APPLICATION OF INTEGRATED RATING MECHANISMS AND MATRIX NON-ANONYMOUS GENERALIZED MEDIAN VOTER SCHEMES TO COORDINATION OF THE AGENTS’ INTERESTS

The collective agent coordination problem in organizational behavior systems is consider. In particular, the problem of coordinating of the agents’ interests to assess the degree of achieve-ment of the corporate strategic targets. The relevance of the problem is due to the need to increase the speed of decision-making, the speed of reaction to changes in the external environment, which can be achieved using appropriate control mechanisms. Aim. Improving methods of collective deci-sion making under circumstances where agents have different ranks of significance. Materials and methods. Methods comprise the integrated rating mechanisms and the generalized median voter schemes. The mathematical apparatus was chosen is contingent on the group decision making in organizational systems. Active agents strives to maximize his target function in the process of inter-action, which leads to a conflict of interests and a desire to distort information. The chosen methods allow these problems to be solved. The first ones are used to aggregate indicators that reflect the de-gree of achievement of the private goals of the organization at the strategic level. The second ones are used to identification the true agents’ opinions about the type of target index convolution matri-ces. Results. The matrix non-anonymous generalized median mechanism is proposed. The non-anonymous statement allows taking into account the interests of agents with different ranks. It is shown how to reduce non-anonymous procedure to an anonymous one. Decisions making process about all elements of the convolution matrices in integrated rating mechanisms with using anony-mous median voter scheme is strategy proofnees. However, the results of aggregation are not stabil-ity to the agent strategic behavior in cases of application anonymous or non-anonymous coordina-tion procedures. The new integrated mechanism based on the synthesis of known control mecha-nisms is proposed to overcome the discovered problem. Conclusion. The statement of the problem corresponds to the real procedures of decision making by governance board, when the opinion of one agent turns out to be more significant than the opinion of another agent. The developed mech-anism makes it possible to agree on the opinions of experts on the degree of achievement of the strategic goals of the organization; it can also be adapted to solve other applied problems, for ex-ample, making a decision on the choice of a project, assessing risks, assessing suppliers, etc.

Integrity

This chapter begins by introducing a conception of a liberal polity as a collective agent with its own moral integrity, and presenting some initial attractions of conceiving of a liberal polity in this way. These attractions are further developed through various international cases, where the idea of liberal integrity captures important but elusive moral intuitions. Several parallels are presented between a liberal polity’s unconditional commitments and the unconditional commitments of an individual person. These parallels help dispute skepticism about integrity’s independent moral significance, and support the argument that such skepticism is easier to combat at the political as compared to the personal level. After developing two additional arguments reinforcing this conclusion, the chapter closes by considering the objection that the discussion of a liberal polity’s integrity might be a distraction from a proper focus on personal integrity.

Flocking Together: Collective Animal Minds in Contemporary Fiction

The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a fullfledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance- like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows), and animals that embrace a collective “we” to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). When individuality drops out of the picture of human‐animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi‐geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance. (MC)

Interdisciplinarity and Crowdsourcing in Ecology as Reply to the Challenges of the Technogenic Civilization

The main characteristic of the modern environment is the negative change by its people – destruction and pollution. Man is part of the biosphere and the technogenic transformations of the biosphere inevitably affect him. Under the influence of technogenic civilization, all spheres of human activity undergo changes, and science above all. Ecology is especially keenly aware of the challenges of technogenic civilization. It focuses on anthropogenic factors, works with the human environment. At the same time, its problem field is expanding due to interdisciplinary research and the allocation of knowledge of new environmental disciplines into an independent industry. The interdisciplinarity of modern ecology is most clearly visible on the example of such a direction as informational ecology. The presence of the digital environment in human life has grown so much that it requires the separation of the digital information environment into a separate subsystem. Information ecology studies the laws of the influence of information on the formation and functioning of man. In turn, interdisciplinarity, assuming the use of knowledge from various branches of science, brings us to the problems of the collective agent of cognition and distributed knowledge. In ecology, the problems of the collective agent of cognition are implemented through crowd-sourcing technology. Ecology is a science that requires massive collection of observation data (samples of water, air, soil pollution in various, sometimes hard-to-reach corners of the planet, observation of fluctuations in the number of species of animals and plants). The popularity of crowdsourcing projects in the field of ecology is explained by the fact that the challenges and threats of anthropogenic civilization have generated such a trend of our time as environmental orientation or environmentalism. Ecological crowdsourcing projects, inspired by the philosophy of environmentalism, can serve as an answer to the challenges of technogenic civilization.

