In this article we critique the collectivist approach to collective moral responsibility. According to philosophers of a collectivist persuasion, a central notion of collective moral responsibility is moral responsibility assigned to a collective as a single entity. In our critique, we proceed by way of discussing the accounts and arguments of three prominent representatives of the collectivist approach with respect to collective responsibility: Margaret Gilbert, Russell Hardin, and Philip Pettit. Our aims are mainly critical; however, this should not be taken (...) to imply that we do not ourselves support an alternative account of collective responsibility. We advocate an individualist account of collective responsibility. On this view of collective responsibility as joint responsibility, collective responsibility is ascribed to individuals. Each member of the group is individually morally responsible for the outcome of the joint action, but each is individually responsible jointly with the others. (shrink)

This article’s primary concern is with characterizing and distinguishing institutional corruption and institutional corrosion. While the concept of institutional corruption entails some degree of culpability on the part of institutional role occupants, this does not seem to be the case with institutional corrosion. The article outlines and motivates a prior definition of institutional corruption developed elsewhere to develop an account of the contrasting notion of institutional corrosion. Since both institutional corruption and institutional corrosion are typically the product of some form (...) of collective action or omission on the part of multiple institutional role occupants, there is also a need to provide a serviceable notion of collective responsibility. (shrink)

In this article, I introduce and analyze the notion of joint abilities; a species of ability possessed by agents who perform joint actions of a certain kind. Joint abilities are abilitie...

Margaret Gilbert has long defended the view that, roughly speaking, agents share the intention to perform an action if and only if they jointly commit to performing that action. This view has proven both influential and controversial. While some authors have raised concerns over the joint commitment view of shared intention, including at times offering purported counterexamples to certain aspects of the view, straightforward counterexamples to the view as a whole have yet to appear in the literature. Here we provide (...) such counterexamples to show that joint commitment is neither necessary nor sufficient for shared intention. (shrink)

In this paper my concern is with the collective moral responsibility of criminal investigators for the outcomes of their investigations, bearing in mind that it is important to distinguish collective moral responsibility from, and relate it to, individual moral responsibility. In what sense, if any, are police detectives individually and collectively morally responsible for their success (or, for that matter, their failure) in gathering sufficient evidence to identify, arrest, and charge an offender who has committed a serious crime? Alternatively, in (...) what sense are they morally responsible in cases where they identify, arrest, and charge an innocent person? And in what sense, if any, are police detectives individually and collectively morally responsible for the ultimate outcome of the trial, the finding by the courts of someone they have investigated and charged with a serious crime to be guilty or innocent? (shrink)

SummaryIn the present article it is argued that Pieter de la Court's Political Maxims of the State of Holland presented a remarkably consistent grand strategy for Holland in relation to its Dutch allies and the European powers. I present an outline of this strategy, which was built around the accomplishment and defence of commercial goals; I sketch a historical context that takes into account the general historical shift from tribute-taking agrarian societies towards commercial wealth-generating polities, and also the violent contemporary (...) military and ideological background against which De la Court's strategy stands out; I argue that his strategy can be understood by his use of three basic game theoretic concepts ; and I stress the distinctive character of De la Court's work, by comparing the practical and strategic use of these concepts in the Maxims with the function of the same concepts in the philosophical contract theories of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza. (shrink)

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 (...) and rationality in adequate measure. The main discovery in the recent theory of group agency is that this result is not easily achieved; no regular voting procedure will ensure, for example, that a group of individually consistent agents will display consistency in group judgments. Key Words: groups • group agents • collective agents • joint action • joint intention. (shrink)

This paper gives an up-to-date account of we-intentions and responds to some critics of the author’s earlier work on the topic in question. While the main lines of the new account are basically the same as before, the present account considerably adds to the earlier work. For one thing, it shows how we-intentions and joint intentions can arise in terms of the so-called Bulletin Board View of joint intention acquisition, which relies heavily on some underlying mutually accepted conceptual and situational (...) presuppositions but does not require agreement making or joint intention to form a joint intention. The model yields categorical, unconditional intentions to participate in the content of the we-intention and joint intention (viz. shared we-intention upon analysis). The content of a we-intention can be, but need not be a joint action. Thus a participant alone cannot settle and control the content of the intention. Instead the participants jointly settle the content and control the satisfaction of the intention. These and some other features distinguish we-intentions from “action intentions”, viz. intentions that an agent can alone settle and satisfy. The paper discusses weintentions (and other “aim-intentions”) from this perspective and it also defends the author’s earlier account against a charge of vicious circularity that has been directed against it. (shrink)

There is a need to provide an appropriate normative conception of the modern university: a conception which identifies its unifying purposes and values and, thereby, gives direction to institutional role occupants, governments, public policymakers and other would-be institutional designers. Such a conception could admit differences between modern universities; differences, for example, between so-called universities of technology and other universities. Indeed, it is preferable to frame the issue at the level of higher education or university systems rather than at the level (...) of individual universities. According to the teleological normative theory of social institutions, social institutions are organizations or systems of organizations that provide collective goods by means of joint activity; universities are no exception. So what are the fundamental collective good that universities of technology, or the larger systems of which they are a part, ought to be providing and how are they travelling in this regard? This is the question addressed in this paper. (shrink)

