Abstract
Christian List and Philip Pettit have recently developed a model of group agency on which an autonomous group agent can be formed, by deductive inference, from the beliefs and preferences of the individual group members. In this paper I raise doubts as to whether this type of group agent is a moral agent. The sentimentalist approach to moral responsibility sees a constitutive role for moral emotions, such as blame, guilt, and indignation, in our practices of attributing moral responsibility. These moral emotions are important for the alignment of moral understandings, and for valuing other members of the moral community. I argue that while the intentional objects of beliefs and preferences are propositions, the intentional objects of moral emotions are other agents. Because agents are not subject to rules of inference, we cannot generate group agent emotions—such as guilt—in the same way as we can generate group agent beliefs and preferences. And because the group agents lack moral emotions, we have reason to resist treating them as moral agents.
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Notes
Ibid.
The List and Pettit functionalist account of agency is of course more complex than this brief summary. In particular, they draw a distinction between rationality and reasoning. Agents—including robots, animals, and humans—can be rational by design. But some agents—humans, and some group agents—can think or reason to promote their rationality further. These more complex agents can have meta-propositional attitudes; they can ask themselves about the connections between propositions, in particular, their logical consistency. This more complex agential capacity seems essential for moral agency.
An analogous exercise can be performed for the group’s preferences. Suppose that the committee has to decide what criteria they prefer for selecting the safety measure (a guard against electrocution). The committee is presented with four possible selection criteria: takes up little space, visually unobtrusive, easy to clean, and the conjunction of these. If the profile of votes is the same as in the table above, then the same problem of inconsistency arises again.
Note that the problem of generating group attitudes from member attitudes is much broader than a concern with majority rule. See List and Pettit (2002, p. 49, 50).
A ‘distributed premise-based procedure’, is also a way of avoiding the permanent threat of inconsistent group attitudes, and a procedure that also generates autonomous group attitudes. With this procedure, different member agents are assigned to make decisions on different premises, and the group attitude on the conclusion is generated via logical implication. The distributed premise-based procedure is a plausible way in which a large corporation may make its decisions, with different departments being given authority to make specific types of decisions.
Pettit’s own example (2007, p. 198).
I take it that the reactive attitudes or moral emotions of betrayal, resentment and blame are roughly equivalent.
The accounts of moral responsibility provided by List and Pettit, and by Strawson seem quite disparate; Strawson makes no mention of any necessary or sufficient conditions for moral responsibility, and List and Pettit make only one mention of Strawson’s account:
“…we assume that blaming involves adopting or identifying with the stance of a creditor: someone to whom at least an apology is owed. Adopting such a stance typically means indulging in resentment, identifying with the stance means indulging in indignation (Strawson 2003 [1962]). Adopting the stance towards oneself, as in blaming oneself, means indulging in a sense of guilt.” (List and Pettit 2011, p. 154).
Once a wrongdoer experiences guilt in response to their wrongdoing, having been made aware of their wrongdoing by the expressions of blame or indignation by other members of their moral community, they may communicate their guilt to the other members. Again, this communication can occur directly via verbal or written expressions of guilt such as apologies, or the communication can occur indirectly via efforts to make amends such as reparations. If those who originally felt blame or indignation towards the wrongdoer notice, via the communicative or other actions of the wrongdoer, that the wrongdoer now recognises, understands and acknowledges that they committed a wrong, then the feelings of blame and indignation should subside. Normal relations, and membership of the moral community can then be restored. The change in behavior of the wrongdoer is the perlocutionary point of the speech act of expressing blame (Fricker).
Grzankowski (2012).
List and Pettit (2011, p. 130) themselves note the possible analogy between a group agent and a psychopath.
The claim that group agents are incapable of their own, non-reductive affective attitudes is not novel, and has been made in one form or another by Hindriks (2014, p. 1574), Tollefsen (2003; p. 231, 2008, p. 9), Haney (2004, p. 398), Silver (2005, p. 286), Velasquez (1983, p. 124), and Wolff (1985, p. 279), among others. Gaus (2012) makes some very brief remarks concerning the lack of Strawsonian reactive attitudes in List and Pettit-type group agents. Some of these authors point to the fact that group agents are not made of the right sort of ‘stuff’ to have reactive attitudes: a group agent might be characterised as a set of relationships between individual members, or an organisational structure, or a flow chart; these are not the sorts of things that feel. Others suggest that consciousness is necessary for experiencing emotions and group agents are not sufficiently integrated or unified to have consciousness (In this regard, see List 2016). None of these authors point to the fundamental reason List and Pettit-type group agents lack affective attitudes that I argue for in this paper.
See also Schmid (2009).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.
See Koenigs et al. (2007).
Gilbert’s account allows for official representatives of the plural subject (e.g. the President of a nation) to determine the emotional state of the group agent by jointly committing the member agents to feel emotions such as guilt.
Mikko Salmela (2012) notes that Gilbert’s joint commitment account seems to provide a ‘feeling rule’ for group emotions, rather than group emotions per se. One cannot summon emotions at will, even in the presence of reasons for experiencing emotions. And if most members of a plural subject are unable to actually summon the relevant emotion, in spite of a joint commitment to have the emotion, then it is implausible to claim that the group does in fact experience an emotion such as guilt.
Or perhaps a majority of the member agents.
We need not go so far as to suggest that the emotion must be caused by a grounding belief for that emotion to be justified. It seems possible for an emotion to cause the justifying belief. For example, I might discover that my emotional capacity of fear is an extremely reliable indicator of danger: whenever I feel fear I discover a target that is dangerous, and form the appropriate belief that the target is dangerous with respect to some object I value. Similarly, I might discover that I have a highly attuned moral sense: in the past whenever I felt a sense of guilt towards someone, it turned out that I behaved in a blameworthy manner, so whenever I feel a sense of guilt towards someone now I form the grounding belief that I behaved in a blameworthy manner towards them. Helm (2001) makes a similar point about the non-vicious circularity between the evaluative judgment and emotion: I might feel fear towards the shopping trolley because I judge my car to be valuable; I might discover that I judge my car to be valuable because I feel fear towards the shopping trolley. But it remains important that there is a causal relationship between the emotion and its grounding belief.
See List and Pettit (2012, p. 296).
Hindriks’ target is the second ‘Judgmental Capacity’ condition of List and Pettit’s three conditions for moral responsibility.
In this regard, see Wallace (2011).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for posing this challenge.
As discussed earlier in the paper, this is important since if we can attribute the intentional attitudes of the group agent to individual member agents, then we can also attribute the moral responsibility of the group agent to those same individuals.
Here I follow the analysis of Grzankowski (2012).
List and Pettit (2012) note that group emotions are best analysed in a functionalist manner, and that different accounts of the function of emotions are possible. They also note that it is at best an open question whether group agents have hedonic states (which would include a capacity for reactive attitudes).
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Acknowledgements
I presented versions of this paper to the OZSW Conference, VU University Amsterdam (2015), the ‘Grundlegung’ research seminar, University of Groningen (2015), and the Hope and Trust Workshop, University of Frankfurt (2016). I am grateful for the comments received from audience members. I am also grateful for the comments received from Tony Booth, Boudewijn de Bruin, Katherine Hawley, Frank Hindriks, Jens van’t Klooster, Marco Meyer, Alex Oliver, Tom Simpson, and two anonymous referees.
Funding
The author was supported by postdoctoral funding from the NWO project ‘Trusting Banks’ (Project Number 360-20-310).
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Thompson, C. The Moral Agency of Group Agents. Erkenn 83, 517–538 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9901-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9901-7