Results for 'group agents'

965 found
Order:
  1. Group Agents are Not Expressive, Pragmatic or Theoretical Fictions.Philip Pettit - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (9):1641-1662.
    Group agents have been represented as expressive fictions by those who treat ascriptions of agency to groups as metaphorical; as pragmatic fictions by those who think that the agency ascribed to groups belongs in the first place to a distinct individual or set of individuals; and as theoretical fictions by those who think that postulating group agents serves no indispensable role in our theory of the social world. This paper identifies, criticizes and rejects each of these (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  2. Group Agents, Moral Competence, and Duty-bearers: The Update Argument.Niels de Haan - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (5-6):1691-1715.
    According to some collectivists, purposive groups that lack decision-making procedures such as riot mobs, friends walking together, or the pro-life lobby can be morally responsible and have moral duties. I focus on plural subject- and we-mode-collectivism. I argue that purposive groups do not qualify as duty-bearers even if they qualify as agents on either view. To qualify as a duty-bearer, an agent must be morally competent. I develop the Update Argument. An agent is morally competent only if the agent (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  3. Group agents and moral status: what can we owe to organizations?Adam Https://Orcidorg Lovett & Stefan Https://Orcidorg Riedener - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (3):221–238.
    Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  4. The Normativity of Group Agents [Preprint].Jimmy Lewis-Martin - manuscript
    Group agents like businesses, political parties, universities, and charity organisations dominate our social and political landscapes. Their activities dictate our legal structures, the availability of education and healthcare, and our collective leap into climate crisis. Hence, it is crucial that we understand both the norms of these group agents and how these norms arise. will argue for applying the organisational account of normativity to group agents as the best means to achieve this understanding. Roughly, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Group Agents and the Phenomenology of Joint Action.Jordan Baker & Michael Ebling - 2024 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 23 (3):525-549.
    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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  6. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Group Agents: Persons, Mobs, or Zombies?Cathal O’Madagain - 2012 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2):271-287.
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 20, Issue 2, Page 271-287, May 2012.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  8. (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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   55 citations  
  9. The Duty to Promote Digital Minimalism in Group Agents.Timothy Aylsworth & Clinton Castro - 2024 - In Timothy Aylsworth & Clinton Castro (eds.), Kantian Ethics and the Attention Economy. Palgrave Macmillan.
    In this chapter, we turn our attention to the effects of the attention economy on our ability to act autonomously as a group. We begin by clarifying which sorts of groups we are concerned with, which are structured groups (groups sufficiently organized that it makes sense to attribute agency to the group itself). Drawing on recent work by Purves and Davis (2022), we describe the essential roles of trust (i.e., depending on groups to fulfill their commitments) and trustworthiness (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. What it Might Be like to Be a Group Agent.Max F. Kramer - 2021 - Neuroethics 14 (3):437-447.
    Many theorists have defended the claim that collective entities can attain genuine agential status. If collectives can be agents, this opens up a further question: can they be conscious? That is, is there something that it is like to be them? Eric Schwitzgebel argues that yes, collective entities, may well be significantly conscious. Others, including Kammerer, Tononi and Koch, and List reject the claim. List does so on the basis of Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. I argue here (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  11. Reasons and Rationality: The Case of Group Agents.Lara Buchak & Philip Pettit - 2015 - In Iwao Hirose & Andrew Evan Reisner (eds.), Weighing and Reasoning: Themes From the Philosophy of John Broome. New York, NY: Oxford University Press UK.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  12. Groups as fictional agents.Lars J. K. Moen - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Can groups really be agents or is group agency just a fiction? Christian List and Philip Pettit argue influentially for group-agent realism by showing how certain groups form and act on attitudes in ways they take to be unexplainable at the level of the individual agents constituting them. Group agency is therefore considered not a fiction or a metaphor but a reality we must account for in explanations of certain social phenomena. In this paper, I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  13. Collective Understanding — A conceptual defense for when groups should be regarded as epistemic agents with understanding.Sven Delarivière - forthcoming - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (2).
