Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. How Autonomous Are Collective Agents? Corporate Rights and Normative Individualism.Frank Hindriks - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S9):1565-1585.
    Corporate responsibility requires a conception of collective agency on which collective agents are able to form moral judgments and act on them. In spite of claims to the contrary, existing accounts of collective agency fall short of this kind of corporate autonomy, as they fail to explain how collective agents might be responsive to moral reasons. I discuss how a recently proposed conception of shared valuing can be used for developing a solution to this problem. Although the resulting conception of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Three Kinds of Collective Attitudes.Christian List - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (S9):1601-1622.
    This paper offers a comparison of three different kinds of collective attitudes: aggregate, common, and corporate attitudes. They differ not only in their relationship to individual attitudes—e.g., whether they are “reducible” to individual attitudes—but also in the roles they play in relation to the collectives to which they are ascribed. The failure to distinguish them can lead to confusion, in informal talk as well as in the social sciences. So, the paper’s message is an appeal for disambiguation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • The Aggregation of Propositional Attitudes: Towards a General Theory.Franz Dietrich & List & Christian - 2007 - In Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 3. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 215-234.
    How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to …lling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Methods for distance-based judgment aggregation.M. K. Miller & D. Osherson - unknown
    Judgment aggregation theory, which concerns the translation of individual judgments on logical propositions into consistent group judgments, has shown that group consistency generally cannot be guaranteed if each proposition is treated independently from the others. Developing the right method of abandoning independence is thus a high-priority goal. However, little work has been done in this area outside of a few simple approaches. To fill the gap, we compare four methods based on distance metrics between judgment sets. The methods generalize the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • The aggregation of propositional attitudes: Towards a general theory.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2010 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 3.
    How can the propositional attitudes of several individuals be aggregated into overall collective propositional attitudes? Although there are large bodies of work on the aggregation of various special kinds of propositional attitudes, such as preferences, judgments, probabilities and utilities, the aggregation of propositional attitudes is seldom studied in full generality. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap in the literature. We sketch the ingredients of a general theory of propositional attitude aggregation and prove two new theorems. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Judgment aggregation without full rationality.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2008 - Social Choice and Welfare 31:15-39.
    Several recent results on the aggregation of judgments over logically connected propositions show that, under certain conditions, dictatorships are the only propositionwise aggregation functions generating fully rational (i.e., complete and consistent) collective judgments. A frequently mentioned route to avoid dictatorships is to allow incomplete collective judgments. We show that this route does not lead very far: we obtain oligarchies rather than dictatorships if instead of full rationality we merely require that collective judgments be deductively closed, arguably a minimal condition of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  • Optimal judgment aggregation.Jesus P. Zamora Bonilla - unknown
    A necessary condition for a group being taken as a rational agent is that its choices and judgements are ‘logically contestable’, but this can lead to problems of aggregation, as Arrow impossibility theorem or the discursive dilemma. This paper proposes a contractarian or constitutional approach: the relevant thing is what aggregation mechanisms would be preferred by the members of the group. Two distinctions need to be made: first, judgement aggregation is not aggregation of decisions, and judgement aggregation needs be distinguished (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Do group agents have free will?Christian List - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    It is common to ascribe agency to some organized collectives, such as corporations, courts, and states, and to treat them as loci of responsibility, over and above their individual members. But since responsibility is often assumed to require free will, should we also think that group agents have free will? Surprisingly, the literature contains very few in-depth discussions of this question. The most extensive defence of corporate free will that I am aware of (Hess [2014], “The Free Will of Corporations (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Cooperative duties of efficiency and efficacy.Niels de Haan - 2022 - Journal of Global Ethics 18 (3):330-348.
