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Call for Participation: THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY Freedom, Responsibility and Rights in Collective Contexts The University of Groningen hosts a manuscript workshop on The Structure of Society: Freedom, Responsibility and Rights in Collective Contexts by Frank Hindriks. This event takes place in Groningen, the Netherlands, on March 8-9, 2018. During this workshop, a number of internationally acclaimed scholars will comment on the penultimate version of the book. PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and recent assistant professors are hereby invited to apply (< 3 years after receiving a PhD). A limited number of people will be accepted to attend the workshop and actively participate in the discussions. Accommodation and sustenance costs will be covered. Please send your CV and a brief letter of motivation to Frank Hindriks at f.a.hindriks@rug.nl before February 1, 2018. Participants by invitation: Gunnar Björnsson, Olle Blomberg, Stephanie Collins, Francesco Guala, Kendy Hess, Arto Laitinen, Abraham Roth, David Schweikard, Kai Spiekermann, Christine Straehle, Tobias Hansson Wahlberg, and Bill Wringe.
Call for Participation The University of Groningen hosts a manuscript workshop on The Structure of Society: Freedom, Responsibility and Rights in Collective Contexts by Frank Hindriks. This event takes place in Groningen, the Netherlands, on March 8-9, 2018. During this workshop, a number of internationally acclaimed scholars will comment on the penultimate version of the book. PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and recent assistant professors are hereby invited to apply (< 3 years after receiving a PhD). A limited number of people will be accepted to attend the workshop and actively participate in the discussions. Accommodation and sustenance costs will be covered. Please send your CV and a brief letter of motivation to Frank Hindriks at f.a.hindriks@rug.nl before February 1, 2018. Participants by invitation: Gunnar Björnsson, Olle Blomberg, Stephanie Collins, Francesco Guala, Kendy Hess, Arto Laitinen, Abraham Roth, David Schweikard, Kai Spiekermann, Christine Straehle, Tobias Hansson Wahlberg, and Bill Wringe.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Group Freedom: A Social Mechanism Account2017 •
Many existing defenses of group rights seem to rely on the notion of group freedom. To date, however, no adequate analysis of this notion has been offered. Group freedom is best understood in terms of processes of social categorization that are embedded in social mechanisms. Such processes often give rise to group-specific constraints and enablements. On the proposed social mechanism account, group rights are demands for group freedom. Even so, group rights often serve to eradicate individual unfreedom. Furthermore, generic measures sometimes provide the most appropriate solution to a problem of group unfreedom.
Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations depend on their members for their existence, but the members of an organization can be where the organization is not. The designated office of an organization, however, need be little more than a mailbox. I argue that the problem can be solved by conceptualizing the relation between social entities and non-social entities as one of constitution, a relation of unity without identity. Constituted objects have properties that cannot be reduced to properties of the constituting objects. Thus, my attempt to solve the Location Problem results in an argument in favor of a kind of non-reductive materialism about the social.
Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice. Kendy Hess, Tracy Isaacs, and Violetta Igneski, eds (Rowman and Littlefield 2018)
The Peculiar Unity of Corporate AgentsThe various "collective" literatures have generally focused on collectives that are unified and directed by "shared intentions" – mental or intentional states that are (1) possessed by each member of a collective, in some sense, and (2) immediately relevant to the formation and behavior of the collective. Three people moving a couch are unified by the shared intention to move the couch because each has an intention to move the couch and to do so with the other members. There are a number of different ways to theorize these shared intentions, and I am not trying to choose among them. Instead, I would like to recognize them as a group and contrast them with theories of a very different kind of collective: the large, highly organized collectives increasingly identified as "corporate agents.” The literature has often failed to recognize the very different kind of unity that binds the members of a corporate agent, and the failure to recognize this difference has led to unnecessary confusion and implausible claims. I begin by describing this "peculiar unity" in some detail, then turn to the question of whether this unity is sufficiently robust to underwrite claims of material existence. In the absence of consensus on the requirements for material existence, I test my account against popular proposals from Baker (2000) and van Inwagen (1995). I conclude in each case that the corporate agent qualifies as a material object in its own right, and suggest that these successes suggest that it would qualify on other accounts not addressed here.
