Frank Hindriks

Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together ten new philosophical essays that address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states.The theories of the Big Four of collective intentionality -- Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and Margaret Gilbert -- and the Big Five of Social Ontology -- which in addition to the Big Four includes Philip Pettit -- play a central role in almost all of these essays. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including dynamical systems theory, economics, and psychology, the contributors develop existing theories, criticize them, or provide alternatives to them.Several essays challenge the idea that there is a straightforward dichotomy between individual and collective level rationality, and explore the interplay between these levels in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between them. These contributions make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is a discrepancy. Some go as far as arguing that on closer inspection the alleged discontinuities dissolve.

Neither Johnston's nor Wright's account of response-dependence offers a complete picture of response-dependence, as they do not apply to all concepts that are intrinsically related to our mental responses. In order to (begin to) remedy this situation, a new conception of response-dependence is introduced that I call "acceptance-dependence". This account applies to concepts such as goal, constitutional, and money, the first two of which have mistakenly been taken to be response-dependent in another sense. Whereas on Johnston's and Wright's accounts response-dependent concepts depend on counterfactual responses of individuals, acceptance-dependent concepts depend on the actual responses of groups of people. This implies that concepts of the latter kind are less objective than concepts of the former kind.

Some harms are such that they cannot be prevented by a single individual because she lacks the requisite control. Because of this, no individual has the obligation to do so. It may be, however, that the harm can be prevented when several individuals combine their efforts. I argue that in many such situations each individual has a duty to join forces: to approach others, convince them to contribute, and subsequently make a coordinated effort to prevent the harm. A distinctive feature of this proposal is that, in the first instance, it focuses on mobilizing others rather than on preventing the outcome. As it ultimately concerns a collective harm, the duty to join forces is irreducibly collective. Furthermore, once enough people have been mobilized, they have a collective obligation to prevent the harm that is irreducibly collective also because it applies to the collective as such.

A common objection against deflationist theories of truth is that they cannot do justice to the correspondence intuition, i.e. the intuition that there is an explanatory relationship between, for instance, the truth of ‘Snow is white’ and snow's being white. We scrutinize two attempts to meet this objection and argue that both fail. We then propose a new response to the objection which, first, sheds doubt on the correctness of the correspondence intuition and, second, seeks to explain how we may nonetheless have come to have that intuition.

Traditional accounts of explanation fail to illuminate the explanatory relevance of “models that are descriptively false” in the sense that the regularities they entail fail to obtain. In this paper, I propose an account of explanation, which I call ‘explanation by concretization’, that serves to explicate the explanatory relevance of such models. Starting from a highly abstract and idealized model, causal explanations of the absence of regularities are sought by adding complexity to the model or by concretizing it. Whether this process is successful depends on whether the abstractions and idealizations in the basic model succeed in isolating a mechanism, i.e. in representing how it operates when interfering factors are absent. This account is developed in the context of economics and contrasted to those of Daniel Hausman and Nancy Cartwright. I go on to provide an account of how unrealistic models can be used for providing understanding of the way mechanisms work.

Many existing defenses of group rights seem to rely on the notion of group freedom. To date, however, no adequate analysis of this notion has been offered. Group freedom is best understood in terms of processes of social categorization that are embedded in social mechanisms. Such processes often give rise to group-specific constraints and enablements. On the proposed social mechanism account, group rights are demands for group freedom. Even so, group rights often serve to eradicate individual unfreedom. Furthermore, generic measures sometimes provide the most appropriate solution to a problem of group unfreedom.

Institutions are norm-governed social practices, or so I propose. But what does it mean for a norm to govern a social practice? Theories that analyze institutions as equilibria equate norms with sanctions and model them as costs. The idea is that the sanctions change preferences and thereby behavior. This view fails to capture the fact that people are often motivated by social norms as such, when they regard them as legitimate. I argue that, in order for a social norm to be perceived as legitimate, agents have to acknowledge reasons for conforming to it other than the sanctions they might incur for violating it. In light of this, I defend a theory of institutions that does not only invoke equilibria, but also normative rules that are supported by normative expectations and, in some cases, normative beliefs.