    I argue that agents can have duties to cooperate with one another if this increases their combined efficiency and/or efficacy in addressing ongoing collective moral problems. I call these duties cooperative duties of efficiency and efficacy. I focus particularly on collective agents and how agents ought to reason and act in the face of global moral problems. After setting out my account, I argue that a subset of cooperative duties of efficiency and efficacy of collective agents are duties of justice (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Group Responsibility.Christian List - 2022 - In Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Are groups ever capable of bearing responsibility, over and above their individual members? This chapter discusses and defends the view that certain organized collectives – namely, those that qualify as group moral agents – can be held responsible for their actions, and that group responsibility is not reducible to individual responsibility. The view has important implications. It supports the recognition of corporate civil and even criminal liability in our legal systems, and it suggests that, by recognizing group agents as loci (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Group Agency and Artificial Intelligence.Christian List - 2021 - Philosophy and Technology (4):1-30.
    The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • Corporate Social Responsibility and the Supposed Moral Agency of Corporations.Matthew Lampert - 2016 - Ephemera 16 (1):79-105.
    Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been traditionally framed within business ethics as a discourse attempting to identify certain moral responsibilities of corporations (as well as get these corporations to fulfill their responsibilities). This theory has often been normatively grounded in the idea that a corporation is (or ought to be treated as) a moral agent. I argue that it is a mistake to think of (or treat) corporations as moral agents, and that CSR’s impotency is a direct result of this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology.J. Adam Carter - 2022 - In Mark Alfano, Jeroen De Ridder & Colin Klein (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology. Routledge.
    A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Epistemic autonomy and group knowledge.Chris Dragos - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6259-6279.
    I connect two increasingly popular ideas in social epistemology—group knowledge and epistemic extension—both departures from mainstream epistemological tradition. In doing so, I generate a framework for conceptualizing and organizing contemporary epistemology along several core axes. This, in turn, allows me to delineate a largely unexplored frontier in group epistemology. The bulk of extant work in group epistemology can be dubbed intra-group epistemology: the study of epistemically salient happenings within groups. I delineate and attempt to motivate what I dub inter-group epistemology: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Why Business Firms Have Moral Obligations to Mitigate Climate Change.Anne Schwenkenbecher - 2018 - In Martin Brueckner, Rochelle Spencer & Megan Paull (eds.), Disciplining the Undisciplined? Perspectives from Business, Society and Politics on Responsible Citizenship, Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability. Springer. pp. 55-70.
    Without doubt, the global challenges we are currently facing—above all world poverty and climate change—require collective solutions: states, national and international organizations, firms and business corporations as well as individuals must work together in order to remedy these problems. In this chapter, I discuss climate change mitigation as a collective action problem from the perspective of moral philosophy. In particular, I address and refute three arguments suggesting that business firms and corporations have no moral duty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)What is it Like to be a Group Agent?Christian List - 2015 - Noûs:295-319.
    The existence of group agents is relatively widely accepted. Examples are corporations, courts, NGOs, and even entire states. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? I give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate and sketch a tentative argument for the view that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness. In developing my argument, I draw on integrated information theory, a much-discussed theory of consciousness. I conclude by pointing out an implication (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   55 citations  
  • Firms, agency, and evolution.Armin W. Schulz - 2016 - Journal of Economic Methodology 23 (1):57-76.
    A recent trend in economics has been to appeal to evolutionary theory when addressing various open questions in the subject. I here further investigate one particular such appeal to evolutionary biology: the argument that, since markets select firms as coherent units, firms should be seen to be genuine economic agents. To assess this argument, I present a model of firm/office selection in a competitive market, and show that there are cases where markets can select for firms/offices as collective units – (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Freedom, recognition and non-domination: a republican theory of (global) justice.Fabian Schuppert (ed.) - 2013 - New York: Springer.
    This book offers an original account of a distinctly republican theory of social and global justice. The book starts by exploring the nature and value of Hegelian recognition theory. It shows the importance of that theory for grounding a normative account of free and autonomous agency. It is this normative account of free agency which provides the groundwork for a republican conception of social and global justice, based on the core-ideas of freedom as non-domination and autonomy as non-alienation. As the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Indispensability, the Discursive Dilemma, and Groups with Minds of Their Own.Abraham Sesshu Roth - 2014 - In Gerhard Preyer, Frank Hindriks & Sara Rachel Chant (eds.), From Individual to Collective Intentionality: New Essays. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 137-162.
