Abstract
Proxy agency is the capacity of individuals and groups to act for other individuals or groups in specific social transactions. For example, a legal team acts as a proxy for a client in a courtroom, or the Prime Minister acts as a proxy for the UK Government when attending international meetings, etc. Although a very common social phenomenon, it has not yet received enough philosophical treatment. Currently, the most developed account of this capacity is Ludwig’s proxy agency in collective action. Yet, his account relies on a deflationary, we-content approach to collective intentionality (á la Bratman). In this chapter, I argue that this approach is far too weak to explain proxy agency in institutional contexts—where the individuals and groups formally authorised to perform rule-guided group activities for the principal hold a strong, non-conditional we-commitment. In order to elucidate this feature, I provide an account of proxy agency based on a more robust, we-mode approach to collective intentionality (á la Tuomela). I suggest with this that, for institutional proxy agency to operate as expected, there must be appropriate conditions of sociality in place—which ultimately coheres with the larger project developed by Tuomela on social ontology.
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Notes
- 1.
Ludwig (2020b) has already argued for an understanding of legal organisations (the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of Government) as proxies for the citizenry (see also Garcia-Godinez 2022), while Cordelli (2020) has recently discussed the possibility of private agents (e.g., civilians and corporations) acting on behalf of the state.
- 2.
Roughly, individual agency is the capacity of an individual to perform intentional actions (e.g., raising an arm, having a shower, or voting), whereas collective agency consists in the capacity of a group of individuals to perform intentional actions together (e.g., playing chess, dancing a tango, or having a conversation). For an overview on individual agency, see (Schlosser 2019), and on collective agency, see (Roth 2017).
- 3.
- 4.
Following Leow (2019), we should notice, first, that there is a special kind of power at stake in all these situations, viz., proxy power; and second, that ‘acting for’, ‘acting on behalf of’, and ‘acting in the name of’ relations do not (necessarily) express proxy agency, which is better (if not only) captured by ‘acting through’ relations. Although Ludwig (2014, p. 103, n. 23) recognises an important difference between acting ‘in behalf of’ and ‘on behalf of’ (where the former, but not the latter, is taken to be in the benefit or in the interests of the principal), he uses the other three relations interchangeably.
- 5.
Noticeably, though, Ludwig has not always been clear about what he means by ‘status roles’. Sometimes he appears to equate status roles with status functions (2014, p. 86), and some other times he seems to recognise that they are two different things (2017a, p. 7, 138). As he is now more explicit about the specific nature of status roles, viz., that they are a special case of status functions (see 2020a, p. 308; 2020b, p. 181), this is the characterisation I follow in the text.
- 6.
On partial constitution, see (Ludwig 2014, p. 85).
- 7.
Unfortunately, Ludwig does not say here (1) what he means by ‘deflationary’ and (2) what it is meant to be deflationary—indeed, he talks about various things being deflationary, e.g., a “deflationary view of collective action” (2014, p. 75), a “deflationary account of collective agency” (2014, p. 76), and a “deflationary account of constitutive rules” (2014, p. 83). Yet, what I think is deflationary in his project is the conception of collective intentionality (we-intentionality) that underlies his theory of collective action (see Ludwig 2007 and 2016, p. 236).
In personal communication, Ludwig has clarified to me that his account is ‘conceptually’ and ‘ontically’ deflationary regarding both collective action and collective agency in the sense that “we can state necessary and sufficient conditions that draw only on concepts already in play in our understanding of individual agency” and that “we do not have to admit group agents per se into our ontology”. As for constitutive rules, his view is deflationary because it takes that “a constitutive rule is just a rule specifying a form of acting like any other”, and so its “being constitutive is not a property of a rule”, but rather “a relation between a rule and an action type”.
- 8.