People often do things together and form groups in order to get things done that they cannot do alone. In short they form a collectivity of some kind or a group, for short. But if we consider a group on the one hand and the persons that constitute the group on the other hand, how does it happen that these persons work together and finish a common task with a common goal? In the philosophy of action this problem is often (...) solved by saying that there is a kind of collective intention that the group members have in mind and that guides their actions. Does such a collective intention really exist? In this article I’ll show that the answer is “no”. In order to substantiate my view I’ll discuss the approaches of Bratman, Gilbert and Searle on collective intention. I’ll put forward four kinds of criticism that undermine the idea of collective intention. They apply mainly to Bratman and Gilbert. First, it is basically difficult to mark off smaller groups from bigger unities. Second, most groups change in membership composition over time. Third, as a rule, on the one hand groups are internally structured and on the other hand they belong to a larger structure. It makes that generally it cannot be a collective intention that moves the actions of the members of a group. Fourth, conversely, most individual actions cannot be performed without the existence of a wider context of agents who support these actions and make them possible. My critique on Searle mainly involves that in his approach his idea of collective intention is superfluous and that he is not radical enough in his idea that collective action is based on coordinated individual intentions and actions. However, it is a good starting point for showing how collective action actually functions, especially when combined with Giddens’s structuration theory. Every agent in a group executes his or her own individual intentions, relying on what the group offers to this agent and asks from him or her. In this way individual actions of the members of a group are coordinated and it makes that the group can function and that its goals can be performed. And in this way the group is produced and reproduced by fitting individual actions together. An individual agent who belongs to a group only needs to know what s/he wants and what s/he has to do in the group, even if s/he has no knowledge of the intentions and commitments of the other members. Then he or she can do things together with others in a group without supposing that there is something like a collective intention. (shrink)

The paper discussed and analyzes collective and joint intentions of various strength. Thus there are subjectively shared collective intentions and intersubjectively shared collective intentions as well as collective intentions which are objectively and intersubjectively shared. The distinction between collective and private intentions is considered from several points of view. Especially, it is emphasized that collective intentions in the full sense are in the “we-mode”, whereas private intentions are in the “I-mode”. The paper also surveys recent discussion in the literature concerning (...) the nature of collective and joint intention and defends the author's accounts against criticisms. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a theory of the speech act of assertion according to which assertion is a species of joint action. In doing so I rely on a theory of joint action developed in more detail elsewhere. Here we need to distinguish between the genus, joint action, and an important species of joint action, namely, what I call joint epistemic action. In the case of the latter, but not necessarily the former, participating agents have epistemic goals, e.g., the (...) acquisition of knowledge. It is joint epistemic action that assertion is a species of. (shrink)

The notion of collective action is one of the most discussed topics in contemporary social ontology, which offers different explanations of how two or more individuals can act together in the pursuit of a common goal. Many believe that collective intentionality is at the basis of actions of this kind, whereas others deny that collective actions have a distinctive nature or involve different faculties than those required by individual actions. The article aims to outline the most influential approaches to collective (...) agency and discuss the disputed case of Margaret Gilbert’s theory, which is subject to conflicting interpretations. I start from asking the question: what is it that makes a group of people act together intentionally? First, I will outline three approaches offered in social ontology, i.e., content, mode, and subject account. Then, I will focus on Gilbert’s view, allegedly a proponent of the (plural) subject account. The main purpose of these pages is to show that Gilbert’s approach should rather be classified as a mode account and that the interpretation attributing to her a subject account is, if not to be discarded, at least to be regarded as uncertain. While some scholars have questioned the theory of plural subjects as presented in Gilbert’s early essays, this article makes the point by considering Gilbert’s latest publications. (shrink)

According to many, joint intentional action must be understood in terms of joint intentions. Most accounts of joint intention appeal to a set of sophisticated individual intentional states. The author argues that standard accounts of joint intention exclude the possibility of joint action in young children because they presuppose that the participants have a robust theory of mind, something young children lack. But young children do engage in joint action. The author offers a revision of Michael Bratman’s analysis of joint (...) intention that reflects the socio-cognitive abilities young children do have. This revision makes sense of joint action among young children and equally well explains simple joint actions involving adults. Key Words: collective intentionality • joint action • child’s theory of mind • joint attention. (shrink)

Seumas Miller’s book Shooting to Kill: The Ethics of Police and Military Use of Lethal Force concerns the moral rules applicable to the use of lethal force over three domains: individuals (personal...

Neste artigo iremos sistematizar os conceitos-chave da chamada epistemologia coletiva, apontando as diferentes teorias que explicam nossa prática de atribuição de estados cognitivos a grupos. Na introdução levantaremos o problema central que motiva a área, a saber: a atribuição de estados cognitivos a grupos tem como referente o grupo enquanto grupo ou os indivíduos que o compõe? Na primeira seção apresentaremos os melhores argumentos em favor do individualismo, aqueles que defendem que as atribuições se reduzem aos indivíduos. Na segunda, terceira (...) e quarta seções apresentaremos modelos coletivistas, que defendem uma certa autonomia do grupo frente aos indivíduos, o conjunto de membros que o compõe. Na quinta e sexta seções apresentaremos como modelos coletivistas explicam a atribuição de justificação e conhecimento a grupos. Nós concluímos notando que os ataques coletivistas ao individualismo são bastante efetivos, fazendo com que essa abordagem seja difícil de sustentar, e apontando outros elementos que são necessários para a construção de um modelo coletivista completo. (shrink)

This article considers individual rights and fundamental tenets of the criminal justice system in the context of DNA evidence, in particular recent advancements in genomics that have significantly advanced law enforcement investigative capabilities in this area. It discusses a technique known as Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) which utilizes genomic data held by commercial direct-to-consumer ancestry and health companies to investigate the identity of suspects linked to serious crimes. Using this technique, even if only a small proportion of the population (e.g. (...) 5%) has submitted genomic data to these companies, almost anyone in the population can be identified. We discuss this phenomenon in the context of the existing literature and arguments in relation to universal forensic DNA databases, as well as relevant recent developments in both liberal democracies and authoritarian states. We introduce the concept of a quasi-universal forensic DNA database and consider associated implications for the criminal justice system and society from the perspectives of privacy, the right not to self-incriminate, joint rights, and collective responsibility. (shrink)