential sweatshop workers are victims of global structural injustice, from which multinational corporations typically benefit. (shrink)

It has been suggested that understanding our obligations to address large-scale moral problems such as global poverty and the threat of severe climate change as fundamentally collective can allow us to insist that a great deal must be done about these problems while denying that there are very demanding obligations, applying to either individuals or collectives, to contribute to addressing them. I argue that this strategy for limiting demandingness fails because those who endorse collective obligations to address large-scale moral problems (...) have no grounds for denying that the relevant collectives are obligated to do what is impartially best. Specifically, I argue that appeals to the claim that collective obligations to do what is impartially best would be objectionably demanding cannot succeed, for two reasons. The first is that demandingness complaints cannot be aggregated across the individual members of a collective. And the second is that demandingness complaints cannot plausibly be asserted on behalf of collectives themselves. I conclude by suggesting some reasons to think that collective obligations to address large-scale problems will tend to imply demanding individual obligations. (shrink)

Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000) describes the striving mechanism as a mode of routine change driven by successful organizational routines. Striving describes a process by which organization members gain a better understanding of the ideals undergirding their actions. In turn, this insight drives changes within routines. In this paper, I argue that the rational actor model, especially as articulated in Donald Davidson’s (1963) theory of action, is unable to account for the striving mechanism of endogenous routine change identified by (...) Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000). Drawing upon Brewer’s (2011) criticisms of propositional theories of desire, the account of meta-language intentional attitudes developed by List and Pettit (2011), and MacIntyre’s (2007) theory of social practices, I introduce an expanded framework for conceptualizing agency at the individual level, and aggregation at the organization level, that better accounts for the striving mechanism as a process of endogenous routine change. (shrink)

The nature and role of the patient in biomedicine comprise issues central to bioethical inquiry. Given its developmental history grounded firmly in a backlash against 20th-century cases of egregious human subjects abuse, contemporary medical bioethics has come to rely on a fundamental assumption: the unit of care is the autonomous self-directing patient. In this article we examine first the structure of the feminist social critique of autonomy. Then we show that a parallel argument can be made against relational autonomy as (...) well, demonstrating how this second concept of autonomy fails to take sufficiently into account an array of biological determinants, particularly those from microbial biology. Finally, in light of this biological critique, we question whether or to what extent any relevant and meaningful view of autonomy can be recovered in the contemporary landscape of bioethics. (shrink)

In this article, I critically reassess Iris Marion Young's late works, which centre on the distinction between liability and social connection responsibility. I concur with Young's diagnosis that structural injustices call for a new conception of responsibility, but I reject several core assumptions that underpin her distinction between two models and argue for a different way of conceptualising responsibility to address structural injustices. I show that Young's categorical separation of guilt and responsibility is not supported by the writings of Hannah (...) Arendt, which Young draws on, and that it is also untenable on independent systematic grounds. Furthermore, I argue that several of Young's other criteria fail to clearly demarcate two distinct phenomena. I therefore propose to transcend Young's distinction between two models in favour of a related, but conceptually different distinction between two forms of responsibility: interactional and structural. Embracing this terminology facilitates the conceptualisation of the general features of responsibility that are shared by both forms, including their retrospective and prospective time-direction and their applicability to individual, joint and group agency. The distinction between interactional and structural responsibility also yields a more compelling general account of the role of background structures, and of blame within ascriptions of political responsibility. (shrink)

I present an argument that propositional attitudes are not mental states. In a nutshell, the argument is that if propositional attitudes are mental states, then only minded beings could have them; but there are reasons to think that some non-minded beings could bear propositional attitudes. To illustrate this, I appeal to cases of genuine group intentionality. I argue that these are cases in which some group entities bear propositional attitudes, but they are not subjects of mental states. Although propositional attitudes (...) are not mental states, I propose that they are typically co-instantiated with mental states. In an attempt to explain this co-instantiation, I suggest that propositional attitudes of minded beings are typically realized by mental states. (shrink)

This paper provides a metaphysical framework which enables the possibility of the hypostatic union. More specifically, social ontology will be used to philosophically ground the distinction between nature or substance on the one hand, and person on the other hand, which is crucial to that debate. There are some historical precedents for a juridical approach in christological debates, but the main sections develop a systematic metaphysical account. Relying on a generic version of dispositional realism, and the distinction between the ability (...) space and the liberty space of a person, a person is the locus or nexus of contingent activations of alternative possibilities. This is distinct from the set or range of alternative possibilities open to a person. Persons can therefore function as artificial persons, paradigmatically exemplified in sovereign states. Extending that framework to the supernatural level enables the possibility of a divine person uniting a divine and a human nature. (shrink)

