States as Agents and Computing Systems

We live in a world dominated by states. Whether we like it or not, how states are internally organised and how they interact with one another directly affect our lives. Economic development, wars, democratisation, climate change and many other important phenomena can, at least in part, be explained by how states work. But how do they work? How should we think about them? Political scientists often like to treat states as if they were human beingsas things that have desires, beliefs and intentions. For example, it is often said that a state increases its military expenditure when it believes that the threat posed by its rivals is growing. But does it make sense to treat states like humans? At first sight, the answer seems to be an obvious no, given that states are not made up of flesh and bones and do not possess consciousness like we do. However, things are more complicated than that. In fact, many philosophers hold that states are human-like in significant respects and many political scientists argue that even if states are not literally like human beings, it is useful to pretend that they are. If that is the case, one wonders, are there other things that states are like? Are there things that are worth pretending that states are like for the sake of achieving better explanations and predictions in the social sciences? In particular, should we pretend that states are like computers, that they follow well-defined sequences of rules similar to algorithms? Should we pretend that Austria behaves, at least in some ways, like a MacBook? My project tries to shed light on these and related questions by bringing together insights from philosophy, political science, computer science and other relevant disciplines. More specifically, it will contribute to long-standing debates about the nature of the modern state by bringing together various bodies of literature that have, so far, developed largely independently of each other. It will try to provide a philosophical theory of what it is for a state to be human-like (or, as academics say, what it is for a state to be an agent or actor) and computer-like, and to explore whether a states agency is related to its computational character.