Bill Wringe

I address the question of whether non-agential groups can have agential powers, or abilities and propose a new analysis of group agential powers. In this paper I provide a plausible counter-example to the claim that the only groups of agents that can have agential powers are collective agents, and discuss other, weaker conditions which a groups of agents must satisfy in order to have agential powers. In particular, I introduce a notion which I call ‘co-agential attunement’ and provide an analysis of group agential powers on which a group’s members must be capable of becoming co-agentially attuned in order to have agential powers. Some non-agential groups meet this condition: a group’s members having the mere capacity for co-agential attunement does not make the group a collective agent.

I address the question of whether non-agential groups can have agential powers, or abilities and propose a new analysis of group agential powers. In this paper I provide a plausible counter-example to the claim that the only groups of agents that can have agential powers are collective agents, and discuss other, weaker conditions which a groups of agents must satisfy in order to have agential powers. In particular, I introduce a notion which I call ‘co-agential attunement’ and provide an analysis of group agential powers on which a group’s members must be capable of becoming co-agentially attuned in order to have agential powers. Some non-agential groups meet this condition: a group’s members having the mere capacity for co-agential attunement does not make the group a collective agent.

This chapter discusses obligations falling on collectives or groups of agents, focusing on cases in which obligations fall on the group non-distributively—that is, cases in which the attribution of an obligation to a group does not entail attributions of that very same obligation to group members. The relationship between claims about what groups ought to do and what the individuals that make them up ought to do is a complex matter. In this chapter, particular attention is paid to the relationship between collective obligation and collective agency and to the way in which appeal to the explanatory role of collective obligations can be used to undermine pressure toward reductionist and eliminativist views of these obligations.

I argue that in certain circumstances where individuals are harmed or wrongful omissions occur, and those harms or wrongs could have been avoided by collective action, it can be appropriate for individuals who were in a position to contribute to avoiding those wrongs to feel a kind of collective regret. This can be true even in situations where there was no agent, individual or collective who was in a position to prevent the harm or wrong, provided that a suitable collective agent could have been formed. I also argue the existence and appropriateness of this form of collective moral regret suggests that collective obligations can fall on groups which do not constitute collective agents. This conclusion runs counter to an assumption which plays a fundamental role in much existing work on collective obligation: namely that only agents can be obligation bearers.

Collective action and responsibility have gained increased attention in the past decades. The influence of collective agents on our lives and the prevalence of collective harms, such as climate change, has brought the collective nature of human action into the spotlight. Philosophers have addressed these issues from the viewpoint of social ontology and political philosophy. Despite their complementary focus on the nature of collective action and agency on the one hand and the nature of political action on the other, the two strands of philosophical literature have seen relatively little cross-pollination so far. This volume aims to bring these two strands a little closer to one another, aiming to expand the range of issues within political philosophy to which conceptual resources for understanding collective responsibility developed within the field of social ontology can be applied. At the same time, we aim to also shed new light on issues that have been staples of discussion within the social ontology literature, including the extent to which collective agents can be understood as moral agents and, hence, as bearers of a kind of collective moral responsibility.

I shall argue that advocates of denunciatory forms of expressivism can make a good case for restricting the range of measures that can be an appropriate form of punishment. They can do so by focusing not on the conditions of uptake of the message conveyed by punishment, but by the content of that message. For it is plausible that part of that message should be that the offender is a responsible agent and a member of the political community. Forms of punishment which do not treat the offender as such are, for that reason unacceptable. Among the forms of punishment which are thereby ruled out are the extended use of solitary confinement, since this undermines the capacity for moral agency – and permanent felon disenfranchisement. I also address two objections to this line of argument. One focuses on penal practices involving those who are not members of the political community: resident aliens and minors. These two cases raise different issues, but they both appear to show that justifiable punishment does not need to communicate a message which has components affirming agency and membership of a political community. I argue that in both cases the justifiability of punishment piggy-backs on the kind of justification available in the standard case. A second objection suggests that the offender has excluded themselves from the political community, and that measures that recognize this are therefore acceptable: I argue that very few offences, if any, have this character. ---

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which the concept of collective responsibility is relevant to ongoing normative debates in social and political philosophy. Individual chapters address issues such as the relationship between collective obligations and collective responsibility, the kinds of groups which can be the subjects of collective responsibility and obligations, and the relationship between the obligations of groups and the obligations of individual members of those groups. The book also puts these concepts to work in a number of applied cases, including questions around corporate responsibility and responsibility of AI, or debates about the responsibilities of individuals in relationship to questions about state wrong-doing, or the obligations of allies of marginalised social groups. The guiding principle of the book is that by taking both the theoretical and the applied issues seriously, we can gain new insights into the structure of collective responsibility and its practical implications. In addition to drawing on technical contributions of social ontology, the book is interested in what our real-life practices reveal to us about collective responsibility. The further question is should some of our institutional practices be revised in light of the implicit ontological claims that they make. This book appeals to academics and students in philosophy, political theory and legal studies, especially graduates and postgraduates.