Conventions and leaders are believed to be the two pillars of justice and order in society. This paper evaluates this proposition and draws attention to two intriguing ways in which these pillars can malfunction. The argument is constructed by creating two new games, Greta’s Dilemma and the Incarceration Game. An awareness of these problems can help us use our ‘moral intention’ to reexamine our own collective behavior and to design prior conventions, which limit the power of the leader.

We analyze a frequent but undertheorized form of structural injustice, one that arises due to the difficulty of reaching numerically equitable representation of underrepresented subgroups within a larger group. This form of structural injustice is significant because it could occur even if it were possible to completely eliminate bias and overt discrimination from hiring and recruitment practices. The conceptual toolkit we develop can be used to analyze such situations and propose remedies. Specifically, based on a simple mathematical model, we offer (...) a new argument in favour of quotas, explore implications for policy-making, and consider the wider philosophical significance of the problem. We show that in order to reach more equitable representations, quota-based recruitment may often be practically unavoidable. Assuming that members of groups in statistical minority are more likely to quit due to their marginalization, their proportions can stabilize at a low level, preventing a shift towards more equal representation and conserving the minority status of the subgroup. We show that this argument has important implications for addressing, preventing, and remediating the structural injustice of unfair representation. (shrink)

Almost 40 years ago, a book appeared by J.S. Brubacher entitled On the Philosophy of Higher Education. Today, we have neither its successor nor a sense as to what such a book might contain. The argument here is that we currently lack a recognised subfield of study that might be termed ‘the philosophy of higher education’. The paper attempts to begin to remedy this situation by assembling the main planks of such a field, and identifying broadly the kinds of resources (...) that might be brought together. A particular approach is argued for that builds from a recognition of the university both as institution and as idea. This approach would understand both that the university possesses a social ontology and that the university is accompanied by a widening conceptual hinterland. An undue pessimism is noted, such that the contemporary university is sometimes seen as being subject to overwhelming global forces, which underplays the university’s potential as an agent. It is suggested that an adequate philosophy of higher education would seek to widen the conceptual landscape by identifying universal and imaginative concepts that can assist not merely in understanding the university or in defending the university but in changing it. (shrink)

Our understanding of emotional labor, while conceptually and empirically substantial, is normatively impoverished: very little has been said or written expressly about its ethical dimensions or ramifications. Emotional labor refers to efforts undertaken by employees to make their private feelings and/or public emotion displays consistent with job and organizational requirements. We formally define emotional labor, briefly summarize research in organizational behavior and social psychology on the causes and consequences of emotional labor, and present a normative analysis of its moral limits (...) focused on conditional rights and duties of employers and employees. Our focus is on three points of conflict involving rights and duties as they apply to the performance of emotional labor: when employees’ and organizations’ rights conflict, when employees’ rights conflict with their duties, and when organizations’ rights conflict with their duties. We discuss implications for future inquiry as well as managerial practice. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers and scientists have done much to expand our understanding of the structure and neural mechanisms of joint action. But the phenomenology of joint action has only recently become a live topic for research.One method of clarifying what is unique about the phenomenology of joint action is by considering the alternative perspective of agents subsumed in group action. By group action we mean instances of individual agents acting while embedded within a group agent, instead of with individual coordination. Paradigm (...) examples are educational bureaucracies, corporations, and nation states. There is a phenomenological difference between agents whose actions are subsumed within a group action as compared to agents who act jointly. Attending to this difference clarifies what is phenomenologically distinctive about joint action.Appealing to an Aristotelian account of agency and to the metaphysical concept of weak emergence, we argue that what makes paradigmatic group action distinctive is the relative inaccessibility, un-revisability, and evaluative simplicity of the group agent’s goal from the perspective of individual agents. This suggests that a distinctive feature of joint agency is the maintenance of a greater sense of individual agency. Put simply, joint agency is often experienced as an enhancement of the individuals’ agency precisely because our paradigmatic agential powers are extended intersubjectively as we act together. In contrast, group agency often involves a loss of the sense of agency, precisely because it is the emergent group agent that maintains the agential powers. (shrink)