His ‘pluralist’ theory of collective action has it that there is nothing special about collective action, except for the fact that more than one individual agent participates in its performance (2013, p. 129). When two individuals carry a table together, for instance, the sentence describing the action quantifies over two individuals, rather than a group or any other collective entity (2013, Sec. 5.5). Moreover, even when those individuals act based on their we-intentions, this does not imply that they constitute anything other than a mere plurality; that is, their we-intentions explain only their intentional participation in the collective action, but not the existence of any group agent (2016, p. 229).
- 9.
For some objections to Bratman’s view, especially regarding the ‘deconditionalisation’ of conditional we-intentions, see (Tuomela 2007, pp. 70-79).
- 10.
Conditional we-intentions are just the plural form of conditional intentions. A conditional intention, as characterised by Ludwig, is the result of ‘contingency planning’, which creates a commitment to perform an action if a certain condition obtains (2015, p. 31). So, the obtaining of the condition gives the agent a sufficient reason either for (if ‘reason-providing’) or against (if just ‘enabling’) undertaking an action. Unlike conditional intentions, unconditional intentions are commitments (not) to act simpliciter (see Bratman: 1979). That is, an unconditional intention, for Ludwig, is an intention (not) to perform an action for (against) which the agent already has a sufficient reason (2015, p. 33). For example, my deciding ‘to leave the party if it is too loud’ is a conditional intention, the condition of which, if it obtains (i.e., if the party gets too loud), gives me enough reason to leave the party. Thus, by forming this intention, I am committed to leaving the party if it gets too loud (but if it does not get too loud, then I have no commitment to either leaving or not leaving the party). On the contrary, my deciding ‘to study at the library because I want to avoid distractions’ is an unconditional intention: I already have a reason for, and so a commitment to, going to study at the library.
- 11.
For Ludwig, the collective acceptance of something (or someone) as having a certain status function (or role) for the purposes of a constitutive collective action, amounts to a convention—the aim of which is to solve a coordination problem (see 2017a, Sec. 9.1). Ultimately, for him, such conventions are the ground floor of social institutions.
- 12.
I should note here that Ludwig does not believe that ‘things are significantly different’ in this respect (personal communication). Instead, he thinks that unless people have “more reason to continue in their roles than not”, they can always (and sometimes do) walk away. Yet, my point here is not that people cannot walk away, but that they hold a group-based commitment, qua institutional role holders, not to do so (even when they do it). It is because of this commitment that other participants can rationally plan their contributions to the institutional action without relying on each having appropriate conditional we-intentions (or not having more reason not to continue in their roles, etc).
- 13.
An internal reason, says Ludwig, is a reason “grounded in one’s existing motivations” (2017a, p. 149). For example, if I want to avoid pain, I have a reason to avoid pain. On the contrary, an external reason (e.g., a legal rule imposing taxes on pain of legal sanctions) is independent of one’s motivations and so, it can only motivate when connected to an internal reason (e.g., that I want to avoid legal sanctions).
- 14.
Collective commitment, for Tuomela, is what glues “the members together around an ethos” and gives “joint authority to the group members to pursue ethos-related action” (2007, p. 5).
- 15.
Note here, though, that having a group reason is not the same as, nor even entails, having an all-things-considered reason for action. A group reason is, at best, a pro-tanto reason, the (moral, legal, etc) correctness of which must be determined by external factors (moral conventions, legal rules, etc). On this, see (Tuomela 2012 and 2013, p. 277, n 21).
- 16.
- 17.
For an overview, see (Preyer & Peter 2018).
- 18.
Tuomela (2017) and Ludwig (2017b) have already discussed the irreducibility of we-mode to I-mode intentionality. It should be clear from what I have said here that I do not think the objections to Tuomela’s view are entirely correct; however, I leave to the reader a final assessment upon the merits of each position.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Kirk Ludwig for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Thanks also to the audiences at both the ISOS 2022 Conference and the Themes from Raimo Tuomela’s Social Ontology Workshop for helpful discussion.
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Garcia-Godinez, M. (2023). Institutional Proxy Agency: A We-Mode Approach. In: Garcia-Godinez, M., Mellin, R. (eds) Tuomela on Sociality. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22626-7_8
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