    There is a way of talking that would appear to involve ascriptions of purpose, goal directed activity, and intentional states to groups. Cases are familiar enough: classmates intend to vacation in Switzerland, the department is searching for a metaphysician, the Democrats want to minimize losses in the upcoming elections, and the US intends to improve relations with such and such country. But is this talk to be understood just in terms of the attitudes and actions of the individuals involved? Is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)Group Peer Disagreement.J. Adam Carter - 2014 - Ratio 27 (3):11-28.
    A popular view in mainstream social epistemology maintains that, in the face of a revealed peer disagreement over p, neither party should remain just as confident vis-a-vis p as she initially was. This ‘conciliatory’ insight has been defended with regard to individual epistemic peers. However, to the extent that (non-summativist) groups are candidates for group knowledge and beliefs, we should expect groups (no less than individuals) to be in the market for disagreements. The aim here will be to carve out (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Joint Duties and Global Moral Obligations.Anne Schwenkenbecher - 2013 - Ratio 26 (3):310-328.
    In recent decades, concepts of group agency and the morality of groups have increasingly been discussed by philosophers. Notions of collective or joint duties have been invoked especially in the debates on global justice, world poverty and climate change. This paper enquires into the possibility and potential nature of moral duties individuals in unstructured groups may hold together. It distinguishes between group agents and groups of people which – while not constituting a collective agent – are nonetheless capable of performing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • (1 other version)Group Knowledge and Group Rationality: A Judgment Aggregation Perspective.Christian List - 2005 - Episteme 2 (1):25-38.
    In this paper, I introduce the emerging theory of judgment aggregation as a framework for studying institutional design in social epistemology. When a group or collective organization is given an epistemic task, its performance may depend on its ‘aggregation procedure’, i.e. its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ individual beliefs or judgments into corresponding collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole. I argue that a group’s aggregation procedure plays an important role in determining whether the group (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   60 citations  
  • Joint actions and group agents.Philip Pettit & David Schweikard - 2006 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 36 (1):18-39.
    University of Cologne, Germany Joint action and group agency have emerged as focuses of attention in recent social theory and philosophy but they have rarely been connected with one another. The argument of this article is that whereas joint action involves people acting together to achieve any sort of result, group agency requires them to act together for the achievement of one result in particular: the construction of a centre of attitude and agency that satisfies the usual constraints of consistency (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   113 citations  
  • Distributed cognition: A perspective from social choice theory.Christian List - 2003 - In M. Albert, D. Schmidtchen & S Voigt (eds.), Scientific Competition: Theory and Policy, Conferences on New Political Economy. Mohr Siebeck.
    Distributed cognition refers to processes which are (i) cognitive and (ii) distributed across multiple agents or devices rather than performed by a single agent. Distributed cognition has attracted interest in several fields ranging from sociology and law to computer science and the philosophy of science. In this paper, I discuss distributed cognition from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. Drawing on models of judgment aggregation, I address two questions. First, how can we model a group of individuals as a distributed cognitive system? Second, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Artificial agents among us: Should we recognize them as agents proper?Migle Laukyte - 2017 - Ethics and Information Technology 19 (1):1-17.
    In this paper, I discuss whether in a society where the use of artificial agents is pervasive, these agents should be recognized as having rights like those we accord to group agents. This kind of recognition I understand to be at once social and legal, and I argue that in order for an artificial agent to be so recognized, it will need to meet the same basic conditions in light of which group agents are granted such recognition. I then explore (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Group virtue epistemology.Jesper Kallestrup - 2016 - Synthese 197 (12):5233-5251.
