Group Action Without Group Minds

Abstract

Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states-typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. I show how a more general view of action captures what is central to action without mentioning mental states, and I argue that a group's members can fulfill the role in group action that mental states play in our actions. Group behavior is explicable in terms of reasons, regardless of whether the group itself cognizes those reasons. After discussing the kind of reasons at issue and arguing that groups can act in light of them without minds, I assess how this account bears on the question of group responsibility.We frequently speak as if there are groups and as if those groups can do things. A basketball team can win the championship; the Supreme Court can strike down the decision of a lower court; Amazon can acquire Whole Foods. One set of questions concerns whether there really are such groups and how best to understand their existence (as well as the differences between groups, collectives, corporations, etc.). Another kind of question, however, concerns whether the behavior of groups can appropriately be construed as actions. Here, I focus on the latter question.Let's take it for granted that groups exist. 1 Given this, there is a strong intuition that certain groups act. The acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon is something done by Amazon that seems intelligible. It may follow from an overall market strategy, and management will point to this as the reason for the acquisition in answer to shareholder scrutiny. Even in cases of small groups, we readily ascribe actions. We would say, for example, that the tenure committee recommended tenure and had reasons for doing so.To make good on this intuition, we need to see how the behavior of groups can be captured by a theory of action. There are many views of action that have been developed, so we would ideally need only to pick a good one and show how groups can satisfy its conditions. 2 When trying to do this, though, what becomes apparent is that most of the prominent views of action in the literature involve 1 We need only accept that some groups exist. This is not uncontroversial, but I take it for granted here and focus instead on whether what groups do can be construed as actions. See Ritchie (2013) for a discussion of a number of proposals of how groups exist, including her own. I remain agnostic here as to the nature of group existence. Though I am partial to an account on which groups are sui generis entities constituted by members in virtue of the group structure and certain social facts (bearing the most similarities to Uzquiano [2004]), the account of group action g...

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