    Could groups ever be an understanding subject (an epistemic agent ascribed with understanding) or should we keep our focus exclusively on the individuals that make up the group? The way this paper will shape an answer to this question is by starting from a case we are most willing to accept as group understanding, then mark out the crucial differences with an unconvincing case, and, ultimately, explain why these differences matter. In order to concoct the cases, however, we (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  14. Group Inquiry.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1099-1123.
    Group agents can act, and they can have knowledge. How should we understand the species of collective action which aims at knowledge? In this paper, I present an account of group inquiry. This account faces two challenges: to make sense of how large-scale distributed activities might be a kind of group action, and to make sense of the kind of division of labour involved in collective inquiry. In the first part of the paper, I argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  15. Existence, really? Tacit disagreements about “existence” in disputes about group minds and corporate agents.Johannes Himmelreich - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4939-4953.
    A central dispute in social ontology concerns the existence of group minds and actions. I argue that some authors in this dispute rely on rival views of existence without sufficiently acknowledging this divergence. I proceed in three steps in arguing for this claim. First, I define the phenomenon as an implicit higher-order disagreement by drawing on an analysis of verbal disputes. Second, I distinguish two theories of existence—the theory-commitments view and the truthmaker view—in both their eliminativist and their constructivist (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  16.  79
    Group Agency.Daniel Shussett - 2024 - Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.
    This is an encyclopedia entry written for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. It provides an overview of the concept of and literature surrounding "group agency" from the perspective of analytic philosophy. It begins with an introduction to agency in its most general sense before examining agency in the social world. Next, group agency as a research field is presented in the context of the problem of collective intentionality. Here, accounts of group intentions (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  17. Eliminating Group Agency.Lars J. K. Moen - 2023 - Economics and Philosophy 39 (1):43-66.
    Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  18. 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 (...) agents as loci of responsibility, we may be able to avoid “responsibility gaps” in some cases of collectively caused harms for which there is a shortfall of individual responsibility. The chapter further asks whether the view that certain groups are responsible agents commits us to the view that those groups should also be given rights of their own and gives a qualified negative answer. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  19. Group Action Without Group Minds.Kenneth Silver - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (2):321-342.
    Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states—typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  20. Group disagreement: a belief aggregation perspective.Mattias Skipper & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen - 2019 - Synthese 196 (10):4033-4058.
    The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons. Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, companies, and the like. However, this raises a number of fundamental questions concerning (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  21. Redundant Group Agency.Lars J. K. Moen - 2019 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 49 (5):364–384.
    According to group-agent realism, treating groups as agents with their own intentional states, irreducible to those of the group members, helps us explain and predict the groups’ behavior. This paper challenges this view. When groups judge logically interconnected propositions, group members often have incentives to misrepresent their beliefs of propositions they care less about in order to increase the probability of their groups adopting their view of propositions they consider more important. Aggregating such untruthful judgments may (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  22.  43
    A Pathology of Group Agency.Matthew Rachar - 2024 - Social Theory and Practice 50 (3):387-405.
    Pathologies of agency affect both groups and individuals. I present a case study of agential pathology in a group, in which supposedly rogue members of a group act in light of what they take the group’s interests and attitudes to be, but in a way that goes against the group’s explicitly stated agential point of view. I consider several practical concerns brought out by rogue member action in the context of a group agent, focusing in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. Believing is said of groups in many ways (and so it should be said of them in none).Richard Pettigrew -
    In the first half of this paper, I argue that group belief ascriptions are highly ambiguous. What's more, in many cases, neither the available contextual factors nor known pragmatic considerations are sufficient to allow the audience to identify which of the many possible meanings is intended. In the second half, I argue that this ambiguity often has bad consequences when a group belief ascription is heard and taken as testimony. And indeed it has these consequences even when the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. Piper’s question and ours: a role for adversity in group-centred views of non-agentive shame.Basil Vassilicos - 2018 - Continental Philosophy Review 52 (2):241-264.
