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THE NORMATIVE STANDING OF GROUP AGENTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2012

Rachael Briggs
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Abstract

Christian List and Philip Pettit (henceforth LP) argue that groups of people can be agents – beings that believe, desire and act. Their account combines a non-reductive realist view of group attitudes, on which groups literally have attitudes that cannot be analyzed in terms of the attitudes of their members, with methodological individualism, on which good explanations of group-level phenomena should not posit forces above individual attitudes and behaviors. I then discuss the main normative conclusion that LP draw from the claim that group agents exist: that we ought morally to grant legal rights and responsibilities to group agents, but that group rights should be more limited than individual rights. I argue that when it comes to the fitness of group agents to bear legal rights and responsibilities, LP can draw support from nonreductionist views elsewhere, particularly in the philosophy of mind. I raise some objections to LP's views about the value of granting legal rights and responsibilities to group agents.

Type
Symposium on Christian List and Phillip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents
Information
Episteme , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 283 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

REFERENCES

List, C., and Menzies, P. 2009. ‘Nonreductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle.’ Journal of Philosophy, 106(9): 475–502.Google Scholar
List, C., and Pettit, P. 2011. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, F., and Pettit, P. 2004. Mind, Morality, and Explanation: Selected Collaborations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar