Reissuing works originally published between 1949 and ‘79, this set presents a rich selection of renowned scholarship across the subject, touching also on ethics, religion, and psychology and other behavioural science. Classic previously out-of-print works are brought back into print here in this set of important discourse and theory.

The prospect of using genome technologies to modify the human germline has raised profound moral disagreement but also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging discussion and a well-informed policy response. The Hinxton Group brought together scientists, ethicists, policymakers, and journal editors for an international, interdisciplinary meeting on this subject. This consensus statement formulated by the group calls for support of genome editing research and the development of a scientific roadmap for safety and efficacy; recognizes the ethical challenges involved (...) in clinical reproductive applications of genome editing but, importantly, rejects the idea that human reproductive germline modification is necessarily morally unacceptable; and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement in discussions of genome editing and the development of regulation and oversight mechanisms to govern future uses of such technologies. (shrink)

Improvements of the happiness of the rural population are an essential sign of the effectiveness of relative poverty governance. In the context of today’s digital economy, assessing the relationship between digital literacy and the subjective happiness of rural low-income groups is of great practicality. Based on data from China Family Panel Studies, the effect of digital literacy on the subjective well-being of rural low-income groups was empirically tested. A significant happiness effect of digital literacy on rural low-income groups was found. (...) Digital literacy promotes the subjective happiness of rural low-income groups through income increase and consumption growth effects. The observed happiness effect is heterogeneous among different characteristic groups, and digital literacy significantly positively impacts the subjective happiness of rural low-income groups. Decomposition of subjective happiness into life satisfaction and job satisfaction shows that digital literacy significantly positively affects the job and life satisfaction of rural low-income groups. This paper demonstrates that digital literacy induces a practical happiness effect. To further strengthen the subjective welfare effect of digital literacy in the construction of digital villages, the government should focus on cultivating digital literacy among low-income groups from the demand side. The construction of digital infrastructure should be actively promoted from the supply side. (shrink)

In the paper, I distinguish the bottom-up strategy and the intentional stance strategy of analyzing group intentional states, and show that the thesis of distributed group subject of knowledge could be accommodated by either of them. Moreover, I argue that when combined with virtue reliabilism the thesis satisfactorily explains the phenomenon of group knowledge. To justify my argument, in the second part of the paper, I distinguish two accounts of justification pointing to conditions of group (...) knowledge. The first, which I call the belief-centered approach to group intentional states, determines the concept of group belief and group justificatory reason. The second, the process-centered approach represented by S. Orestis Palermos, employs the theory of virtue reliabilism and focuses on the group knowledge-conducive process. In the paper, I argue in favor of the latter as the internalism associated with the former appears to lack sufficient explanatory power. The theory of virtue epistemology runs into considerable difficulties when trying to deal with an extended epistemic subject composed of one individual and her cognitive artifact. In the two last parts of the paper, I consider the most important difficulties and argue that these obstacles are overcome once one adopts an approach combining virtue epistemology and the thesis of distributed group epistemic subject. (shrink)

Will Kymlicka ha sido considerado como compatibilizador de liberales y comunitaristas en cuanto a los derechos de las minorías. Su distinción entre derechos de grupo como protecciones externas y como restricciones internas buscó dar cuenta de las reivindicaciones minoritarias sin vulnerar el principio liberal de autonomía. En este artículo se buscan dos objetivos: primero, adoptar una perspectiva crítica, al afirmar que tal distinción soslaya el eje central de la discusión, esto es, la problemática de la titularidad del derecho, y, segundo, (...) proponer una nueva clasificación de los derechos aplicables a las minorías que sea capaz de servir de modelo para futuros diseños institucionales. Will Kymlicka has attempted to harmonize the positions of liberals and communitarians with respect to minority rights. His distinction between group rights as external protections and internal restrictions sought to account for minority vindications without violating the liberal principle of autonomy. The objective of this article is twofold: first, to adopt a critical perspective by arguing that said distinction avoids the core of the discussion, that is, the issue of ownership of rights, and, second, to proposed a new classification of rights applicable to minorities that can serve as a model for future institutional designs. Will Kymlicka tem sido considerado como compatibilizador de liberais e comunitaristas quanto aos direitos das minorias. Sua distinção entre direitos de grupo como proteções externas e como restrições internas pretendeu dar conta das reivindicações minoritárias sem vulnerar o princípio liberal de autonomia. Este artigo apresenta dois objetivos: primeiro, adotar uma perspectiva crítica ao afirmar que essa distinção elude o eixo central da discussão, isto é, a problemática da titularidade do direito; segundo, propor uma nova classificação dos direitos aplicáveis à s minorias que seja capaz de servir de modelo para futuros desenhos institucionais. (shrink)

Margaret Gilbert has defended the claim that her plural subject theory can give a reasonable account of retrospective (or backward-looking) collective responsibility. On one occasion, publishing in this periodical, she writes that she deliberately left out the discussion of prospective (or forward-looking) collective responsibility, or the “responsibilities” of a collective. In the present paper, I want to show that plural subject theory, in fact, also allows accounting for prospective responsibilities of groups and institutions. In order to do so, (...) I will first sketch the social ontological background of my discussion which is, in fact, an amended version of Gilbert’s theory of plural subjects (§ 2). Based on the assumption that a prospective responsibility accrues from some kind of commissioning, I will then discuss a variety of possible sources of prospective collective responsibilities: self-commissioning, third-party commissioning and what I will call commissioning by unique capability (§ 3). Having done so, I will discuss some consequences of this account and defend it against objections (§ 4). (shrink)

Version 3.0 12/02/00. Submitted to R.M. Nesse The Evolution of Subjective Commitment, Russell Sage Foundation. Please do not cite without author’s permission.  by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd. Comments welcome! Word count 14,487.

A collaborative team of environmental sociologists, community psychologists, religious studies scholars, environmental studies/science researchers and engineers has been working together to design and implement new training in research ethics, culture and community-based approaches for place-based communities and cultural groups. The training is designed for short and semester-long graduate courses at several universities in the northeastern US. The team received a 3 year grant from the US National Science Foundation’s Ethics Education in Science and Engineering in 2010. This manuscript details the (...) curriculum topics developed that incorporate ethical principles, particularly for group protections/benefits within the field practices of environmental/engineering researchers. (shrink)

Revisiting Lacan's discussion of the puzzle of the prisoner's dilemma provides a means of elaborating a theory of the trans-subjective. An illustration of this dilemma provides the basis for two important arguments. Firstly, that we need to grasp a logical succession of modes of subjectivity: from subjectivity to inter-subjectivity, and from inter-subjectivity to a form of trans-subjective social logic. The trans-subjective, thus conceptualized, enables forms of social objectivity that transcend the level of (inter)subjectivity, and which play a crucial role in (...) consolidating given societal groupings. The paper advances, secondly, that various declarative and symbolic activities are important non-psychological bases—trans-subjective foundations—for psychological identifications of an inter-subjective sort. These assertions link interesting to recent developments in the contemporary social psychology of interobjectivity, which likewise emphasize a type of objectivity that plays an indispensible part in co-ordinating human relations and understanding. (shrink)

To examine the influence of hypnotic suggestibility testing as a source of individual differences in hypnotic responsiveness, we compared behavioral and subjective responses on three scales of hypnotic suggestibility: The Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A . Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility. Berlin: Consulting Psychologists Press); the Carleton University Responsiveness to Suggestion Scale . The Carleton University Responsiveness to Suggestion Scale: Normative data and psychometric properties. Psychological Reports, 53, 523–535); and the Group Scale of (...) Hypnotic Ability . The Group Scale of Hypnotic Ability and response booklet. Australian Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 27, 20–31). Behavioral and subjective responses to the CURSS were significantly different than those on the HGSHS: A and GSHA. More participants were classified as “low suggestible” on the CURSS and they reported subjective experiences more similar to everyday mentation. Attitudes and expectancies of participants who received the GSHA were less predictive of responding, but rates of responding and subjective experiences were similar on the GSHA and the HGSHS: A. Discussion focuses on implications for the use of group hypnotic suggestibility scales. (shrink)

Abstract:The pedagogical strategy of students choosing their own friends with whom to work in classroom contexts (under the guise of democratic participation) because this is how popular musicians learn, has mostly gone uninterrogated in the literature. Approaching the question of how to create a common world through a critical examination of the unexamined assumptions that underpin emerging celebratory discourses on friendship, I consider the ways in which the words friends and friendship are indiscriminately used without acknowledging that the soundness of (...) this pedagogical choice is based on data collected from people (‘real life’ popular musicians) who are in, more often than not, instrumental relations of utility. In doing so I call for a rereading of friendship groups in order to resist the neoliberal injunction of self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and unchecked individualism. To that end I question the ways in which friendship groups in popular music groupings have become sites for developing and perfecting the neoliberal self. (shrink)

The article by MacKay and Saylor (2020) claims that the principle of fair subject selection yields conflicting imperatives (e.g. in the case of pregnant women) and should be understood as “a bundle of four distinct sub-principles” (i.e. fair inclusion, burden sharing, opportunity, distribution of third-party risks), each having conflicting normative recommendations (MacKay and Saylor 2020). The authors also offer guidance as to how we should navigate between subprinciples that may conflict with each other. The problem is a crucial one (...) since fair subject selection is one of the principles regulating clinical research that produces generalizable knowledge with the potential of improving people’s health. Therefore, there may be cases where the way in which participants are selected directly influences the generalizability (or its lack) of the clinically relevant knowledge and its value (if any) to different groups. In my commentary article, written from the philosophical perspective, I notice a number of interrelated problems which I believe have not been discussed thoroughly in the target article: (1) the precise way in which health care priority setting should influence the content of health research priority setting and fair inclusion principles; (2) the distinction between group and individual benefits and burdens from clinical research; (3) the reference class problem in medical research. (shrink)

There have been serious controversies in the latter part of the 20th century about the roles and functions of scientific and medical research. In whose interests are medical and biomedical experiments conducted and what are the ethical implications of experimentation on subjects unable to give competent consent? From the decades following the Second World War and calls for the global banning of medical research to the cautious return to the notion that in controlled circumstances, medical research on human subjects is (...) in the best interest of the given individual and the broader population, this book addresses the key implications of experimentation on humans. This volume covers major ethical themes within biomedical research providing historical, philosophical, legal and policy reflections on the literature and specific issues in the field of research on human subjects. Focusing on special populations (the elderly, children, prisoners and the cognitively impaired) it represents the most up-to-date review of the special ethical and legal conflicts that arise with relation to experimentation on subjects from these groups. In the light of current initiatives for law reform pertaining to research ethics the world over, this volume provides a timely, comprehensive and provocative exploration of the field. The volume has been carefully organized to present important philosophical perspectives on organizing principles that should underlie any practical application. A forward-looking historical review of the regulatory regimes of principal jurisdictions, including of the legal controls already in place, provides the backdrop for future policy initiatives. Additionally, in the light of global restructuring of health care systems, several chapters have been devoted to epidemiological research and related issues. (shrink)

Science motivational beliefs are crucial for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) performance and persistence, but these beliefs typically decline during high school. We expanded the literature on adolescents’ science motivational beliefs by examining: 1) changes in motivational beliefs in three specific science subjects, 2) how gender, immigrant generation status, and perceived support from key social agents predicted differences in adolescents’ science motivational beliefs, and 3) these processes among Latino/as in the United States, whose underrepresentation in STEM is understudied. We (...) used hierarchical linear modeling to estimate the changes in 104 (40% female) Latino/a high school students’ physics, chemistry, and biology motivational beliefs from 9th to 11th grade. Subject-specific ability self-concept, interest, and utility were regressed on gender, immigrant generation status, and perceived science support while controlling for family income, parent education, and adolescents’ school. Adolescents’ utility declined from 9th to 11th grade whereas their interest remained stable for all three science subjects. Adolescents’ ability self-concept increased for biology, decreased for physics, but remained stable for chemistry. Gender differences in adolescents’ motivational beliefs at 9th grade only emerged for physics utility as well as physics and chemistry interest; yet, there were no gender differences in how adolescents’ science motivational beliefs changed over time. Contrary to expectations, immigrant generation status was not significantly associated with adolescents’ science motivational beliefs at 9th grade or in terms of how they changed over time. Adolescents who perceived higher science support generally had higher motivational beliefs in 9th grade, but did not differ on their rate of change. Our findings highlight the need to examine specific science subjects, and that typical gender differences in adolescents’ motivational beliefs discussed in the literature may not generalize to all racial and ethnic groups. (shrink)

Criminal liability of legal entities was legitimised in the Republic of Lithuania nine years ago, and in the ruling of the Constitutional Court of 8 June 2009, a conclusive confirmation on its accordance with the Constitution was made. It should be noted that this penal law novelty (providing the extension of the concept of criminal offence subject) caused considerable debate among Lithuanian scientists. One of the most controversial issues of this penal law novelty are the exceptions listed in Article (...) 20(5) of the Criminal Code. (shrink)

주관적이면서 객관적이기도 한 인간의 이중적 본성이 양립한다는 것을 어떻게 설명할 수 있는가? 김재권은 행위론에서 바로 이 문제를 제기한다. 인간 행위에 대한 기존의 대표적인 이론들, 인과론과 비인과론은 행위를 바라보는 주관적 관점과 객관적 관점을 이원적으로 분리하거나 어느 한쪽으로의 환원을 시도한다. 필자는 주관과 객관의 양립가능성 문제에 접근하는 기존의 모델들을 비판적으로 검토한 후 새로운 대안을 제안할 것이다. 여기서 이 문제를 해명하기 위한 시도의 하나로 김재권의 투사 및 시뮬레이션 모델을 검토하고 그것이 갖는 설명력과 한계를 논의한다. 나아가 필자가 고안한 시뮬레이션 집단사고실험 모델은 그러한 한계를 해결할 수 (...) 있다는 것을 보임으로써, 주관과 객관의 이중성을 해명하는 하나의 모델이 될 수 있다는 것을 논의할 것이다. (shrink)

If individual knowledge and justification can be vanquished by epistemic defeaters, then the same should go for group knowledge. Lackey (2014) has recently argued that one especially strong conception of group knowledge defended by Bird (2010) is incapable of preserving how it is that (group) knowledge is ever subject to ordinary mechanisms of epistemic defeat. Lackey takes it that her objections do not also apply to a more moderate articulation of group knowledge--one that is embraced (...) widely in collective epistemology--and which she does not challenge. This paper argues that given certain background premises that are embraced by orthodox thinking in collectivist epistemology, the more moderate account of group knowledge cannot make sense of either psychological or normative epistemic defeaters. I conclude by offering some suggestions for how the more moderate proposal might avoid this result. (shrink)

Recently, social-media tools have been widely credited with igniting pervasive social upheavals in the Middle East, some of which brought down governments. This article explores the putative structure of such gatherings and considers new developments in what such collectives might be from a Sartrean perspective, in particular as mediated by the arrival of social media. A Sartrean perspective on the still indefinite composition of media collectives is offered under Sartre's concept of the groupe en fusion , yet still open to (...) discussion under his concept of individual free choice. Throughout, the chimerical presence of the We-subject, as an ontologically suspect entity arises, in particular when reification is attempted by socialmedia users living under illiberal political regimes. The situation of dissident women in the Middle East is often referred to. (shrink)

Rosamond Rhodes' evaluation of modern American research ethics emphasizes a need to shift from a protectionist understanding of human subjects to one that focuses more on the conduct of research in...

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 (...) has sufficient positive and negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. Positive control involves the general ability to update one’s goal-seeking states, whereas negative control involves the absence of other agents with the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with updating one’s goal-seeking states. I argue that even if purposive groups qualify as plural subjects or we-mode group agents, these groups necessarily lack negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. This creates a cut-off point for groups as duty-bearers: Organized groups may qualify as duty-bearers, whereas purposive groups cannot qualify as duty-bearers. (shrink)

The following paper continues discussions within this journal about how the work of Delueze and Guattari can inform radical pedagogy. Building primarily on Noel Gough's 2004 paper, we take up the challenge to move towards a more creative form of 'becoming cyborg' in our teaching. In contrast to work that has focused on Deleuzian theories of the rhizome, we deploy Guattari's work on institutional schizoanalysis to explore the role of group creativity in radical pedagogy. The institutional therapies of Felix (...) Guattari's schizoanalytic practice in the 1950s and 1960s and, before him, the Francophone educationalist Celestin Freinet, who founded the Modern School Movement, are explored and used to illuminate examples of some of our own attempts to set the classroom up as a space for collective engagement. We conclude by exploring how this understanding of the class as subject group may be used to mobilise action and de-stabilise the coordinates of existing academic divisions of labour. (shrink)