According to the expression account, assertion is the linguistic expression of belief. Given the knowledge rule of belief, this entails that knowledge is a normative requirement of sincere assertions. On this account, which is defended in Hindriks, knowledge can be a normative requirement of sincere assertions even though there is no knowledge rule that is constitutive of assertion. Ball criticizes this claim arguing that the derivation of the knowledge rule equivocates between epistemic and moral senses of obligation. In response, we resist the charge of equivocation. Ball does not, after all, demonstrate that the distinction matters in the context at issue. In addition to this, we argue that it is a virtue of the account that the knowledge rule is restricted in application to sincere assertions. The case we present to illustrate this is that of the virtuous liar who knows what he believes, and is insincere because that is the right thing to do in the situation. It makes no sense, we suggest, to criticize the liar for not knowing that which he asserts. After all, it is his moral duty to assert what he knows to be false. Furthermore, his epistemic standing is impeccable, as he knows what he believes.

In a celebrated experiment, Joshua Knobe showed that people are much more prone to attribute intentionality to an agent for a side effect of a given act when that side effect is harmful than when it is beneficial. This asymmetry has become known as ‘the Knobe Effect’. According to Knobe's Moral Valence Explanation, bad effects trigger the attributions of intentionality, whereas good effects do not. Many others believe that the Knobe Effect is best explained in terms of the high amount of blame attributed in the harm condition, and the low amount of praise attributed in the help condition. This Blame Hypothesis explains the high number of intentionality attributions in the harm condition in terms of the high degree of blame people ascribe, and the low number of intentionality attributions in the help conditions in terms of the low degree of praise people attribute. We replicated Knobe's original experiment and conducted a logistic regression on the results to probe more deeply into the relationship between attributions of intentionality and responsibility. The statistical analysis revealed a hitherto unknown interaction effect: intentionality correlates with blame, but not with praise. This interaction effect is consistent with the Moral Valence Hypothesis, but inconsistent with the Blame Hypothesis, as well as with two of the three other hypotheses discussed here.

Experimental philosophers have discovered a large number of asymmetries in our intuitions about philosophically significant notions. Often those intuitions turned out to be sensitive to normative factors. Whereas optimists have insisted on a unified explanation of these findings, pessimists have argued that it is impossible to formulate a single factor explanation. I defend the intermediate position according to which unification is possible to some extent, but should be pursued within limits. The key issue that I address is how it is possible to set such limits in a way that is true to the phenomena.

Responsibility gaps concern the attribution of blame for harms caused by autonomous machines. The worry has been that, because they are artificial agents, it is impossible to attribute blame, even though doing so would be appropriate given the harms they cause. We argue that there are no responsibility gaps. The harms can be blameless. And if they are not, the blame that is appropriate is indirect and can be attributed to designers, engineers, software developers, manufacturers or regulators. The real problem lies elsewhere: autonomous machines should be built so as to exhibit a level of risk that is morally acceptable. If they fall short of this standard, they exhibit what we call ‘a control gap.’ The causal control that autonomous machines have will then fall short of the guidance control they should emulate.

We propose a bridge-builder perspective on social ontology. Our point of departure is that an important task of philosophy is to provide the bigger picture. To this end, it should investigate folk views and determine whether and how they can be preserved once scrutinized from the perspective of the sciences. However, the sciences typically present us with a fragmented picture of reality. Thus, an important intermediate step is to integrate the most promising social scientific theories with one another. In addition to this, social ontology can provide input to and benefit from other philosophical disciplines that engage in normative theorizing. Thus, we propose that social ontology connects not only with folk ontology and scientific ontology but also with fields such as ethics and political philosophy. Building bridges between them serves to formulate a credible and encompassing worldview that is of theoretical and practical significance.

Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article’s author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle’s notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses more than it enlightens. The distinction is exposed between regulative and constitutive rules as being primarily a linguistic one: whereas deontic powers figure explicitly in regulative rules, they feature only implicitly in constitutive rules. Furthermore, he contends that Searle’s collective acceptance account of human rights cannot adequately account for the fact that people have these rights even when they are not recognized. Finally, It is argued that a conception of collective intentionality that involves collective commitment is needed in order to do justice to the normative dimension of institutions.

ABSTARCT When people go shopping, they enter a building. But the shop cannot be identified with the building, because it would remain the same shop if it moved to another building or if it became an e-store. Daniel Korman [2019] uses these two observations to argue that establishments are immaterial objects. However, all that follows is that establishments are not buildings. I argue that establishments are organisations or corporate agents that are constituted by people. This entails that they are material objects. Korman’s observations can be accommodated in terms of the further observation that corporate agents can but need not own or rent buildings.

