Abstract
Pettit and List argue for realism about group agency, while at the same time try to retain a form of metaphysical and normative individualism on which human beings qualify as natural persons. This is an unstable and untenable combination of views. A corrective is offered here, on which realism about group agency leads us to the following related conclusions: in cases of group agency, the sort of rational unity that defines individual rational unity is realized at the level of a whole group; rational unity is never a metaphysical given but always a product of effort and will; just as it can be realized within groups of human beings it can also be realized within parts of human beings, as well as within whole human lives; in cases of group agency, the rational unity that is achieved at the level of the group typically precludes rational unity at the level of its human constituents within their whole lives, though it can be realized within parts of those human lives. Along the way, a contrast is drawn between cases of genuine group agency and the cases of political agency envisaged by Rousseau and Rawls (and by Pettit and List) which leave individual human beings intact as separate agents in their own rights.
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Notes
Pettit and List (2011).
Arrow (1951).
Many of these are offered in Pettit and List (2011).
These claims about the different sizes that rational points of view can have are not meant metaphorically. On the account I am offering, a rational point of view consists of the thoughts that together comprise the proper basis of deliberations that proceed from that point of view. Since the thoughts that comprise a group agent’s rational point of view are scattered across different human lives, it literally takes up a larger region of space–time than a rational point of view that consists solely of thoughts within a given human life. I’ll say more as I go on about the different sizes that rational points of view can have, and why human beings who constitute group agents typically also house rational points of view that are—again, literally—smaller than human size, because some of the thoughts that occur within those human beings’ brains belong to the group agent’s point of view.
It was suggested by a referee for this paper that when Rawls envisaged the original position from which principles of justice are to be selected, he wasn’t really trying to characterize a form of group agency. I won’t try to argue that he or she is mistaken about this. I’ll merely point out that the principles of justice are interesting only insofar as they can direct political action, and moreover—with the exception of one-person dictatorships—political action is characteristically a group activity. So it doesn’t really matter for my purposes whether Rawls himself intended that the choices made from his original position be thought of as constituting the choices of a political group; what matters is that political theorists who are interested in political agency might naturally think of it in this way.
Rousseau (1997).
Rawls (1971).
Arrow (1951).
Maskin (2001) has argued that when rankings are restricted in various ways, including ideological rankings, majority rule is a good (where this connotes rationally acceptable) procedure for group decision making.
I’ve discussed the example to follow in Rovane (2005).
For a sustained investigation into the first person, including the psychological pre-cursors to the first personal thought of fully reflective agents, see Burge (2011)—though his ultimate conclusion is precisely the view against which I am arguing in this paper.
See Anderson (2001).
Although I would be less quick to attribute any form of agency to identity-conferring groups, I am sympathetic to Anderson’s claim that many of the norms by which we reason are given to us with membership in groups—though I would put the point in terms of being located in a moral context. See Chapter Four of Rovane (2013) for further discussion.
If I read her correctly, her primary concern is not to emphasize that human beings may be the site of rational fragmentation, even though this does follow from her view; her primary concern is to criticize the economists’ picture of the rational individual. Her concluding point is that if a human being’s primary identity is given by being a woman, then she might not emerge as someone who reasons as an individual in the economists’ sense unless she first possesses other identities, and then in the process of navigating these other identities she gains some distance on the norms imparted to her through her identity as a woman.
References
Anderson, L. (2001). Unstrapping the straightjacket of ‘preference’: A comment on Amartya Sen’s contributions to philosophy and economics. Economics and Philosophy, 17, 21–38.
Arrow, K. (1951). Social choice and individual values. New York: Wiley.
Burge, T. (2011). The Dewey lectures 2007: Self and self-understanding. Journal of Philosophy, CVIII(6/7), 287–315.
Maskin, E. (2001). Is majority rule the best election method? Occasional Papers in the School of Social Science, 11, 1–8.
Pettit, P., & List, C. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design and status of corporate agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rousseau, J. (1997). The social contract and other later political writings of Rousseau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rovane, C. (2005). What is an agent? Synthese, 40, 181–198.
Rovane, C. (2013). The metaphysics and ethics of relativism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Rovane, C. Group Agency and Individualism. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 9), 1663–1684 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9634-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9634-9