Can it ever be appropriate to feel guilt just because one's group has acted badly? Some say no, citing supposed features of guilt feelings as such. If one understands group action according to my plural subject account of groups, however, one can argue for the appropriateness of feeling guilt just because one's group has acted badly - a feeling that often occurs. In so arguing I sketch a plural subject account of groups, group intentions (...) and group actions: for a group to intend (in the relevant sense) is for its members to be jointly committed to intend that such-and-such as a body. Individual group members need not be directly involved in the formation of the intention in order to participate in such a joint commitment. The core concept of joint commitment is in an important way holistic, not being reducible to a set of personal commitments over which each party holds sway. (shrink)

According Philip Pettit, suitably organised groups not only possess ‘minds of their own’ but can also ‘make up their minds’ and 'speak for themselves'--where these two capacities enable them to perform as conversable subjects or 'persons'. In this paper I critically examine Pettit's case for group personhood. My first step is to reconstruct his account, explaining first how he understands the two capacities he considers central to personhood – the capacity to ‘make up one’s mind’, and the capacity to (...) ‘speak for oneself’ – before showing how he thinks these can be manifested in groups. With Pettit’s account duly reconstructed, I then turn to criticism, arguing that Pettit’s construal of making up one’s mind does not do proper justice to our first-personal self-understanding, nor to our characteristic interpersonal forms of engagement. This leads me, finally, to consider an alternative construal of ‘making up one’s mind’ and ‘speaking for oneself’ that is associated with the work of Richard Moran and whichargue, could usefully be exteextended to groups. (shrink)

Despite clear overlap between the study of extended minds and the study of group minds, these research programs have largely been carried out independently. Moreover, whereas proponents of the extended mind thesis straightforwardly advocate the view that there are, literally, extended mental states, proponents of the group mind thesis tend to be more circumspect. Even those who advocate for some version of the thesis that groups are the subjects of mental states often concede that this thesis is true (...) only in some loose or metaphorical sense. I argue that this imbalance is a mistake. A literal interpretation of the group mind thesis is no less plausible than the extended mind thesis, because group minds are particularly defensible instances of extended minds. However, the extended mind thesis, and the view that group minds are extended minds, are defensible only following a revision of the extended mind thesis. (shrink)

In this paper I want to introduce and defend what I call the "subject mode account" of collective intentionality. I propose to understand collectives from joint attention dyads over small informal groups of various types to organizations, institutions and political entities such as nation states, in terms of their self-awareness. On the subject mode account, the self-consciousness of such collectives is constitutive for their being. More precisely, their self-representation as subjects of joint theoretical and practical positions towards the (...) world – rather than as objects of such positions – makes them what they are. Members of such collectives represent each other as co-subjects of such positions and thus represent the world from the point of view of the collective. (shrink)

The claim is frequently made that structured collections of individuals who are themselves subjects of mental and cognitive states – such collections as courts, countries, and corporations – can be, and often are, subjects of mental or cognitive states. And, to be clear, advocates for this so-called group-minds hypothesis intend their view to be interpreted literally, not metaphorically. The existing critical literature casts substantial doubt on this view, at least on the assumption that groups are claimed to instantiate the (...) same species of mental and cognitive properties as individual humans. In this essay, I evaluate a defensive move made by some proponents of the group-oriented view: to concede that group states and individual states aren’t of the same specific natural kinds, while holding that groups instantiate different species of mental or cognitive states – perhaps a different species of cognition itself – from those instantiated by humans. In order to evaluate this defense of group cognition, I develop a view of natural kinds – or at least of the sort of evidence that supports inferences to the sameness of natural kind – a view I have previous dubbed the ‘tweak-and-extend’ theory. Guided by the tweak-and-extend approach, I arrive at a tentative conclusion: that what is common to models of individual cognitive processing and models of group processing does not suffice to establish sameness of cognitive (or mental) kinds, properties, or state-types, not even at a generic or overarching level. (shrink)

Self-conscious emotions such as shame and pride are emotions that typically focus on the self of the person who feels them. In other words, the intentional object of these emotions is assumed to be the subject that experiences them. Many reasons speak in its favor and yet this account seems to leave a question open: how to cash out those cases in which one genuinely feels ashamed or proud of what someone else does? This paper contends that such cases (...) do not necessarily challenge the idea that shame and pride are about the emoting subject. Rather, we claim that some of the most paradigmatic scenarios of shame and pride induced by others can be accommodated by taking seriously the consideration that, in such cases, the subject “group-identifies” with the other. This is the idea that, in feeling these forms of shame or pride, the subject is conceiving of herself as a member of the same group as the subject acting shamefully or in an admirable way. In other words, these peculiar emotive responses are elicited in the subject insofar as, and to the extent that, she is (or sees herself as being) a member of a group – the group to which those who act shamefully or admirably also belong. By looking into the way in which the notion of group identification can allow for an account of hetero-induced shame and pride, this paper attempts to achieve a sort of mutual enlightenment that brings to light not only an important and generally neglected form of self-conscious emotions, but also relevant features of group identification. In particular, it generates evidence for the idea that group identification is a psychological process that the subject does not have to carry out intentionally in the sense that it is not necessarily triggered by the subject’s conative states like desires or intentions. (shrink)

A body of work in ethics and epistemology has advanced a collectivist view of virtues. Collectivism holds that some social groups can be subjects in themselves which can possess attributes such as agency or responsibility. Collectivism about virtues holds that virtues are among those attributes. By focusing on two different accounts, I argue that the collectivist virtue project has limited prospects. On one such interpretation of institutional virtues, virtue-like features of the social collective are explained by particular group-oriented features (...) of individual role-bearers that are elicited by institutional structures or goals. On another account of groups as moral agents unbound by formal institutional constraints, to the extent that group characteristics meet the collectivist requirement, they fail to stand up as virtues in the substantive sense of a character trait. These two positions’ respective drawbacks and insights support a non-collectivist conclusion: Where there is a substantive virtue of some social group, it consists only in certain group-specific attitudes and motives of individuals qua members of that group. I end by outlining some risks in adopting collectivism about virtues as an explanatory or normative doctrine, and suggesting that we can abandon it without embracing an equally undesirable individualism in virtue theory. (shrink)

We gain information from collective, often institutional bodies all the time—from the publications of committees, news teams, or research groups, from web sites such as Wikipedia, and so on—but do these bodies ever function as genuine group testifiers as opposed to mere group sources of information? In putting the question this way I invoke a distinction made, if briefly, by Edward Craig, which I believe to be of deep significance in thinking about the distinctiveness of the speech act (...) of testimony. The distinction is that between somebody’s functioning as a ‘good informant’ and their functioning merely as a ‘source of information’. The difference between these has, as he remarks, a crucial ethical aspect: What I have in mind is the special flavour of situations in which human beings treat each other as subjects with a common purpose, rather than as objects from which services, in this case true belief, can be extracted. In this paper I shall try to bring out the distinctive nature of the role of good informant in a way that helps to clarify what is at stake in asking whether there can be group testimony in the sense of genuinely collective testimony—that is to say, where the group testifier is a collective and not merely a sum of individuals testifying in one or another form of aggregated chorus. (shrink)

Talk of group minds has arisen in a number of distinct traditions, such as in sociological thinking about the “madness of crowds” in the 19th-century, and more recently in making sense of the collective intelligence of social insects, such as bees and ants. Here we provide an analytic framework for understanding a range of contemporary appeals to group minds and cognate notions, such as collective agency, shared intentionality, socially distributed cognition, transactive memory systems, and group-level cognitive adaptations.

In ordinary discourse we often attribute beliefs not just to individuals but also to groups. But can groups really have genuine beliefs? This paper considers but ultimately rejects one of the main arguments in support of the claim that groups can be genuine believers – the Argument From Interpretationism – and concludes that we have good reasons to be sceptical about the existence of group beliefs. According to the Argument From Interpretationism, roughly speaking, groups qualify as genuine believers because (...) we can interpret their behaviour in much the same way that we can interpret the behaviour of individuals. While this argument may seem initially attractive, I argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful. In particular, I argue that the argument is unsuccessful even if one is generally sympathetic towards interpretationism. The reason for this, as we will see, is that a number of problems arise when we try to apply the interpretationist strategy – originally formulated with individual subjects in mind – to plural subjects or groups. In showing why the Argument From Interpretationism fails, the paper also brings into focus some more general constraints on the scope and applicability of interpretationism. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey presents a ground-breaking exploration of the epistemology of groups, and its implications for group agency and responsibility. She argues that group belief and knowledge depend on what individual group members do or are capable of doing, while being subject to group-level normative requirements.

