Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1979 Groups as Moral Agents Michael David Smith Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Michael David, "Groups as Moral Agents" (1979). Dissertations. 1913. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1913 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1979 Michael David Smith GROUPS AS MORAL AGENTS by Michael David Smith A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graauate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 1979 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to thank Martha Rominger Smith for her loving and efficacious (im)patience, David Ozar for his guidance, Thomas Donaldson for helpful suggestions, Alice Bowling for her typing, and the Arthur Schmitt Foundation for its financial support. ii VITA The author, Michael David Smith, is the son of Lawrence Harold Smith and Mary Carolyn (Dolf) Smith. He was born August 17, 1948, in Hamilton, Ohio. He obtained his elementary education in the parochial schools of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Ohio 1 and secondary education at Sacred Heart Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he graduated in 1966. In September, 1966, he entered Seminaire St-Augustin in Cap Rouge, P.Q. In June, 1970, he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from Marian College, Indianapolis, Indiana, with a major in philosophy. In September, 1970, he was granted an assistantship in philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago. In 1976, he was awarded the Master of Arts in philosophy. He was appointed lecturer in philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago, 1973-75. He is presently instructor of philosophy at East Tennessee State University, where he is Director of the Humanities Program. He has published in Philosophical Studies. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • . ii LIFE . iii CHAPTER I. GROUPS AS RULE CONSTITUTED ENTITIES 1 II. SOME OBJECTIONS: THE INDIVIDUALIST ONTOLOGY 26 III. GROUPS AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF AGENTS 45 IV. GROUPS AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY • 78 v. GROUP AGENTS AND PERSONS . 101 CONCLUSION . 134 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 137 APPENDIX . 144 CHAPTER ONE GROUPS AS RULE CONSTITUTED ENTITIES We commonly talk of corporations, fraternal organizations, gov­ ernment agencies and other groups of persons as if they are themselves single, unified agents, distinct from the persons who comprise them. We speak, for example, of the goals of the American Civil Liberties Union, of decisions by the IBM Corporation, and of actions taken by HEW. Such ways of talking seem puzzling on close scrutiny, for we appear to be treating the group as if it is itself a person of sorts and not merely an aggregate of human persons who are all acting in roles. In short, our choice of language in talking about groups of persons makes it appear that the group is itself an agent with its own goals, capable of making decisions and acting. It is my intention to show here the conceptual underpinnings of this sort of talk as well as to show that it has implications for morality. More precisely, my intention is to show how it is that a group of persons can be a single moral agent, responsible for its own actions. In arguing for the moral agency of groups J will ao a number of things. Firstly, I shall examine more carefully the aistinction between an aggregate of persons and the group as a single entity. An exam- 1 2 ination of the kinds of rules that we use in constituting and under­ standing our world will enable us to see this distinction better. That much will be accomplished in the present chapter. ln Chapter Two I will examine a challenge to the intelligibility of the distinction between the aggregate and the group as a single entity. ln subsequent chapters I shall argue that groups are able to make decisions, have goals, and have moral obligations and rights that are attributable to the group itself and not necessarily to all the persons in the group. I shall then explore in more detail the logical relations between the group and the persons in the group, especially as these relate to the moral agency of the group and that of persons in it. In an appendix, I will explore the significance of the moral agency of groups in the context of two specific moral issues, the demand for black reparation and strict lia­ bility in tort. * * * * * Groups can be of various kinds. Groups are sometimes simply aggregates of persons. In such cases, the propositions that we use to / describe the actions of groups can be replaced by sets of propositions about the actions of individual persons in the group. Such a replace­ ment can be regarded as successful when the new set of propositions about persons can function in all contexts in exactLy the same way as the proposition it replaces functioned. When such a group action can be adequately described (i.e. with nothing left out) as the actions of persons in the group, I shall refer to that group action as a "reducible" group action. And I shall refer to the sentences describing such 3 reducible group actions as "translatable" to sentences about action by persons. The unwieldiness or verbosity of such translations is not at issue here; instead, I am concerned only about the possibility of translation. Whenever a group action is reducible to the action of the members of the group, the sentence describing that group action will be translatable. We can express this nature and interrelation of reduc- ibility and translatability as follows: Where "~ did "'!._" designates a group action (where ~ is a group of persons and "'!._ is an action) , that action Y is reducible if there are persons in A (a, b, c, ... ) such that "A did Y" can be trans­ lated to some finite set-of sentences:l "a did G; II "b did H; II "c did I;" etc. There are some group actions that are reducible; or, to put it another way, there are some group-action sentences that are translatable. Consider, for example, the following sentence: The entire Jones family refused their flu shots. The act of refusing is in this case reducible to the acts of refusing by individual members of the Jones family if it involves no act by the family as a unity but is instead the aggregate of the following acts by members of the family: Mr. Jones refused his flu shot. Mrs. Jones refused her flu shot. Susy Jones refused her flu shot. 1The notion of a "person in a group" is one that will receive a technical definition once we have completed the examination of rules in the present chapter. (Seep. 18). For now, it must suffice to state that a person in a group is, for our purposes here, any person who can perform some act that, by itself or as part of some set of acts, counts as an act by that group. This, the reader should note, differs sharply from ordinary usage. 4 2 Billy Jones refused his flu shot, etc. Translations, though, are not always as simple as this one. In order to see this, consider now the following group-action sentence: The entire community built the barn. To parallel exactly the first example, this sentence would have to be translatable into some set of sentences about acts by persons such as the following: Jones built the barn; Brown built the barn; Smith built the barn; etc. Such a translation is, at best, opaque and perhaps incorrect. For it leaves us wondering how the barn can be built by all at once with each counting as the sole builder. There is, however, another possible translation: Jones laid the foundation; Brown put in the joists; 3 Smith shingled the roof; etc. This new translation makes it obvious that each person performed some different and distinguishable act or set of acts, the cumulative result 2 The adequacy of such a translation seems apparent, at least for contemporary North American society. But one can conceive of a society in which families (or clans, tribes, etc.) are so precisely structured that a person in authority (e.g. a patriarch) can make de­ cisions or take actions that count as decisions or actions by the family and not as his personal decision or action. The possibility of one thing "counting as" something else presupposes a substructure of various sorts of rules. The nature of these rules will be explored in the present chapter. 3Again, the adequacy of the translation depends on the actual situation. If the community in question is so highly organized that it has a decision-procedure of its own, has assets that belong to no single person in the group decides to spend these assets on building materials and relegates specific barn-building tasks to Jones, Brown, Smith, etc., then the action would not be reducible to those of ind­ ividual persons. 5 of which is a completed barn. 4 Thus, there are at least these two kinds of reducible group actions: those that involve individuals each performing the same ac~ tian individually and those that involve persons performing different actions with some cumulative result. There might be other forms of reducible group action as well, but my main concern in this work is whether there are any group-actions that are not reducible to aggregates of acts by persons and that must be attributed to the group itself.