    This paper aims to contribute to ‘group-centred views’ of non-agentive shame, by linking them to an ‘anepistemic’ model of the experience and impact of human failing. One of the most vexing aspects of those group-centred views remains how susceptivity to such shame ought to be understood. This contribution focuses on how a basic familiarity with adversity, in everyday life, may open individuals up to these forms of shame. If, per group-centred views, non-agentive shame is importantly driven by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. Aggregating agents with opinions about different propositions.Richard Pettigrew - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-25.
    There are many reasons we might want to take the opinions of various individuals and pool them to give the opinions of the group they constitute. If all the individuals in the group have probabilistic opinions about the same propositions, there is a host of pooling functions we might deploy, such as linear or geometric pooling. However, there are also cases where different members of the group assign probabilities to different sets of propositions, which might overlap a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  26. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  27. Bayesian group belief.Franz Dietrich - 2010 - Social Choice and Welfare 35 (4):595-626.
    If a group is modelled as a single Bayesian agent, what should its beliefs be? I propose an axiomatic model that connects group beliefs to beliefs of group members, who are themselves modelled as Bayesian agents, possibly with different priors and different information. Group beliefs are proven to take a simple multiplicative form if people’s information is independent, and a more complex form if information overlaps arbitrarily. This shows that group beliefs can incorporate all (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  28. Is Distributed Cognition Group level Cognition?Kirk Ludwig - 2015 - Journal of Social Ontology 1 (2):189-224.
    This paper shows that recent arguments from group problem solving and task performance to emergent group level cognition that rest on the social parity and related principles are invalid or question begging. The paper shows that standard attributions of problem solving or task performance to groups require only multiple agents of the outcome, not a group agent over and above its members, whether or not any individual member of the group could have accomplished the task (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  29. How to Tell if a Group is an Agent.Philip Pettit - 2014 - In Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Essays in Collective Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 97-121.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  30. Genes and the Agents of Life: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences Biology.Robert A. Wilson - 2004 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    Genes and the Agents of Life undertakes to rethink the place of the individual in the biological sciences, drawing parallels with the cognitive and social sciences. Genes, organisms, and species are all agents of life but how are each of these conceptualized within genetics, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and systematics? The 2005 book includes highly accessible discussions of genetic encoding, species and natural kinds, and pluralism above the levels of selection, drawing on work from across the biological sciences. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   82 citations  
  31. A Theory of Bayesian Groups.Franz Dietrich - 2017 - Noûs 53 (3):708-736.
    A group is often construed as one agent with its own probabilistic beliefs (credences), which are obtained by aggregating those of the individuals, for instance through averaging. In their celebrated “Groupthink”, Russell et al. (2015) require group credences to undergo Bayesian revision whenever new information is learnt, i.e., whenever individual credences undergo Bayesian revision based on this information. To obtain a fully Bayesian group, one should often extend this requirement to non-public or even private information (learnt by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  32. Three conceptions of group-based reasons.Christopher Woodard - 2017 - Journal of Social Ontology 3 (1):102-127.
    Group-based reasons are reasons to play one’s part in some pattern of action that the members of some group could perform, because of the good features of the pattern. This paper discusses three broad conceptions of such reasons. According to the agency-first conception, there are no group-based reasons in cases where the relevant group is not or would not be itself an agent. According to the behaviour-first conception, what matters is that the other members of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  33. Guilty Artificial Minds: Folk Attributions of Mens Rea and Culpability to Artificially Intelligent Agents.Michael T. Stuart & Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW2).
    While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  34. The Curious Case of Ronald McDonald’s Claim to Rights: An Ontological Account of Differences in Group and Individual Person Rights: Winner of the 2016 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society.Leonie Smith - 2018 - Journal of Social Ontology 4 (1):1-28.
