Christian List and Philip Pettit develop an account of group agency which is based on a functional understanding of agency. They claim that understanding organizations such as commercial corporations, governments, political parties, churches, universities as group agents helps us to a better understanding of the normative status and working of those organizations. List and Pettit, however, fail to provide a unified account of group agency since they do not show how the functional side of agency and the normative side of (...) agency are connected. My claim is that a constitutive account of agency helps us to a proper understanding of group agency since it ties the functional part of acting to the group agent’s self-understanding and its commitment to specific norms, principles and values. A constitutive model of agency meets much better what List and Pettit seek to accomplish, namely conceiving of group agents as artificial persons, constituted by normative principles and entertaining normative relations to others to whom they are accountable. (shrink)

Self-interest is widely accepted as a powerful motivator by both academics and laypeople alike. However, research surrounding the self-interest motive paints a complicated picture of this most important psychological construct. Additionally, research on the social desirability of self-interest has revealed that despite its widespread acceptance, people do not readily accept that self-interest drives their own behaviors. This paper reviews the literature on self-interest and reveals several curious features surrounding its actual effect on helping behaviors, political attitudes and voting, and people's (...) apparent ambivalence toward self-interest as a motive. It is possible that norms against the expression of self-interestedness evolved, creating ambivalence towards this widely accepted construct, subsequently affecting its expression on many human behaviors. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

This paper presents Sen's theory of agency, focusing on the role of commitment in this theory as both problematic and potentially illuminating. His account of some commitments as goal-displacing gives rise to a dilemma given the standard philosophical theory of agency.Eithercommitment-motivated actions are externally motivated, in which case they are not expressions of agency,orsuch actions are internally motivated, in which case the commitment is not goal-displacing. I resolve this dilemma and accommodate his view of commitment as motivation by developing a (...) broader descriptive theory of agency, which recognizes both agent goal-directed and goal-displacing commitments. I propose a type of goal-displacing commitment, which I call ‘tacit commitment’, that can be seen to fit between the horns. Tacit commitments regulate behaviour without being made conscious and explicit. This resolution suggests a means of bridging the normative/descriptive gap in social-scientific explanation. (shrink)

Amartya Sen argues that a conception of impartiality built upon “trans-positional objectivity” provides a potential remedy to conflicts of distributive justice by securing the most “reasonable reasons” in a debate. This article undertakes a critical analysis of Sen’s theory by contrasting it with Paul Ricoeur’s claim that impartiality is a normative concept and therefore that the demand faced within the arena of competing distributive claims is not one of providing the most reasonable reasons but of exposing and understanding the role (...) of convictions that underwrite normative frameworks, or ethical orders. -/- Amartya Sen soutient qu’une idée de l’impartialité qui se fonde sur une objectivité «trans-positionelle» offre un remède possible aux conflits de la justice distributive en s’assurant d’obtenir les «raisons» les plus «raisonnables» dans un débat. Cet article a pour intention principale de formuler une critique de l’hypothèse de Sen en la contrastant avec l’interprétation de l’impartialité proposée par Paul Ricœur. Selon Ricœur, l’impartialité est un concept normatif. Par conséquent, la tâche à assumer est de révéler et de comprendre le rôle des convictions qui établissent les bases des cadres normatifs et des systèmes éthiques, et non de procurer les raisons les plus raisonnables. (shrink)

‘We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth’, so Christians confess when they recite the Nicene Creed. Now if the argument of Mark S. McLeod-Harrison’s Make/Believing the World: Toward a Christian Ontological Pluralism is correct, God is not alone in that task. We human beings are makers of heaven and earth, too, in the sense that what exists is as it is because our minds have made it so, which is a kind of noetic (...) irrealism. Now noetic irrealism about heaven and earth quickly leads to ontological pluralism, that is, that there isn’t just one way heaven and earth, that is, the world, is; rather, there are many ways the world is, not all of which are compatible with each other. So, there are many heavens and earths, many worlds, created, in part, by human noetic feats. But worlds can’t be created just any way; there are limits to the ways a world might be, for instance, they must be internally consistent. But what provides these limits? These limits are given by a unity of the worlds which yield the boundaries within which our noetic feats may create a world. And what could provide this unity? …. (shrink)

Economic Theory normally assumes the so-called homo economicus, a consequential model of rationality. We highlight the main features of this model in opposition to deontology: axiological homogeneity, maximization and agent neutrality. Amartya Sen’s criticism of standard consequentialism copes to those features, and includes commitment and duty in the economic rationality. We analyze his concept of preference to ascertain how far economic rationality can thus go in the direction of deontology. We conclude that, though diminished, the difference between them still remains.