Societies as group agents

ABSTRACT

Could an entire society count as an agent in its own right? I argue here that it could. While previous defenders of group agency have focused primarily on groups such as states and corporations that exhibit a great deal of formalized internal structure, less attention has been devoted to more loosely structured social groups. I focus on defending the claims that societies can have ends or goals and that they engage in end-directed behavior. I defend this view by responding to three potential objections. The first is the allegation that the attribution of ends to societies would be redundant, given that the properties of any group will supervene upon the properties of the group’s individual human members. The second is the charge that societies are not genuine agents engaged in end-directed actions because their behavior is not under their own direct control. The third is the concern that while it may be useful to speak of societies ‘as if’ they were agents, this does not indicate that societies really act in pursuit of ends. I draw upon a functionalist approach from the philosophy of mind to argue that all three objections can be addressed by the defender of social agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Group agency
• society
• functionalism
• supervenience
• multiple realizability

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on previous drafts of this work, I wish to thank Paul Boghossian, Jane Friedman, Paul Horwich, Olof Leffler, Lars Moen, Sharon Street, and anonymous referees for the journal Inquiry.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 French (1979) speaks of corporations as ‘moral persons.’ Yet see Hess (2013, 320) for discussion of the point that corporations’ status as moral agents need not entail their personhood.

2 Their ends need not be to flatten the curve. One who is motivated purely by profit, for instance, might respond to the changing social circumstances by selling PPE at a high price in such a way that contributes positively to the society’s pursuit of its end.

3 See also Jackson and Pettit (1992) on the value of explanations at different levels of grain.

4 Note that I am not relying upon any claim that the economy itself is an agent or has ends. My point is only that we can make sense of genuine causation at multiple levels of explanation.

5 See Tollefsen (2002) for a detailed defense of the claim that it can be explanatorily useful to speak of social groups as agents.

6 This final objection may seem reminiscent of Quinton’s (1976) suggestion, discussed in §2, that talk of group properties is merely shorthand for the properties of the group’s members, such as their individual goals or attitudes. As I understand this third and final objection, however, one might press the objection even without granting that the properties that are ascribed loosely or metaphorically (‘as if’) to groups apply literally to the group’s members, either.

7 Strictly, they would act in almost the same way, minus any behaviors associated with explicitly considering the goal.