ABSTRACT Genetics research, like research in sociology and anthropology, creates risks for groups from which research subjects are drawn. This paper considers what sort of protection for groups from the risks of genetics research should be provided and by whom. The paper categorizes harms by distinguishing process‐related from outcome‐related harms and by distinguishing two kinds of group harms. It argues that calls for community engagement are justified with respect to some kinds of harms, but not with respect to others; (...) and it cautions that community engagement may itself be harmful. (shrink)

When groups feature in political philosophy, it is usually in one of three contexts: the redressing of past or current injustices suffered by ethnic or cultural minorities; the nature and scope of group rights; and questions around how institutions are supposed to treat a certain specific identity/cultural/ethnic group. What is missing from these debates is a comprehensive analysis of groups as both agents and objects of social policies. While this has been subject to much scrutiny by sociologists (...) and social psychologists, it has received less attention from a normative and philosophical point of view. This volume asks: what problems are posed to political philosophy by a collection of individuals who act or are treated in a collective way? Focusing not only on ways in which institutions should treat groups, but also on the normative implications of considering groups as possible social agents, when acting either in vertical relations with the state or in horizontal relations with other groups (or individuals), this book explores these issues from both theoretical and practical perspectives, combining questions about the nature of groups, and their social and political impacts, with the particular, pressing considerations to which such groups give rise. (shrink)

Social epistemology is a many-splendored subject. Different theorists adopt different approaches and the options are quite diverse, often orthogonal to one another. The approach I favor is to examine social practices in terms of their impact on knowledge acquisition . This has at least two virtues: it displays continuity with traditional epistemology, which historically focuses on knowledge, and it intersects with the concerns of practical life, which are pervasively affected by what people know or don't know. In making this (...) choice, I am not blind to the allure of alternative approaches. In this paper I explain and motivate the knowledge-centered approach by contrasting it with a newly emerging alternative that has a definite appeal of its own. According to this alternative, the chief dimension of social epistemological interest would be rationality rather than knowledge. (shrink)

Biomedical research using data from participants’ mobile devices borrows heavily from the ethos of the “citizen science” movement, by delegating data collection and transmission to its volunteer subjects. This engagement gives volunteers the opportunity to feel like partners in the research and retain a reassuring sense of control over their participation. These virtues, in turn, give both grass-roots citizen science initiatives and institutionally sponsored mHealth studies appealing features to flag in recruiting participants from the public. But while grass-roots citizen science (...) projects are often community-based, mHealth research ultimately depends on the individuals who own and use mobile devices. This inflects the ethos of mHealth research towards a celebration of individual autonomy and empowerment, at the expense of its implications for the communities or groups to which its individual participants belong. But the prospects of group harms — and benefits — from mHealth research are as vivid as they are in other forms of data-intensive “precision health” research, and will be important to consider in the design of any studies using this approach. (shrink)

Democratic deliberation places the burden of self‐governance on its citizens to provide mutual justifying reasons (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996). This article concerns the limiting effect that group identity has on the efficacy of democratic deliberation for equality in education. Under conditions of a powerful majority, deliberation can be repressive and discriminatory. Issues of white flight and race‐based admissions serve to illustrate the bias of which deliberation is capable when it fails to substantively take group identity into account. As (...) forms of Gilbert's (1994) plural subjects, identity group members holding the group identity can experience agency as the freedom to believe together with members of their group. I argue that attending to how group members acquire group beliefs through trust is a reasonable accommodation of group identity in deliberation. (shrink)

: Some argue that human groups have a stake in the outcome of population-genomics research and that the decision to participate in such research should therefore be subject to group permission. It is not possible, however, to obtain prior group permission, because the actual human groups under study, human demes, are unidentifiable before research begins. Moreover, they lack moral standing. If identifiable social groups with moral standing are used as proxies for demes, group approval could be (...) sought, but at the expense of unfairly exposing these surrogates to risks from which prior group approval is powerless to protect them. Unless population genomics can proceed without targeting socially defined groups, or can find other ways of protecting them, it may fall to individuals to protect the interests of the groups they care about, and to scientists to warn their subjects of the need to do so. (shrink)