    According to Sosa, knowledge is apt belief, where a belief is apt when accurate because adroit. Sosa :465–475, 2010; Judgment and agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) adds to his triple-A analysis of knowledge, a triple-S analysis of competence, where a complete competence combines its seat, shape and situation. Much of Sosa’s influential work assumes that epistemic agents are individuals who acquire knowledge when they hit the truth through exercising their own individual skills in appropriate shapes and situations. This paper (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • An Anatomy of Moral Responsibility.M. Braham & M. van Hees - 2012 - Mind 121 (483):601-634.
    This paper examines the structure of moral responsibility for outcomes. A central feature of the analysis is a condition that we term the ‘avoidance potential’, which gives precision to the idea that moral responsibility implies a reasonable demand that an agent should have acted otherwise. We show how our theory can allocate moral responsibility to individuals in complex collective action problems, an issue that sometimes goes by the name of ‘the problem of many hands’. We also show how it allocates (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • Aggregating Causal Judgments.Richard Bradley, Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (4):491-515.
    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. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • (1 other version)Rationality, Reasoning and Group Agency.Philip Pettit - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (4):495-519.
    The rationality of individual agents is secured for the most part by their make-up or design. Some agents, however – in particular, human beings – rely on the intentional exercise of thinking or reasoning in order to promote their rationality further; this is the activity that is classically exemplified in Rodin’s sculpture of Le Penseur. Do group agents have to rely on reasoning in order to maintain a rational profile? Recent results in the theory of judgment aggregation show that under (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  • Emergence, group judgment and the discursive dilemma.Joel Walmsley - 2015 - Mind and Society 14 (2):185-201.
    In this paper, I argue that the account of emergence advanced by Broad is both defensible and applicable to some examples of group-level phenomena. Specifically, Broad’s account enables the formulation of a non-reductive physicalism or of a non-reductive individualism, and correctly describes the case of group-judgment under the conditions of the discursive dilemma. Furthermore, this analysis shows that emergent phenomena need not be characterised using the resources of complexity theory.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Social Science and the Problem of Interpretation: A Pragmatic Dual(ist) Approach.Adam B. Lerner - 2020 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 32 (1-3):124-144.
    ABSTRACT In Power Without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman contends that ideational complexity can stymie social-scientific understanding and prevent the reliable predictive knowledge required of a well-functioning technocracy. However, even this somewhat pessimistic outlook may understate the problem. Ideational complexity has both cognitive and phenomenal dimensions, each of which poses unique dilemmas. Further, due to its methodological individualism, Friedman’s vision may neglect emergent layers of knowledge produced through social interaction, creating yet another source of unknowns. Given these two factors, social science should (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Citizens and States in Spinoza’s Political Treatise.Michael LeBuffe - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):809-832.
    In his Political Treatise, Spinoza repeatedly compares states to human beings. In this interpretation of the comparisons, I present a progressively more restrictive account of Spinoza’s views about the nature of human beings in the Ethics and show at each step how those views inform the account of states in the Political Treatise. Because, like human beings, states are individuals, they strive to persevere in existence. Because, like human beings, states are composed of parts that are individuals, states' parts also (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A Naturalistic Argument for the Irreducibility of Collective Intentionality.Mattia Gallotti - 2012 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (1):3-30.
    According to many philosophers and scientists, human sociality is explained by our unique capacity to “share” attitudes with others. The conditions under which mental states are shared have been widely debated in the past two decades, focusing especially on the issue of their reducibility to individual intentionality and the place of collective intentions in the natural realm. It is not clear, however, to what extent these two issues are related and what methodologies of investigation are appropriate in each case. In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Distributive and relational equality.Christian Schemmel - 2012 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 11 (2):123-148.
    Is equality a distributive value or does it rather point to the quality of social relationships? This article criticizes the distributive character of luck egalitarian theories of justice and fleshes out the central characteristics of an alternative, relational approach to equality. It examines a central objection to distributive theories: that such theories cannot account for the significance of how institutions treat people (as opposed to the outcomes they bring about). I discuss two variants of this objection: first, that distributive theories (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   64 citations  
  • On Pettit's thought ascription to groups.Kanit Sirichan - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):1-18.