    Performative accounts of personhood argue that group agents are persons, fit to be held responsible within the social sphere. Nonetheless, these accounts want to retain a moral distinction between group and individual persons. That: Group-persons can be responsible for their actions qua persons, but that group-persons might nonetheless not have rights equivalent to those of human persons. I present an argument which makes sense of this disanalogy, without recourse to normative claims or additional ontological commitments. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  35. Intra-Group Epistemic Injustice.Abraham Tobi - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (6):798-809.
    When an agent suffers in their capacity as a knower, they are a victim of epistemic injustice. Varieties of epistemic injustices have been theorised. A salient feature across these theories is that perpetrators and victims of epistemic injustice belong to different social groups. In this paper, I argue for a form of epistemic injustice that could occur between members of the same social group. This is a form of epistemic injustice where the knower is first a victim of historical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  36. Group Responsibility and Historicism.Stephanie Collins & Niels de Haan - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (3):754-776.
    In this paper, we focus on the moral responsibility of organized groups in light of historicism. Historicism is the view that any morally responsible agent must satisfy certain historical conditions, such as not having been manipulated. We set out four examples involving morally responsible organized groups that pose problems for existing accounts of historicism. We then pose a trilemma: one can reject group responsibility, reject historicism, or revise historicism. We pursue the third option. We formulate a Manipulation Condition and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  37. Imperfect Duties, Group Obligations, and Beneficence.S. Andrew Schroeder - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (5):557-584.
    There is virtually no philosophical consensus on what, exactly, imperfect duties are. In this paper, I lay out three criteria which I argue any adequate account of imperfect duties should satisfy. Using beneficence as a leading example, I suggest that existing accounts of imperfect duties will have trouble meeting those criteria. I then propose a new approach: thinking of imperfect duties as duties held by groups, rather than individuals. I show, again using the example of beneficence, that this proposal can (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  38. 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  
  39. What Are Group Speech Acts?Kirk Ludwig - 2020 - Language & Communication 70:46-58.
    The paper provides a taxonomy of group speech acts whose main division is that between collective speech acts (singing Happy Birthday, agreeing to meet) and group proxy speech acts in which a group, such as a corporation, employs a proxy, such as a spokesperson, to convey its official position. The paper provides an analysis of group proxy speech acts using tools developed more generally for analyzing institutional agency, particularly the concepts of shared intention, proxy agent, status (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  40. Collective Reasons and Agent-Relativity.Alexander Dietz - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (1):57-69.
    Could it be true that even though we as a group ought to do something, you as an individual ought not to do your part? And under what conditions, in particular, could this happen? In this article, I discuss how a certain kind of case, introduced by David Copp, illustrates the possibility that you ought not to do your part even when you would be playing a crucial causal role in the group action. This is because you may (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  41. The Wisdom of the Small Crowd: Myside Bias and Group Discussion.Edoardo Baccini, Stephan Hartmann, Rineke Verbrugge & Zoé Christoff - forthcoming - Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.
    The my-side bias is a well-documented cognitive bias in the evaluation of arguments, in which reasoners in a discussion tend to overvalue arguments that confirm their prior beliefs, while undervaluing arguments that attack their prior beliefs. The first part of this paper develops and justifies a Bayesian model of myside bias at the level of individual reasoning. In the second part, this Bayesian model is implemented in an agent-based model of group discussion among myside-biased agents. The agent-based model (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  42. New frontiers in epistemic evaluation: Lackey on the epistemology of groups.Jennifer Nagel - forthcoming - Res Philosophica.
    In forming groups—corporations, teams, academic departments, juries—humans gain new ways of acting in the world. Jennifer Lackey argues that groups need to be held responsible for their actions, and therefore need to be subject to epistemic evaluation. To criticize receptive or reckless behavior on the part of a corporation, for example, we need some account of what it is for a group to believe something, and for a group belief to be justified. In Lackey’s account, group epistemic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  43. Group Agency, Really? [REVIEW]Marc Champagne - 2014 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (2):252-258.
