180148 SE Group Agency (2012S)

Companies, nation states, political parties, and universities are agents. This view seems natural enough form an folk sociological perspective, and is commonplace in ordinary language. However, most philosophers and social scientists have tended to assume that for the purposes of a proper analysis, only individuals should be treated as real and proper agents. In their recent book on Group Agency, Philip Pettit and Christian List argue that this view is mistaken. Under some circumstances, collectives are proper agents in the sense that there is no straightforward reduction of group agency to the attitudes of the participating individuals.
In this course, Pettit's and List's argument will be examined, and the consequences for social philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and social ontology will be discussed.