A Constitutive Account of Group Agency

Authors: Herlinde PauerStuder

Publish Date: 2014/04/23

Volume: 79, Issue: 9, Pages: 1623-1639

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Abstract

Christian List and Philip Pettit develop an account of group agency which is based on a functional understanding of agency They claim that understanding organizations such as commercial corporations governments political parties churches universities as group agents helps us to a better understanding of the normative status and working of those organizations List and Pettit however fail to provide a unified account of group agency since they do not show how the functional side of agency and the normative side of agency are connected My claim is that a constitutive account of agency helps us to a proper understanding of group agency since it ties the functional part of acting to the group agent’s selfunderstanding and its commitment to specific norms principles and values A constitutive model of agency meets much better what List and Pettit seek to accomplish namely conceiving of group agents as artificial persons constituted by normative principles and entertaining normative relations to others to whom they are accountableFor critical comments on an earlier version of this paper I would like to thank Martin Kusch David Velleman and the members of the ERCproject “Distortions of Normativity” discussion group Alexandra Couto Julian Fink Christoph Hanisch and Veli Mitova Research for this paper was funded by the ERC Advanced Research Grant “Distortions of Normativity”

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