Group Agency and Group Consciousness

Christian List (London School of Economics)

Please join us for the first talk of the 2018/19 lecture series "Collective Values: Deciding the Good (and Bad) Together" at LMU Munich:

"Group Agency and Group Consciousness"
Christian List (LSE)
MKE, Munich Centre for Ethics, M210, LMU main building, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
6.00-7.30pm

Talks will be followed by dinner with the speaker (at your own expense).

Under certain conditions, groups can be intentional, goal-directed agents in their own right, over and above their individual members. They behave in ways that lend themselves to intentional explanation, in much the same way in which we explain the behaviour of individuals as goal-directed agents. Examples of group agents are corporations, courts, NGOs, and even entire states. But should we also accept that there is such a thing as group consciousness? I will give an overview of some of the key issues in this debate and argue that group agents lack phenomenal consciousness. My argument suggests that group agents have minds in one sense (a functionalist one), but not in another (a phenomenological one). I conclude by pointing out a normative implication of my argument.

Upcoming lectures:
- 24 January 2019, 18:00, Fiorella Battaglia (LMU): "Should We Be Engaged in Establishing the ‘Right Not to Be Subject to Automated Decision-Making’?"
- 25 April 2019, 18:00, Natalie Gold (Oxford): "Team Reasoning and Collective Values"
- 16 May 2019, 18:00, Nick Chater (Warwick): "Virtual Bargaining: A Microfoundation for the Theory of Social Interaction"
- 1 June 2019, 18:00, Cristina Bicchieri (Pennsylvania): "The Dynamics of Norm Erosion"
- July 2019 (date tba), Benedetto de Martino (UCL)

The series is jointly organized by the Chair of Philosophy of Mind and the Munich Center for Ethics. Nick Chater’s lecture is co-organized with the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.