Institutions are often regarded either as rules or as equilibria sustained by self-interested agents. I ask how these two theories can be combined. According to Philip Pettit’s _Virtual Control Theory_, they explain different things: rules explain why regularities persist; self-interest why they are resilient. Thus, his theory reconciles the two theories by adjusting their domains of application. However, the available evidence suggests that rules and self-interest often combine as sources of motivation. Because of this, it is better to integrate the theories rather than to reconcile them. Inspired by Cristina Bicchieri’s theory of social norms, I incorporate the notion of rule-following into a game-theoretic account of institutions. According to the resulting _Rules-and-Equilibrium Theory_, institutions are rule- or norm-governed social practices. The theory does not only explain their persistence and resilience, but also their fragility, which provides another reason for preferring the proposed integration to Pettit’s reconciliation.

In 1964 Searle argued against the naturalistic fallacy thesis that an ought-statement can in fact be derived from is-statements. From an analysis of this argument and of Searle’s social ontology of 1995 – which includes a full-blown theory of institutional facts – I conclude that this argument is unsound on his own (later) terms. The conclusion that can now be drawn from Searle’s argument is that social or institutional obligations are epistemically objective even though they are observer-dependent. I go on to argue that the strength of such obligations depends on the strength of the underlying collective acceptance, which is a kind of collective intentionality. I also point out that all normativity in Searle’s framework can be traced back to either individual or collective intentionality. This bars him from providing an account of intention-independent moral facts.

ABSTARCT When people go shopping, they enter a building. But the shop cannot be identified with the building, because it would remain the same shop if it moved to another building or if it became an e-store. Daniel Korman [2019] uses these two observations to argue that establishments are immaterial objects. However, all that follows is that establishments are not buildings. I argue that establishments are organisations or corporate agents that are constituted by people. This entails that they are material objects. Korman’s observations can be accommodated in terms of the further observation that corporate agents can but need not own or rent buildings.

:Freedom is often analysed in terms of the absence of intentionally imposed constraints. I defend the alternative view on which the relevant constraints are those for which some agent can be held morally responsible. I argue that this best captures the relation between freedom and respect. Berlin correctly points out that intentional restrictions exhibit ill will and hence are disrespectful. However, the same holds, I argue, for restrictions that are due to indifference. Berlin also observed that it would be counterintuitive if an agent could increase her freedom by changing her preferences. I criticize the argument that Dowding and Van Hees present according to which this observation counts in favour of explicating freedom in terms of intentionality.

True Love Without Uniqueness: Good Reasons for Romantic Love Love involves emotions, and emotions are things that happen to us. So how can love be true? Love can be true only if people can have reasons for loving someone. I explore the tension between these two thoughts and propose a way of resolving it. I argue that reasons for romantic love are not limited to the other person’s properties, not even when relational properties such as a common sense of humour are included. A full-blown romantic relation provides relation-dependent reasons that derive from the values that are realized within the relationship. These include trust, vulnerability and intimacy. True love is justified in part by such relation-dependent reasons. How this is consistent with the emotional dimension of love becomes clear once it is appreciated that people can have reasons for the emotions they experience. As this is not always recognized, the mystery of love is sometimes overrated. I end by discussing whether true love must be unique in the sense of being limited to one particular person. I argue that true love need not be combined with the norms of monogamy, but is consistent with those of polyamory.

Many morally significant outcomes can be brought about only if several individuals contribute to them. However, individual contributions to collective outcomes often fail to have morally significant effects on their own. Some have concluded from this that it is permissible to do nothing. What I call ‘the problem of insignificant hands’ is the challenge of determining whether and when people are obligated to contribute. For this to be the case, I argue, the prospect of helping to bring about the outcome has to be good enough. Furthermore, the individual must be in a position to increase the probability of its being brought about to an appropriate extent. Finally, I argue that when too few are willing to contribute, people may have a duty to increase their number. Thus, someone can be obligated to contribute or to get others to contribute. This prospect account is consistent with Kantianism, contractualism and rule consequentialism but inconsistent with act consequentialism.

There is widespread agreement among philosophers about the Mens Rea Asymmetry (MRA), according to which praise requires intent, whereas blame does not. However, there is evidence showing that MRA is descriptively inadequate. We hypothesize that the violations of MRA found in the experimental literature are due to what we call “moral compositionality,” by which we mean that people evaluate the component parts of a moral problem separately and then reach an overall verdict by aggregating the verdicts on the component parts. We have subjected this hypothesis to the test and here report the results of our experiment. We explore several explanations of the experimental findings and conclude that they present a puzzle to moral theory.