Contributing to Historical-Structural Injustice via Morally Wrong Acts

Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress (2019), makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like states. In this article, I extend Nuti’s rich analysis, focusing on two questions that arise from her theory of historical-structural injustice: (1) Beyond being blameworthy for wrongful acts themselves, are culpable wrongdoers blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice? (2) Does historical moral ignorance mitigate moral responsibility for past injustice? Regarding (1), I distinguish between the local and societal structural effects of wrongdoing. Though I think this distinction is well-founded, it ultimately leads to tensions with structural injustice theory’s idea of ordinary individuals being blameless for reproducing unjust structures. Regarding (2), I argue that even though it is natural for the question of historical moral ignorance to arise in considering past wrongdoing, at least in the case of powerful group agents, we should not overlook forms of cruelty which present-day moral concepts are not needed to condemn.

The Easy Approach to Group Agency. A Simple Realist View on Group Agents

"We talk about groups as doing something, we talk as if groups have agency. Is our talk legitimate? Are there group agents? Is there something like group agency? In this paper, I discuss two ontological frameworks concerning existence questions: the Quinean framework and the Thomasson-Carnap framework. I apply them to the problem of group agency. I review the Quinean-oriented literature debating the existence of group agents and its methodological background. I argue, via Thomasson’s easy approach to ontology, that deflationism can simplify the debate surrounding group agents. Thus, I argue for a Thomasson-Carnap framework and show that it is better suited to answer the particular question whether there are group agents. More specifically, I argue for a non-reductive simple realist view on group agents, i.e. I argue for the truth of “There are group agents,” via analytic entailments, by truths about the actions and deeds of groups. Keywords: Analytic Entailments, Deflationism, Group agency, Group agents, Simple Realism "

Group (epistemic) competence

In this paper, I present an account of group competence that is explicitly framed for cases of epistemic performances. According to it, we must consider group epistemic competence as the group agents’ capacity to produce knowledge, and not the result of the summation of its individual members’ competences to produce knowledge. Additionally, I contend that group competence must be understood in terms of group normative status. To introduce my view, I present Jesper Kallestrup’s (Synthese 1–19, 2016) denial that group competence involves anything over and beyond the aggregation of individual competences. I have divided my response into two parts. First, I compare two conceptions of competence from Ernest Sosa’s reliabilist virtue epistemology (Sosa in Philos Stud 142:5–15, 2009; Philos Perspect 24:465–475, 2010a; Knowing full well, Princeton University Press, 2010b; Judgment & agency, Oxford University Press, 2015; Epistemology, Princeton University Press, 2017; in: Silva-Filho, Tateo (eds), Thinking about oneself: The place and value of reflection in philosophy and psychology, Springer, 2019) and David Löwenstein’s (Know-how as competence. A Rylean responsibilist account, Vittorio Klostermann, 2017) account of know-how. Second, I take the results from this comparison and apply them to the issue of group know-how, by the hand of Orestis Palermos and Deborah Tollefsen’s twofold approach to the topic (Palermos and Tollefsen, in: Carter, Clark, Kallestrup, Palermos, Pritchard (eds) Socially extended epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2018). Finally, I return to Kallestrup’s denial to make my point in favour of the conception of genuine group competence as the group normative status to achieve success.

Group Agents and Moral Status: What Can We Owe to Organizations?

Organizations have neither a right to vote nor a right to life. But we can owe them to keep our promises or show them gratitude. So we owe some things to organizations, but not everything we owe to people. What explains this? Individualistic views explain it just in terms of features of organizations’ individual members. Collectivistic views explain it just in terms of features of those organizations. Neither view works. Instead, we need to synthesize these approaches. Some individual interests are distinctively collective. Individuals have an interest in participating in successful collective action. This explains organizations’ apparently fragmented moral status.

Can Creativity Be a Collective Virtue? Insights for the Ethics of Innovation

Virtue accounts of innovation ethics have recognized the virtue of creativity as an admirable trait in innovators. However, such accounts have not paid sufficient attention to the way creativity functions as a collective phenomenon. We propose a collective virtue account to supplement existing virtue accounts. We base our account on Kieran’s definition of creativity as a virtue and distinguish three components in it: creative output, mastery and intrinsic motivation. We argue that all of these components can meaningfully be attributed to innovation groups. This means that we can also attribute the virtue of creativity to group agents involved in innovation. Recognizing creativity as a collective virtue in innovation is important because it allows for a more accurate evaluation of how successful innovation generally happens. The innovator who takes a collective virtue account of creativity seriously will give attention to the facilitation of an environment where the group can flourish collectively, rather than only nurturing the individual genius.