    A thought, taken as a propositional attitude or the content of psychological predicates such as believe, wish, desire, hope, is ascribed to an entity with mental states. A thought is not only allegedly ascribed to particular non-mental things like computer, book, it is also ascribed to non-material things, linguistically in plural terms, e.g. plural pronouns (e.g. we, they), collective names or singular proper names (e.g. the United States), proper names in plural form or general terms (e.g. the Microsoft, feminists). Plural (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Being Reasonable.David Botting - 2015 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 42 (1):17-36.
    Where do the rules of critical discussion get their normative force? What kinds of norms are involved? Unreasonable behaviour in the critical discussion - e.g., continuing to assert the contradictory of a proven standpoint, performing some action pragmatically inconsistent with a proven standpoint, or the same with regard to the starting-points agreed to in the opening stage - is liable to moral sanction. Thus, a moral/ethical norm is involved and the rules must have a moral force. Pragma-dialectics as it stands (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Agency as difference-making: causal foundations of moral responsibility.Johannes Himmelreich - 2015 - Dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science
    We are responsible for some things but not for others. In this thesis, I investigate what it takes for an entity to be responsible for something. This question has two components: agents and actions. I argue for a permissive view about agents. Entities such as groups or artificially intelligent systems may be agents in the sense required for responsibility. With respect to actions, I argue for a causal view. The relation in virtue of which agents are responsible for actions is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Active externalism, virtue reliabilism and scientific knowledge.Spyridon Orestis Palermos - 2015 - Synthese 192 (9):2955-2986.
    Combining active externalism in the form of the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses with virtue reliabilism can provide the long sought after link between mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science. Specifically, by reading virtue reliabilism along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition, we can account for scientific knowledge produced on the basis of both hardware and software scientific artifacts. Additionally, by bringing the distributed cognition hypothesis within the picture, we can introduce the notion of epistemic group agents, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Judgment Aggregation and Subjective Decision-Making.Michael K. Miller - 2008 - Economics and Philosophy 24 (2):205-231.
    I present an original model in judgment aggregation theory that demonstrates the general impossibility of consistently describing decision-making purely at the group level. Only a type of unanimity rule can guarantee a group decision is consistent with supporting reasons, and even this possibility is limited to a small class of reasoning methods. The key innovation is that this result holds when individuals can reason in different ways, an allowance not previously considered in the literature. This generalizes judgment aggregation to subjective (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Optimal Judgment Aggregation.Jesús Zamora Bonilla - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (5):813-824.
    The constitution of a collective judgment is analyzed from a contractarian point of view. The optimal collective judgment is defined as the one that maximizes the sum of the utility each member gets from the collective adoption of that judgment. It is argued that judgment aggregation is a different process from the aggregation of information and public deliberation. This entails that the adoption of a collective judgment should not make any rational member of the group change her individual opinion, and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Languaging, human projects, selves, and societies of selves.Paul J. Thibault - forthcoming - Critical Discourse Studies.
    Focusing on the self as a normative construct, I consider how and why the self, not the group, is ontologically fundamental. Selves live in communities or societies of selves. The intrinsic normativity of the self and the actions the self performs constitute the grounds on which people fashion coherent narratives about themselves and seek to display themselves to others in ways that conform to their narratives. People bond with, care for, and invest in each other as distinctive selves that they (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • In the shadow of justice: postwar liberalism and the remaking of political philosophy: by Katrina Forrester, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019, 432 pp., £30.00 (hbk), ISBN: 9780691163086. [REVIEW]Henrik D. Kugelberg - 2020 - Jurisprudence 11 (2):325-334.
    John Rawls is turning into a historical figure, with scholarship investigating the origins and foundations of his philosophy. 1 Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice is the most recent contr...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Higher-order defeat in collective moral epistemology.J. Adam Carter & Dario Mortini - 2019 - In Michael Klenk (ed.), Higher Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge.
