Reasons, Values, and Group Agents

We are agents: we can act. Agents are subject to norms. Some norms seem highly personal: for example, what we have reason to do or what is good for us. Other norms seem more social: for example, laws or the commitments of employment contracts. One of the deepest questions of moral philosophy is to explain why, if at all, the norms to which we are subject matter. This project explores why norms matter to agents. It has three main stages. The first is general. It focuses on some theoretical considerations about norms: whether norms depend on us, as agents, or on external facts. My hypothesis is the former, for two reasons. First, our practices of moralizing criticizing, blaming, and praising appear to involve having to explain why moral judgements hold for those we make them about. Second, if norms are to genuinely matter for an agent, the agent cannot be alienated from them. These points give an edge to the agential view. This generates methodological points for the latter stages. The second stage is also general. It aims to explain reasons and values. The central hypothesis is that both can be explained in a unified way by an agents desires when the agent is appropriately idealized: responding to the facts, is otherwise rational, and similar. Hence, reasons and value for the agent both depend on what the agent would desire when idealized. This idea is not new, but the unified view promises to capture methodological points from the first stage of the project and respond to many objections in novel ways. In the third phase, the considerations from the previous phases are applied to the norms of social groups, in particular to the norms that structure organized groups such as countries and companies, which normally are considered to be group agents in the literature. Here, my central hypothesis is to argue for a theory of group agents in which their actions are organized by relevant conventionally accepted norms for individual group members. This theory stands in contrast to most theories in the literature: both to theories that attempt to explain group agents through the actions of individual group members and to theories that view groups as independent agents with beliefs, desires and similar states. Most of the former theories leave group members alienated from group norms, and the latter do not explain group reasons or values well. Hence, discussing the actions of groups by considering the nature of normativity and normative phenomena such as reasons and values leads to unexpected results.