    Treating groups as agents is not at all difficult; teenagers and social scientists do it all the time with great success. Reading Group Agency, though, makes it look like rocket science. According to List and Pettit, groups can be real, and such real groups can cause, as well as bear ethical responsibility for, events. Apparently, not just any collective qualifies as an agent, so a lot turns on how the attitudes and actions of individual members are aggregated. Although (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  44. Minimal Cooperation and Group Roles.Katherine Ritchie - 2020 - In Anika Fiebich (ed.), Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency. Springer.
    Cooperation has been analyzed primarily in the context of theories of collective intentionality. These discussions have primarily focused on interactions between pairs or small groups of agents who know one another personally. Cooperative game theory has also been used to argue for a form of cooperation in large unorganized groups. Here I consider a form of minimal cooperation that can arise among members of potentially large organized groups (e.g., corporate teams, committees, governmental bodies). I argue that members of organized (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  45. Desire, Disagreement, and Corporate Mental States.Olof Leffler - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue against group agent realism, or the view that groups have irreducible mental states. If group agents have irreducible mental states, as realists assume, then the best group agent realist explanation of corporate agents features only basic mental states with at most one motivational function each. But the best group agent realist explanation of corporate agents does not feature only basic mental states with at most one motivational function each. So corporate (...) lack irreducible mental states. How so? I defend the conditional with an argument from disagreement. On cognitivist approaches to desire, desires function to both motivate and represent the world. Yet such desires are subject to a significant amount of disagreement. Reflection on the folk-psychological properties of desire and belief suggest that this disagreement is better explained by a non-cognitivist approach to desire where they do not have both functions. I then defend the claim that realists are committed to at least some cognitivist motivational states. Using the example of fire brigades, I argue that the best realist explanation of group agents involves mental states with both representational and motivational functions. By modus tollens, corporations then lack irreducible mental states, period. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  46. Risk aversion and elite‐group ignorance.David Kinney & Liam Kofi Bright - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):35-57.
    Critical race theorists and standpoint epistemologists argue that agents who are members of dominant social groups are often in a state of ignorance about the extent of their social dominance, where this ignorance is explained by these agents' membership in a socially dominant group (e.g., Mills 2007). To illustrate this claim bluntly, it is argued: 1) that many white men do not know the extent of their social dominance, 2) that they remain ignorant as to the extent (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  47. The God of the Groups: Social Trinitarianism and Group Agency.C. A. McIntosh - 2016 - Religious Studies 52 (2):167-186.
    I argue that Social Trinitarians can and should conceive of God as a group person. They can by drawing on recent theories of group agency realism that show how groups can be not just agents but persons distinct from their members – albeit, I argue, persons of a different kind. They should because the resultant novel view of the Trinity – that God is three ‘intrinsicist’ persons in one ‘functional’ person – is theologically sound, effectively counters the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  48. Are My Temporal Parts Agents?Alexander Dietz - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2):362-379.
    When we think about ethics, we normally focus on a particular sort of agent: the individual person. Some philosophers have argued that we should rethink the limits of what counts as an ethically relevant unit of agency by expanding outward, and claiming that groups of people can have normative reasons for action. In this paper, I explore whether we can go in the other direction. Are there sub‐personal beings who count as agents with their own reasons for action? In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  49. Disagreement in a Group: Aggregation, Respect for Evidence, and Synergy.Anna-Maria A. Eder - 2020 - In Fernando Broncano-Berrocal & Adam Carter (eds.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement. Routledge. pp. 184-210.
    When members of a group doxastically disagree with each other, decisions in the group are often hard to make. The members are supposed to find an epistemic compromise. How do members of a group reach a rational epistemic compromise on a proposition when they have different (rational) credences in the proposition? I answer the question by suggesting the Fine-Grained Method of Aggregation, which is introduced in Brössel and Eder 2014 and is further developed here. I show how (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  50. How we fail to know: Group-based ignorance and collective epistemic obligations.Anne Schwenkenbecher - 2022 - Political Studies 70 (4):901-918.
    Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
1 — 50 / 965