Actions by Collectives

Abstract

1. We commonly attribute actions to collectives. Thus, we use locutions like 'Firm F produced the goods G', 'Nation N1 attacked nation N2', 'The board dismissed Jones', 'The team scored', and so on. On the basis of examples like these it seems to be a worthwhile project to accept this commonsensical view at least in part and to think that true statements of the above kind can be made. I shall do so in this paper and investigate some central philosophically and conceptually interesting problems related to actions performed by collectives. I shall below be concerned especially with studying under what conditions attributions of actions to collectives can correctly be made. The commonsensical view that actions can be and are commonly attributed to collective agents does not-under my construal of common sense at least-by itself entail that such attributions need be nonmetaphorical, nor does it entail the existence of collectives as supraindividual entities (see Section II below). And if collectives are construed as real entities, it must be admitted that they are entities clearly different from single human persons-to which action concepts and other mental concepts apply in the first place. Persons have (biological) bodies and perform bodily actions in contrast to collectives. Persons have a full-blown mental life while collectives do not. It can even be maintained that a collective is not a self-sufficient agent (e.g., in the sense of being capable of performing basic bodily actions).