Accounting for groups: the dynamics of intragroup deliberation

In a highly influential work, List and Pettit (Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents, Oxford University Press, 2011) draw upon the theory of judgement aggregation to offer an argument for the existence of nonreductive group agents; they also suggest that nonreductive group agency is a widespread phenomenon. In this paper, we argue for the following two claims. First, that the axioms they consider cannot naturally be interpreted as either descriptive characterisations or normative constraints upon group judgements, in general. This makes it unclear how the List and Pettit argument is to apply to real world group behaviour. Second, by examining empirical data about how group judgements are made by a powerful international regulatory board, we show how each of the List and Pettit axioms can be violated in ways which are straightforwardly explicable at the level of the individual. This suggests that group agency may best be understood as a pluralistic phenomenon, where close inspection of the dynamics of intragroup deliberation can reveal that what prima facie appears to be a nonreductive group agent is, in fact, reducible.

Compacting oblivious agents on dynamic rings

In this paper we investigate dynamic networks populated by autonomous mobile agents. Dynamic networks are networks whose topology can change continuously, at unpredictable locations and at unpredictable times. These changes are not considered to be faults, but rather an integral part of the nature of the system. The agents can autonomously move on the network, with the goal of solving cooperatively an assigned common task. Here, we focus on a specific network: the unoriented ring. More specifically, we study 1-interval connected dynamic rings (i.e., at any time, at most one of the edges might be missing). The agents move according to the widely used Look–Compute–Move life cycle, and can be homogenous (thus identical) or heterogenous (agents are assigned colors from a set of c > 1 colors). For identical agents, their goal is to form a compact segment, where agents occupy a continuous part of the ring and no two agents occupy the same node: we call this the Compact Configuration Problem. In the case of agents with colors, called the Colored Compact Configuration Problem, the goal is to group agents such that each group is formed by all agents having the same color, it occupies a continuous segment of the network, and groups of agents having different colors occupy distinct areas of the network. In this paper we determine the necessary conditions to solve both proposed problems. For all solvable cases, we provide algorithms for both the monochromatic and the colored version of the compact configuration problem. All our algorithms work even for the simplest model where agents have no persistent memory, no communication capabilities and do not agree on a common orientation within the network. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work on the compaction problem in a dynamic network.

Of pride and prejudice: agent learning under sticky and persistent stereotype

Stereotypes matter for economic interaction if counterparty utility is informed by factors other than price. Stereotyped agents may engage in efforts to counter stereotype by adapting to in-group standards. We present a model informing the optimal extent of these efforts depending on an agent’s (a) share of total transactions between out- and in-group agents; and (b) share of repeated transaction pairings with in-group counterparties. Low values of (a) suppress the effect of adaptation efforts on the stereotype itself (persistence). In turn, low values of (b) mean that out-group agents cannot dissociate from stereotype (stickiness). Significantly, the model implies that the optimum level of effort may require adaptation beyond in-group standards, and that such over-adaptation attains maximum likelihood in cases where stereotype is sticky and persistent at the same time. We test our model with data on private equity buyout investments conducted in Japan between 1998 and 2015 by domestic Japanese and Anglo-Saxon funds. We document that the latter not only adapt, but eventually over-adapt. In addition, we show that their efforts are effective in reducing a premium initially asked by domestic counterparties.

Can it be or feel right to hate? On the appropriateness and fittingness of hatred

What exactly is wrong with hating others? However deep-seated the intuition, when it comes to spelling out the reasons for why hatred is inappropriate, the literature is rather meager and confusing. In this paper, I attempt to be more precise by distinguishing two senses in which hatred is inappropriate, a moral and a non-moral one. First, I critically discuss the central current proposals defending the possibility of morally appropriate hatred in the face of serious wrongs or evil perpetrators and show that they are all based on a problematic assumption, which I call the ?reality of evil agents assumption?. I then turn to the issue of non-moral emotional appropriateness and sketch a novel, focus-based account of fittingness. Next, I outline the distinctive affective intentionality of hatred, suggesting that hatred, unlike most other antagonistic emotions, has an overgeneralizing and indeterminate affective focus. Against this background, I argue that hatred cannot be fitting. Due to the indeterminacy of its focus, hatred fails to pick out those evaluative features of the intentional object that would really matter to the emoters. I close with some tentative remarks on the possibility of appropriate hatred towards corporate or group agents.