Szanto, Thomas (2014). Do Group Persons have Emotions – or Should They? In Harald A. Wiltsche & Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Methods and Perspectives. Proceedings of the 37th International Wittgenstein Symposium. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 261-276.
To getaninitial flavorfor the issue at stake, consider the following type of statements that we can regularly encounter in the media: ‘G.M. is concerned about the steep rise of oil prices’; ‘Germany deeply regrets the war crimes committed in Greece.’ Such statements have also been recently analyzed by a number of authors working on collective emotions (e.g., Gilbert 2002;Tollefsen 2003; Huebner et al. 2010;Huebner 2011;Gilbert 2014; Schmid 2014). No matter how one specifies their subject (as legal, artificial, etc.), such statements are not only attributed by third parties but are often also self-attributed, as in the following self-promotion issued by acomputer company: “HP is afirm where one can breathe the spirit of interrelations […]. It is an affective relationship” (cited from Illouz 2007,p.22).
1. The Moral Address and Moral Agency Attribution Account: Though ontologically there are no proper GPs (or, alternatively, whether or not there are such), a collective C can, and in fact should, be counted and treated as a GP, if C is the appropriate target of moral address. Thus, if (i) C’s morally relevant joint action is irreducible to a subset of or the aggregation of the individual members’ actions, and if (ii) either the moral practice of attributing (collective) responsibility to C, or the interpersonal practice of entertaining so-called reactive attitudes (à la Strawson 1968), such as resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, blame, etc., towards C, are justified, then C should be treated as a (characteristically personal) subject bearing moral agency, accountability, and responsibility (Finnis 1989; Tollefsen 2003; Graham 2004; see also with slightly different emphasis, Manning 1984; Sheehy 2006; Huebner 2014; cf. Hess 2013).
2. The Moral Personhood Account: Certain groups and corporations are, ontologically, proper persons, if they are intentional and moral agents who are licensed by having a “Corporation’s Internal Decision Structure” (CID). CID is a “responsibility flow chart” that, together with certain corporate decision rules embedded in corporate policies and recognized as such, determines the levels of, and ratification, exercise, and control of agency within, a corporation’s power structure (French 1979).
3. The Collective Self-Concept Account: A collective has “person-like properties,” such as the capacity to intend, act, plan, regret, or hope, if its members take a first-person plural perspective and have a “shared self-concept” (which also includes membership criteria and is common knowledge among members) (Mathiesen 2003).
4. The Unity of Rational Agency and Social Integrate Account: A collective qualifies as a group person if it is a unified intentional agent that has its own “rational point of view” (Rovane 1989), from which it deliberates, and which guides its actions and the formation of new beliefs and commitments, and that may well be discontinuous with the rational or “deliberative standpoint” (Korsgaard 1989) of each and every member of the group. Moreover, such “social integrates” (Pettit 2003) can be collectively held (morally) responsible for the failure to rationally unify or integrate their actions and beliefs (see also List & Pettit 2011; Szanto 2014).
Notice also that only(1) represents asort of (Dennettian or Davidsonian) “interpretationism” that, despite taking the attribution of (moral) personhood to collectives to metaphysically be an open question, or to be unjustified even, still sees it as necessary for normative and explanatory reasons (cf. Tollefsen 2003). All other accounts grant collectives the proper metaphysical status of being persons.
There are also some possible intermediate positions between (1) and (2): e.g.,one may hold that GP are, though moral agents, no full-fledged persons, because they have no full-fledged moral (but only conventional, or collectively accepted) rights (Ozar 1985).
Alternatively, one may hold that the important question is not metaphysical but, rather, whether groups ought to be treated as individual moral persons, and whether we should have the same scruples about being fair to them or holding them morallyresponsible as we do in the individ ual case (Manning 1984;see more below,sec. 4).
First, it may be argued that reactive attitudes need emotions to reliably track them, or to have some morally motivational power, even if this turns out to be a contingent fact of human (moral) psychology. Mele has put this point nicely:
Perhaps, owing to our basic psychological makeup, we simply cannot learn to regard the interests of others as at all important unless we are sensitive to emotions of other people […] and learn to see ourselves as apt targets of some reactive emotions. Perhaps such sensitivity and learning are, for us, psychologically necessary for the acquisition of any sort of moral sensitivity or understanding. This is a contingent matter. […] Might a hypothetical, isolated community of emotionless beings — hence, beings with no reactive attitudes — include morally responsible agents? (Mele 2000, p. 449)
The idea here is that, if you weren’t able to feel ashamed when being blamed, you wouldn’t be able to be subjected to reactive attitudes such as blame either, nor would you be able to see when it is appropriate to blame somebody else; moreover, we wouldn’t know when and why it would hurt somebody else to be blamed (unjustly or not). It is also this emotional-cum-moral sensibility, and indeed sensitivity, that we both draw upon and try to modulate when we educate the interpersonal behaviour of our children. Now, there seems to be no principled reason why such moral-cum-emotional sensibility should not be possible and, indeed, appropriate in the collective, or group-personal, case.
(2) The second line of objection is closely related to the first. According to this concern, emotions and feelings, just like suffering, incidentally, require that the subject who has them has some phenomenal consciousness, or is consciously aware of having them. After all, emotions, and especially their often-invoked ‘qualitative feel’, seem, in a more straightforward sense than any other type of mental state,¹⁰ to be paradigmatic examples of conscious states. Moreover, one may, and rightly so, question whether group persons, or group minds, must be collectively conscious or not; indeed, I have argued elsewhere that they need not and, indeed, must not (Szanto 2014). In this vein, for example, Huebner (2011) has voiced similar skepticism. Instead of phenomenally conscious (group-) personal level collective emotions, he argues, rather, for subpersonal level collective emotional processes, which may serve similar cognitive functions as individual (and, possibly, personal) level emotions.
But, again, we have a strategy available that allows for reactive emotions to be dissociated from such instances of phenomenal consciousness. According to this, reactive emotions are not individuated by their phenomenology – which GP may then well lack – but, rather, by the norms governing them. Here is how Tollefsen puts this point:
The fact that collectives lack phenomenology, then, does not mean that they lack the capacity for reactive attitudes. […] Collective reactive attitudes would be differentiated on this approach from individual reactive attitudes in terms of the norms governing the relevant reactions. Certain emotional responses might be licensed for an individual only because of her group membership. They would also be differentiated in terms of their motivational upshot. The ‘pangs’ of remorse you feel qua group member may lead you to do actions that you would not do qua individual. Although this approach does not have the collective itself feeling the emotion, it does identify a way in which emotions can be collective. Perhaps this is all we need in order for collectives to be appropriate targets of our reactive attitudes. (Tollefsen 2003, p. 232)