    This chapter discusses methodology in epistemology. It argues that settling the facts, even the epistemic facts, fails to settle the questions of intellectual policy at the centre of our epistemic lives. One upshot is that the standard methodology of analysing concepts like knowledge, justification, rationality, and so on is misconceived. More generally, any epistemic method that seeks to issue in intellectual policy by settling the facts, whether by way of abductive theorizing or empirical investigation, no matter how reliable, is inapt. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Beyond the Hype: The Value of Evolutionary Theorizing in Economics.Armin W. Schulz - 2013 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (1):46-72.
    In this paper, I consider the recent resurgence of “evolutionary economics”—the idea that evolutionary theory can be very useful to push forward key debates in economics—and assess the extent to which it rests on a plausible foundation. To do this, I first distinguish two ways in which evolutionary theory can, in principle, be brought to bear on an economic problem—namely, evidentially and heuristically—and then apply this distinction to the three major hypotheses that evolutionary economists have come to defend: the implausibility (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Organizations as Actors: Microfoundations of Organizational Intentionality.Daniel Little - 2020 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (3):260-279.
    The article addresses the topic of “group agency” with respect to large organizations. It undertakes to analyze some of the concrete micro- and meso-level processes through which large organizations arrive at collective “knowledge” and “action.” The article makes use of the theory of strategic action fields to analyze processes of knowledge and the implementation of organizational intentions. The article describes some of the dysfunctions and disunities that should be expected from these individual-level processes, including principal–agent problems, conflicts of interests and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Collective agency and the concept of ‘public’ in public involvement: A practice-oriented analysis.Tobias Hainz, Sabine Bossert & Daniel Strech - 2016 - BMC Medical Ethics 17 (1):1-14.
    BackgroundPublic involvement activities are promoted as measures for ensuring good governance in challenging fields, such as biomedical research and innovation. Proponents of public involvement activities include individual researchers as well as non-governmental and governmental organizations. However, the concept of ‘public’ in public involvement deserves more attention by researchers because it is not purely theoretical: it has important practical functions in the guidance, evaluation and translation of public involvement activities.DiscussionThis article focuses on collective agency as one property a public as a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • What do aggregation results really reveal about group agency?Brian Flanagan - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (1):261-276.
    Discoveries about attitude aggregation have prompted the re-emergence of non-reductionism, the theory that group agency is irreducible to individual agency. This paper rejects the revival of non-reductionism and, in so doing, challenges the preference for a unified account, according to which, agency, in all its manifestations, is rational. First, I offer a clarifying reconstruction of the new argument against reductionism. Second, I show that a hitherto silent premise, namely, that an identified group intention need not be determined by member attitudes (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The weak collective agential autonomy thesis.David Botting - 2011 - Disputatio 4 (31):215 - 234.
    Can a collective be an agent in its own right? Can it be the bearer of moral and other properties that we have traditionally reserved for individual agents? The answer, as one might expect, is ‘In some ways yes, in other ways no.’ The way in which the answer is ‘Yes’ has been described recently by Copp; I intend to discuss his position and defend it against objections. This describes a fairly weak form of autonomy that I will claim does (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The Collectivity of Blaming.David Botting - 2016 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):1-39.
    In this paper I want to argue that acts of blame are performed by collectives, and not by any collective but only by collectives that satisfy certain conditions { broadly those that, by collectivizing reason, can be held to be autonomous subjects to which it makes sense to attribute attitudes, including participant reactive attitudes such as resentment. The actors involved must also be related to the collective in particular ways in order to hold and be held responsible, but they need (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Being and Becoming in the Theory of Group Agency.Leo Townsend - 2013 - Abstracta 7 (1).
    Article Title: ‘Being and Becoming in the Theory of Group Agency’This paper explores a bootstrapping puzzle which appears to afflict Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency. Pettit claims that the corporate persons recognised by his theory come about when a set of individuals ‘gets its act together’ by undertaking to reason at the collective level. But this is puzzling, because it is hard to see how the step such a collective must take to become a group agent – the collectivisation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation