Philip Pettit on Group Agency

Philosophy Bites

Nigel Warburton

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2010

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

When a group of people acts together we can hold that group morally and legally responsible. But how does the group decide to act? Is a decision of the group simply the majoritarian sum of individual group members' views? Princeton philosopher Philip Pettit, who has written a book about this topic with Christian List of the LSE, discusses these issues with Nigel Warburton for the Philosophy Bites podcast. Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.
0:07.0	Philosophy bites is available at W.
0:08.6	W. W. philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
0:15.0	Christian List of the London School of Economics and Philip Pettit from New York University
0:21.0	in one way constitute a group. They are a group of people who've co-authored
0:26.3	a book on group agency. The book argues that groups like corporations or political parties or churches or charities can be agents
0:35.5	rather in the way individuals can be agents, they can have goals, they can be held responsible.
0:41.7	But groups are not merely an aggregate of their individual components.
0:45.0	The group made up of me, Nigel and Philip Pettit sat in Oxford to discuss.
0:50.0	Philip Pettit, welcome to Philosophy Bides.
0:53.0	Very happy to be here, thank you.
0:54.7	The topic we're focusing on is group agency.
0:58.4	What's that?
0:59.9	I think of group agents as a subspecies,
1:02.0	sort of speak, of groups in general.
1:03.9	It could be the group of red-haired people, it could be the group of people who come
1:07.0	second in the family, whatever it might be, they just share a property, groups of course
1:11.5	different, how far the property is one they recognize, how
1:14.5	far it's important to how they behave and so on. Group agents are different from groups.
1:19.0	They are groups. They will have a property in common and so on, but the feature that makes them a group agent
1:24.8	is that they mimic an individual agent in how they behave.
1:29.4	I think that'd be clearest if you gave an example.
	...

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