Coordination Duties

Given that combinations and coalitions cannot have duties, how are we to charitably reconstruct attributions of duties to them? This chapter answers by using the notion of responsiveness: the notion of one agent acting upon one another with a view to the second agent being responsive to reasons. In cases where a morally important outcome could be produced by each of several agents being responsive, each agent incurs a duty to be responsive with a view to that outcome. These are ‘responsiveness duties’. In cases where a morally important outcome could be produced by a collective agent, where that collective agent could be produced by each of several agents being responsive, each agent incurs a duty to be responsive with a view to producing the collective agent. These are ‘collectivization duties’. Responsiveness duties and collectivization are two species of ‘coordination duty’. Coordination duties are held by singular agents and do not require the positing of any group duty.

Not In Their Name

Given their size and influence, states are able to inflict harm far beyond the reach of a single individual. But there is a great deal of unclarity about exactly who is implicated in that kind of harm, and how we should think about both culpability and responsibility for it. The idea of popular sovereignty is dominant in classical political theory. It is a commonplace assumption that democratic publics both authorize and have control over what their states do; that their states act in their name and on their behalf. Not In Their Name approaches these assumptions from the perspective of social metaphysics, asking whether the state is a collective agent, and whether ordinary citizens are members of that agent. If it is, and they are, there is a clear case for democratic collective culpability. The book explores alternative conceptions of the state and of membership in the state; alternative conceptions of collective agency applied to the state; the normative implications of membership in the state; and both culpability (from the inside) and responsibility (from the outside) for what the state does. Ultimately, Not In Their Name argues for the exculpation of ordinary citizens and the inculpation of those working in public services, and defends a particular distribution of culpability from government to its members.

Is the Citizen-Exclusive State an Agent?

In light of the failure of the preferred model to count as a collective agent on the strong or moderate accounts, this chapter turns to the citizen-exclusive state. It outlines the structure of two versions of the model—one accounting for the separation of powers and one including only the smallest group with decision-making power in government. It argues that the bigger group is characterized by two important features: it has a hierarchical power structure, and it includes ‘nested’ agency (some of its members are collective agents rather than individuals). The chapter concludes with a general discussion of whether this group has both agency and moral agency, and argues that it does.

Citizens’ Culpability and Responsibility for States’ Actions

This chapter returns to the outstanding issue of whether citizens might have responsibility for what their states do in a weaker form than culpability. That is to say, even if they are not members of the collective agent that is the state, they might nonetheless come to have responsibilities for what it does. In the first part of the chapter, the focus is on whether weak collective agency can support collective culpability, and it is argued, through a thought experiment in three variations, that it cannot. In the second part of the chapter, the focus is on alternatives to culpability, including complicity, association, benefit, privilege, and assistance. Difficulties with some of these are noted, but it is argued that there may yet be responsibilities from several of these sources, particular when there are ‘culpability shortfalls’.

Is the Citizen-Inclusive State an Agent?

Chapter 3 asks whether the citizen-inclusive model described in Chapter 2 meets the conditions for collective agency. A range of theories of collective agency are presented, grouped according to strength: strong accounts, moderate accounts, and weak accounts. After presenting each account, the chapter determines whether the state is likely to count as a collective agent on any of these theories. It also considers the distinction between agency and moral agency, and whether the state can be said to have the latter. The chapter concludes with a more general discussion of whether the citizenry is the kind of group likely to meet strong or moderate conditions, and argues that it is not because it is fundamentally unorganized. The conclusion is that an understanding of the state as the citizenry taken together should be rejected.

What is The State?

Chapter 2 focuses on alternative conceptions of the state. It presents several different models of the state drawn from different academic disciplines: political science, international relations, political philosophy, and international law. These include states as political leaders; states as unified national governments; states as defined in the Montevideo Convention; states as the citizenry taken together (at least in democratic states); states as competing organizations; and states as competing leaders of organizations. It is argued that particular attention should be paid to two of these models: the citizenry taken together (because this accords well with ordinary intuitions about what the state is), and a version of the unified national governments model that restricts membership in the state to those involved in the wider government administration. Both of these models are taken forward into Chapters 3 and 4 (respectively), in asking whether each group counts as a collective agent, capable of intentional action.