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Is group agency a social phenomenon?

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Abstract

It is generally assumed that group agency must be a social phenomenon because it involves interactions among many human beings. This assumption overlooks the real metaphysical nature of agency, which is both normative and voluntarist. Construed as a normative phenomenon, individual agency arises wherever there is a point of view from which deliberation and action proceed in accord with the requirements that define individual rationality. Such a point of view is never a metaphysical given, but is always a product of rational activities that aim to satisfy the requirements that define individual rationality. When such a deliberative point of view is forged within a whole human life, there is a single agent of human size. But such points of view can also be forged within parts of human lives so as to constitute multiple agents within them; and they can also be achieved within groups of human lives so as to constitute group agents that literally deliberate and act as one. If such a group agent were a social phenomenon, then its agency would simultaneously be the agency of many even as it was also the agency of one. In that case, its deliberations and actions would have to proceed from many separate deliberative points of view, at the same time that they also proceeded from a single deliberative point of view. A correct account of rational agency shows that this is not necessarily so, and indeed, not typically so. Moreover, if it were so much as possible for this to be so, it would require special conditions of the sort that Rousseau identified in his account of the general will. But this special case is not a good model on which to understand the cases of group agency that are most often discussed in the philosophical literature. They are more appropriately viewed as cases in which the condition of individual agency is realized at the level of a group, than as cases of social agency per se.

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Notes

  1. It does not matter for my purposes in this paper which of the many accounts of collective agency that philosophers have offered might be best (or correct). In particular, it does not matter whether such an account would posit irreducibly social facts, or joint intentions construed in individualist terms. All that matters is that any such account will be focused on capturing what it is for many distinct agents to exercise their agency together while remaining the distinct agents that they are—that suffices to make it an account of a social phenomenon in the sense that I have in mind.

  2. I develop this account of agency, and situate it in relation to the issue of personal identity, in Rovane (1998).

  3. This idea that agents may be of different sizes is further clarified in note 8.

  4. For extended accounts of commitment in this sense see Levi (1990), Rovane (1998) and Bilgrami (2006).

  5. Frankfurt (1971).

  6. In response to my illustrative example, it could fairly be said that there is an ideal political perspective from which it would be better if people didn’t have aversions to crowds, and therefore didn’t have reasons to avoid attending political rallies. But that should not mislead us into thinking that higher order volitions always provide a critical perspective from which lower order desires and actions should be criticized, rather than the other way around. As I just explained in the text above, that is just mixing up two different things—orders of desires, and irreducibly normative considerations.

  7. Let me reiterate the point I made in note 1, that I don’t have any particular account of collective agency in mind. It does not matter for my arguments in this paper how a philosopher might wish to flesh it out. The only point that matters is that group agency qualifies as collective agency by my lights just in case the rational relations and activities that constitute the life of the group agent are social activities on the part of individual agents of human size.

  8. In the last several paragraphs, and more generally throughout the paper, I refer to agents of different sizes—some of human size, and some of greater or smaller size than that. This may seem to be vague talk that stands in need of clarification. But its meaning is very simple and straightforward. On the reductionist account of agent identity that I am advocating, an agent is a body of suitably related intentional episodes. Just as such a body can be of longer or shorter temporal duration, likewise it can span across greater or smaller regions of space, depending on how many human lives it spans across. Thus, group agents are ‘larger’ than agents of human size because they span across more than one human life; multiple agents are ‘smaller’ than human size because they span across less than one human life.

  9. Korsgaard (1989, 2014).

  10. Parfit (1984).

  11. Nagel (1971).

  12. See Dennett (1987).

  13. They make this fully clear in a footnote, where they respond to Elizabeth Anderson’s suggestion (Anderson 2001), that human beings have “multiple identities”—a suggestion that requires her to allow that the individual human being may be the site of more than one point of view, and hence, a site of rational fragmentation. Here is how Pettit and List respond to the suggestion: “It is little short of comic to suggest that we are each an arena in which such different identities have autonomous voices.” (p. 197).

  14. Rovane (2014).

  15. Here is how one such line of argument for the value of agents of human size might proceed: Take from John Stuart Mill the premise that happiness is the final end of conduct, and the further empirical claim that he defended, to the effect that human beings are happiest when they live highly individual lives, independently of others. Although Mill assumed, along with nearly everyone else, that human beings are metaphysically given as individual agents, it may be that his claims about human happiness do not depend upon that mistaken metaphysical assumption. If that is so, then in principle, those claims might serve as a basis on which to argue for the value of agents of human size, owing the superior worth of their individual projects as sources of human happiness. I am not presently able to evaluate this line of argument in and of itself, let alone to try to anticipate its implications about the comparative value of group agents.

  16. I want to thank the editors of this special issue for bringing it out. I also want to especially thank the two reviewers of this paper. Both provided detailed and copious comments; and both were exceedingly generous, not only with their time and attention, but also in their overall response to the paper, even as they might resist one thing or another within it. Last but not least, I want to thank Akeel Bilgrami and Michael Della Rocca for their continued engagement on the themes that concern me in the paper.

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Rovane, C. Is group agency a social phenomenon?. Synthese 196, 4869–4898 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1384-1

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