Group Virtues: No Great Leap Forward with Collectivism

Abstract

A body of work in ethics and epistemology has advanced a collectivist view of virtues. Collectivism holds that some social groups can be subjects in themselves which can possess attributes such as agency or responsibility. Collectivism about virtues holds that virtues (and vices) are among those attributes. By focusing on two different accounts, I argue that the collectivist virtue project has limited prospects. On one such interpretation of institutional virtues, virtue-like features of the social collective are explained by particular group-oriented features of individual role-bearers that are elicited by institutional structures or goals. On another account of groups as moral agents unbound by formal institutional constraints, to the extent that group characteristics meet the collectivist requirement, they fail to stand up as virtues in the substantive sense of a character trait. These two positions' respective drawbacks and insights support a non-collectivist conclusion: Where there is a substantive virtue of some social group, it consists only in certain group-specific attitudes and motives of individuals qua members of that group. I end by outlining some risks in adopting collectivism about virtues as an explanatory or normative doctrine, and suggesting that we can abandon it without embracing an equally undesirable individualism in virtue theory.

Implicit bias and epistemic vice

“…This view of collective vice will face an objection recently advanced by Cordell (2017): that what I have identified is a feature of a collective, but does not amount to a substantive vice. 35 This is for two reasons: first, he argues that if a feature is to be diagnosed 33 We might ultimately come to quite different views regarding the vices of institutions and groups or collectives on a number of matters, such as their collective responsibility and blameworthiness, as well as forward-looking responsibilities for correcting vice.…”

“…I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing defensible about summativist conceptions, but simply that such accounts will not be the right model for the case in hand. For discussion of summativist and anti-summativist approaches, seeFricker 2010, Lahroodi 2007, Cordell 2017, Byerly & Byerly 2016.23 Fricker also notes some reliability condition will also be needed, to ensure the relationship between the motive or method and good outcome.24 Though as Fricker emphasizes, it need not involve awareness that one is committing to something qua virtue, nor the reliable relationship between that motive or way or proceeding and good outcome.…”

Fake News, Conspiracy Theorizing, and Intellectual Vice

“…Its main competitor Airbus has installed extensive computer technology in aircraft since the early 1980s . 7 For a critical discussion of Fricker, see , Cordell (2017), and Konzelmann Ziv (2012). 8 Many functionalists believe that functioning as an agent simply is what it means to be an agent.…”

For A Service Conception of Epistemic Authority: A Collective Approach

“…15 Nonetheless, I shall grant that an expert group can display this virtue simply because its members jointly commit to performing their task but divide the labor in such a way that their agency reflects the group's trait. 16 Let us set aside this issue and consider an objection against the collectivist spirit of Fricker's account recently raised by Sean Cordell (2017). Specifically, the objection tackles the idea that joint commitments to a motive or an end of a virtue are irreducible to personal commitments.…”