Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Group Agency (The Normative and Moral Foundations of Group Agency)

Teaser

Group agency is an important and intensely discussed topic in current social philosophy and philosophy of action. The project has three overall objectives: first, the metaphysics of group agency; second, the exploration of group agents in terms of moral and legal philosophy;...

Summary

Group agency is an important and intensely discussed topic in current social philosophy and philosophy of action. The project has three overall objectives: first, the metaphysics of group agency; second, the exploration of group agents in terms of moral and legal philosophy; third, an analysis of corporate and economic agents’ self-understanding and the impact this has for their awareness of their ethical duties. The project seeks to investigate these issues from perspectives which have not yet been sufficiently addressed in the literature. Research (first objective) focuses on analyzing the normative conditions that are constitutive for group agents and will explore the reasoning processes within groups. A specific question addressed is how identification with a group can change practical reasoning and utility calculations. The project’s second main objective is to connect research on group agency with moral and legal philosophy, with a special focus on questions of responsibility. The third objective of the project is an analysis of corporate and economic agents’ self-understanding. An important moment in ethical recognition of one’s responsibility is an agent’s awareness “it’s me” with respect to consequences affecting others. Research in the project has suggested that group agents and corporate agents can fulfill that condition of agential self-awareness. One way to illuminate and present this self-recognition is in terms of group speech acts, a topic that is intensely pursued within the project. Often, the group agent or corporate agent delegates a proxy to communicate the group agent’s plans, strategies, and goals to the public. These performative utterances reveal the group agent’s self-conception and whether the group agent is conscious and aware of its impact on others, aware that it is “an agential me” that is doing the actions that produce certain effects. The topics of the project are obviously of great interest for society. Social interactions are crucially shaped by agents’ organisational affiliations.

Work performed

The project was successfully implemented during the reporting period at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Vienna, starting with December 2017. The present project team includes the PI, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, one Praedoc, Franz Altner, and two Postdocs, Grace Paterson and Carlos Núñez. Research on the project during the reporting period has focused on all three Subprojects, that is Subproject I: The metaphysics of agency and group agency, including the constitutive normative framework of group agents; Subproject II: The consequences of the philosophical analysis of group agency for current developments in (a) moral philosophy and (b) legal philosophy; and Subproject III: Normative and moral self-understanding of economic agents.
Regarding Subproject 1: The work of Postdoc Carlos Núñez has focused particularly on exploring the metaphysical possibility and the rational permissibility of intending ends that involve the actions of others. Núñez has already written several research articles on this topic. In his research, Núñez has been developing arguments to the effect that it is both possible and permissible to intend ends that involve the behavior of other people, even when one does not believe such behaviour is under one’s control. If these arguments are along the right lines, they would provide us with a natural, organic extension of current accounts of small forms of shared and social agency to much wider and in some ways more interesting forms of shared and social agency. Likewise, they would provide important theoretical tools that can then be used to give metaphysical and normative models of group agency, since at least in some central cases, group agency is realized by agents’ acting in shared intentional ways.
Regarding Subproject 2: Research has focused on exploring the moral implications of affiliating with group agents and the kind of complicity this creates. Moreover, the contours of a relational account of Kantian morality have been explored. Two articles on this topic by the PI have been published during the reporting period, further work will be done.
Regarding Subproject 3: The connections between the self-understanding of group agents and a group agents’ representation via group speech acts have been explored already in several research papers by Postdoc Grace Paterson. This work by Garce Paterson at the intersection of philosophy of action and philosophy of langugage is innovative and will greatly enhance philosophical discourse. The connections between economic agency and moral responsibility have been explored by Praedoc Franz Altner in research papers which will be part of his dissertation. During the reporting period, the team has organised two workshops, one with internationally recognised scholars on the philosophy of action, the other with the Lund-Gothenburg Responsibility Group whose research on moral responsibility and group agents is most valuable.

Final results

In the first reporting period of the project, significant progress has been made on all three Subprojects. In particular, the undertaken research on the metaphysical constitution of group agents has offered illuminating results on the notion of intending social ends. These results tie nicely into the question of corporate agents’ self-awareness and recognition of their ethical commitments and duties. Major progress has also been made on the issue of agents’ affiliations with groups and the complicity of agents resulting from their professional affiliations with corporate agents. Also the connections between group agency and relational accounts of morality have been explored.

Research planned by the project until 2022 will likely have a significant impact on the philosophy of group agency in three respects. First, the metaphysics of group agency will clarify the current understanding of the normative conditions regulating agency.
Research will also explore the connections between individual planning rationality and team rationality, in particular practical team reasoning. Second, the project will contribute substantially to exploring the issue of group speech acts and will give a new account of the normative commitments coming with those speech acts. Further work will be done on the issue of complicit involvement in the policies and actions of group agents such as organisations and corporations. This research on complicity will be connected with work on distortions of morality and law under authoritarian political conditions, addressing also questions of relational normativity and group identification. These analyses will shed light on the normative connections between individual’s self-understanding as single agents and their self-understanding as members of groups. A further question is how group membership changes an agent’s awareness of moral obligations. In all likelihood, there will also be done important work on the practical self-understanding and normative identity of economic agents, particularly on the question how much room the usual identification of economic agents’ practical identity with the goal of profit-maximization makes for economic agents’ recognition of their moral responsibility and duties towards shareholders and stakeholders.

Website & more info

More info: https://groupagency.univie.ac.at/.