In the recent methodological individualism-holism debate on explanation, there has been considerable focus on what reasons methodological holists may advance in support of their position. We believe it is useful to approach the other direction and ask what considerations methodological individualists may in fact offer in favor of their view about explanation. This is the background for the question we pursue in this paper: Why be a methodological individualist? We start out by introducing the methodological individualism-holism debate while distinguishing two forms of methodological individualism: a form that says that individualist explanations are always better than holist accounts and a form that says that providing intervening individualist mechanisms always makes for better explanations than purely holist ones. Next, we consider four lines of reasoning in support of methodological individualism: arguments from causation, from explanatory depth, from agency, and from normativity. We argue that none of them offer convincing reasons in support of the two explanatory versions of individualism we consider. While there may well be occasions in which individualists' favorite explanations are superior, we find no reason to think this always must be the case.
Corporate responsibility requires a conception of collective agency on which organizations are able to form moral judgments and act on them. In spite of claims to the contrary, existing accounts of collective agency fall short of this kind of corporate autonomy, as they fail to explain how collective agents might be responsive to moral reasons. I discuss how a recently proposed conception of shared valuing can be used for developing a solution to this problem. Although the resulting conception of corporate autonomy is useful for making sense of corporate responsibility, it also gives rise to what I call ‘the Corporate Autonomy Problem’. Autonomous collective agents are in principle entitled to the same rights as autonomous individual agents. However, at least some individual rights, such as the right to vote, the right to life, and the right not to be enslaved cannot plausibly be attributed to collective agents. This intuition is supported by normative individualism, the position according to which corporate agents are not entitled to non-derivative rights at all. I argue that without a proper solution to this problem – I sketch the available options – saving corporate responsibility requires giving up on normative individualism.
Hacking's concepts of 'looping effect' (LE) and ‘interactive kind’ (IK) refer to a specific kind of interaction between a category and people who are classified as belonging to this category: the first arc of the loop is one in which the individuals categorized react to being categorized and act accordingly; this response causes social scientists or categorizations’ producers to revise and adjust their original categorization, prompting thereby the second arc of the loop. This interactive process can go on indefinitely. The concepts of IK and LE are supposed to have an explanatory relevance in addition to their descriptive role: they refer to a mechanism underlying social phenomena, and correspond with a specific causal trajectory. They must enable us to make inferences about the social agents' behavior, the evolution of norms and institutions. Dynamics and inferences mentioned above focus on the behavior of individual agents. But what about collective agents? My aim is dual: I want to show, first, the multiple existing links between IK and collective entities and, second, that depending on the kind of groups there are different kinds of interactive influences. More precisely, I argue that IK can generate a specific type of collective intentionality. As Pettit says (2004, 175), we can distinguish, among unorganized collections of people related in more or less arbitrary ways, (1) groups of people who share a common feature that does not affect their behavior from (2) groups of people who share a common feature that does affect their behavior, but without leading them to do anything in common. By contrast, (3) ‘purposive groups’ (Pettit, 2004, 176) are collections of individuals who coordinate their actions around the pursuit of a common goal. The first type of IK’s influence is constitutive: some groups are indeed created by interactive mechanism which can generate the change from kind (1) to kind (2). But this mechanism can also generate the change from unorganized kinds (1) and (2) to unified kind (3). I will focus on a third possibility: the fact that the interactive mechanism can affect a pre-existent purposive collectivity (3) and, therefore, that a specific type of collective intentionality can contribute to modify the categorization of the group and generate LE. After showing such cases, my aim is to emphasize three consequences of this analysis. First, it helps to clarify an important part of the horizontal interactions between such collective. Second, it enables us to extend the relevance of the social mechanisms of IK and LE by applying them at the ‘meso-level’ of organizations. Third, it helps to understand that collective subjects as such are also moving targets: it explains, therefore, that the ideal of an ultimate categorization of goal-oriented groups is by definition illusionary.
Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Raimo Tuomela with his Responses
Group Agents and Social Institutions: Beyond Tuomela's Social Ontology2017 •
Tuomela’s work on group agents and social institutions is very rich and insightful. Although I agree with most of it, two features puzzle me (sections 1.3 and 2.3): Tuomela’s ontological individualism, and Tuomela’s stance about constitutive rules. Insofar as ontological individualism is concerned, Tuomela’s claims about group agents seem to support ontological collectivism rather than the individualism that he defends. It remains unclear whether Tuomela appreciates that the mind-dependence of group agents as such does not rule out their existence (thesis 1). Furthermore, their causal efficacy supports their reality (thesis 2). Tuomela believes that the notion of a constitutive rule can illuminate the enabling role of institutions. I have argued against this that regulative rules suffice for this purpose (thesis 3). Constitutive rules are important but mainly because they lay bare an ontology that regulative rules leave implicit (thesis 4). Finally, I have argued that what is enabled by collectively accepted rules, whether they be regulative or constitutive, is to be explicated in terms of the function of institutions, which is – as Tuomela argues – to facilitate or enhance coordination and cooperation.
The Moral Responsibility of Firms Revisite. Orts, Eric and N. Craig Smith (eds). Oxford University Press.
The Unrecognized Consensus about Firm Moral Responsibility2017 •
I begin this chapter by arguing that there is an unrecognized consensus just below the surface of the FMR debate: almost everyone believes that firms shouldn’t do things that are morally wrong. This consensus is masked by metaphysical and metaethical complexities (briefly outlined), but the central claim is usually held to be true regardless of how we resolve those complexities. It’s important that we recognize this, as doing so reframes the debate in helpful ways and avoids the appearance of serious disagreement about this basic point. The second section raises two concerns about the contemporary debate. First, the myopic focus on explicit executive decision-making implies what I’ve started to call “the homunculus theory of corporate behavior” – the idea every firm has a little man inside who carefully, precisely, and effectively shapes corporate action. Any executive can tell you that’s simply not the case; they wish it were! We need a theory that captures all of the major forces that shape the actions of firms, and I briefly present my own as a contender. My theory focuses on the corporate commitments that drive corporate behavior – commitments that arise through explicit decision-making, distributed decision-making and cultural shift, among other things. This yields an account that is at once truer to life and more useful in guiding interventions. Second, much of the debate about corporate moral agency relies on human paradigms in a way that closes off the possibility of a non-human moral agent. I close the section by briefly outlining a model which avoids this difficulty. The chapter closes by arguing that even within the “pro-FMR” camp, there is more consensus than is usually acknowledged. After explaining how our current labels mask this consensus, I note that almost all the major players agree with the basic claim that “firms” (in some sense) act morally and immorally. Recognizing this hidden consensus – again – allows us to reframe the debate in helpful ways, and puts us in a position to recognize that most of the “competing” claims don’t really compete. What is needed is an over-arching account of corporate moral agency that captures the contributions made by the other theories, and I demonstrate that my own account (described above) can fill this need as well.
In: Thomas Szanto & Dermot Moran (Eds.): The Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’. London, New York: Routledge.
Collectivizing Persons and Personifying Collectives: Reassessing Scheler on Group Personhood2018 •
2009 •
Journal of Social Philosophy
Distributing Collective Moral Responsibility to Group Members2014 •
2001 •
History of the Human Sciences
Leading a universal life': the systematic relevance of Hegel's social philosophy2009 •
Policy Futures in Education
Totalitarianism and the'Repressed'Utopia of the Present: moving beyond Hayek, Popper and Foucault2003 •
2018 •
Why Anarchy Still Matters: On Theories and Things
Why anarchy still matters for International Relations: On theories and things2017 •
2016 •