In this chapter, Wringe considers expressivist accounts of punishment with particular emphasis on the work of Joel Feinberg, Jean Hampton, and Antony Duff. After distinguishing between definitional and justificatory versions of expressivism and examining the case for definitional expressivism, Zaibert argues first that a recognition of the expressive functions of punishment does not require us to accept an expressive definition of punishment. He also argues that the best-known versions of justificatory expressivism are unsuccessful, while an alternative that places at its center what punishment communicates to society at large best resists the critique of punishment that originally motivated Feinberg’s arguments for understanding punishment in expressive terms.

This review article argues for a better acknowledgement by penal philosophers of the diversity of subjects, agents, and practices of punishment. Much current penal philosophy has an unhelpful hyper‐focus on the criminal punishment of culpable adults, by states, often through imprisonment. This paradigmatic case is important, but other subjects, agents, and practices of punishment are not statistically insignificant side‐issues, and a comprehensive account of punishment should address them. Our understanding of punishment as a whole can be enhanced by considering non‐paradigmatic punishment, with implications for whether and when punishment is justified, how we should understand appropriate authority, and how we should understand and engage with abolitionist arguments. We explore non‐paradigmatic penal practices (community punishments, suspended prison sentence, restorative justice, and alternative jurisprudence), non‐paradigmatic punishing agents (International judicial bodies, schools, and religious communities; with practices such as boycotts, shaming and shunning) and non‐paradigmatic subjects of punishment (collective agents, corporations and children).

This is an introduction to the Symposium on Nonparadigmatic Forms of Punishment. We explain what we mean by calling certain instances of punishment 'nonparadigmatic' and explain why nonparadigmatic punishments are of philosophical interest. We then introduce the contributions to the Special Issue and conclude by outlining directions that future research on nonparadigmatic punishment might take. We focus on three particular ways in which punishment might be nonparadigmatic: cases involving nonstandard punishing agents, those involving nonstandard subjects of punishment, and those involving nonstandard means of punishment.

In this paper, I discuss a distinctively non-paradigmatic instance of punishment: the punishment of non-citizens. I shall argue that the punishment of non-citizens presents considerable difficulties for one currently popular account of criminal punishment: Antony Duff’s communicative expressive theory of punishment. Duff presents his theory explicitly as an account of the punishment of citizens - and as I shall argue, this is not merely an incidental feature of his account. However, it is plausible that a general account of the criminal law of the kind of idealized state that Duff focusses on will need to say something about how that law deals with non-citizens. In particular, I claim, it will need to provide a justification for punishing them. Because Duff's account says nothing about the punishment of non-citizens, it cannot do so. Furthermore, although Duff's more recent suggestion that non-citizens should be thought of as being guests in the state on whose territory they are present may provide for an account of their criminalization, it cannot easily be extended into an account that provides a justification for their punishment.

In this paper I attempt to show how an appeal to a particular kind of collective obligation - a collective obligation falling on an unstructured collective consisting of the world’s population as a whole – can be used to undermine recently influential objections to the idea that there is a human right to health which have been put forward by Gopal Sreenivasan and Onora O’Neill. I take this result to be significant both for its own sake and because it helps to answer a challenge often put to Those who argue for the existence of collective obligations: namely, to explain why the question of whether there are any such obligations might matter from a practical point of view. One way of introducing the objection is to focus on questions of agency. Here I'll argue both that there can be obligations on groups that are not themselves collective agents, and that these can play an important explanatory and clarifcatory role in accounting for obligations which fall on individuals.

Thomas Pogge has argued, famously, that ‘we’ are violating the rights of the global poor insofar as we uphold an unjust international order which provides a legal and economic framework within which individuals and groups can and do deprive such individuals of their lives, liberty and property. I argue here that Pogge’s claim that we are violating a negative duty can only be made good on the basis of a substantive theory of collective action; and that it can only provide substantive ethical guidance when combined with an account of how collective action gives rise to forward-looking responsibility and/or accountability on an individual level. I consider accounts of these two topics given in work by Peter French and Christopher Kutz; and I argue that neither of them give Pogge what he needs. Although there is a sense in which 'we' can be said to be violating the rights of the worst off, the sense in which this is true does not generate any plausible action-guiding claims for individuals.

Call the view that perceptual states can have propositional contents the ‘propositional view’ - or PV for short. Proponents of PV include John McDowell and Susanna Siegel; Anil Gupta and Charles Travis are prominent opponents. In this paper, I wish to address an argument against PV put forward by Anil Gupta. Gupta argues that the conjunction of PV with two further claims, which he calls the ‘Equivalence constraint’ and the ‘reliability constraint’, leads to skepticism. I shall argue that even if we grant EC, Gupta has not given us a compelling reason for rejecting PV and that if we are faced with a choice between rejecting PV and RC, we should reject RC ahead of PV. I shall also suggest that Gupta’s account begs the question against one prominent version of PV.

Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by philosophers who hold that the content of perception is object‐like. I shall argue for a view about the content of emotions and perceptual states which will enable us to hold both that emotional content is analogous to perceptual content and that both emotions and perceptual states can have propositional contents. This will involve arguing for a pluralist view of perceptual content, on which perceptual states can have both contents which are proposition‐like and contents which are object‐like. I shall also address two significant objections to the claim that emotions can have proposition‐like contents. Meeting one of these objections will involve taking on a further commitment: the pluralist account of perceptual content will have to be one on which the contents of perception can be non‐conceptual.

It is sometimes argued that non-agent collectives, including what one might call the ‘global collective’ consisting of the world’s population taken as a whole, cannot be the bearers of non-distributive moral obligations on pain of violating the principle that ‘ought implies can’. I argue that one prominent line of argument for this conclusion fails because it illicitly relies on a formulation of the ‘ought implies can’ principle which is inapt for contexts which allow for the possibility of non-distributive plural predications of agency, which are precisely the contexts in which we might expect non-agents to be obligation-bearers.

Nathan Hanna has recently argued against a position I defend in a 2013 paper in this journal and in my 2016 book on punishment, namely that we can punish someone without intending to harm them. In this discussion note I explain why two alleged counterexamples to my view put forward by Hanna are not in fact counterexamples to any view I hold, produce an example which shows that, if we accept a number of Hanna’s own assumptions, punishment does not require an intention to harm, and discuss whether a definition and counter-example approach is the best way to proceed in the philosophy of punishment. I conclude with a brief exegetical discussion of H.L.A Hart’s Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment.

Nathan Hanna has recently addressed a claim central to my 2013 article ‘Must Punishment Be Intended to Cause Suffering’ and to the second chapter of my 2016 book An Expressive Theory of Punishment: namely, that punishment need not involve an intention to cause suffering. Hanna defends what he calls the ‘Aim To Harm Requirement’ (AHR), which he formulates as follows. AHR: ‘an agent punishes a subject only if the agent intends to harm the subject’ (Hanna 2017 p969). I’ll try to show in this note that Hanna’s latest attempts to defend AHR fail. I’ll start by setting out my own view, drawing attention to one significant, but perhaps understandable, misstatement of Hanna’s. I’ll then discuss two alleged counter-examples that Hanna presents to my view, and show that they both fail in their own terms. I’ll also argue that, given assumptions that Hanna is willing to make a scenario closely related to one that Hanna presents counts against AHR. I’ll then discuss how significant it would be if these counter-examples were successful. My view is that it wouldn’t matter much, and that anyone attracted to abolitionism should agree. I’ll conclude with a brief discussion of Hart, which may be of interest to enthusiasts and Hart scholars.

It is natural to see political philosophy as the domain, par excellence, of collective action and collective obligation. It is therefore surprising that the notion of collective obligation rarely assumes centre-stage within the subject. Elsewhere I have argued that we have good reasons for accepting the existence of global collective obligations - in other words, collective obligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole. Here I shall argue that in many situations, forward-looking global obligations give rise to an obligation on individuals to work towards bringing into existence and support an institutional system which will enable their obligations to be met. Call such an obligation the ‘Obligation to Promote Satisfactory Global Institutions’. I shall also examine a significant challenge to this line of argument, which I call the ‘Pluralist Challenge’.

Many authors hold that collectives, as well as individuals can be the subjects of obligations. Typically these authors have focussed on the obligations of highly structured groups, and of small, informal groups. One might wonder, however, whether there could also be collective obligations which fall on everyone – what I shall call ' global collective obligations '. One reason for thinking that this is not possible has to do with considerations about agency : it seems as though an entity can only be the subject of obligations if it is an agent. In this paper, I try to show that the argument from agency is not a good reason for being sceptical about the existence of global collective obligations : it derives whatever plausibility it has from the idea that claims about obligation need to be addressable to some agent. My suggestion is that we should accept this principle about the addressability of obligations, but deny that the addressee of an obligation need be the subject of that obligation. The collective obligations of unstructured collections of individuals, including global collective obligations, meet the addressability requirement insofar as they require something of the individuals who make up the collective

Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by philosophers who hold that the content of perception is object-like. I shall argue for a view about the content of emotions and perceptual states which will enable us to hold both that emotional content is analogous to perceptual content and that both emotions and perceptual states can have propositional contents. This will involve arguing for a pluralist view of perceptual content, on which perceptual states can have both contents which are proposition-like and contents which are object-like. I shall also address two significant objections to the claim that emotions can have proposition-like contents. Meeting one of these objections will involve taking on a further commitment: the pluralist account of perceptual content will have to be one on which the contents of perception can be non-conceptual

Ambivalence—where we experience two conflicting emotional responses to the same object, person or state of affairs—is sometimes thought to pose a problem for cognitive theories of emotion. Drawing on the ideas of the Stoic Chrysippus, I argue that a cognitivist can account for ambivalence without retreating from the view that emotions involve fully-fledged evaluative judgments. It is central to the account I offer that emotions involve two kinds of judgment: one about the object of emotion, and one about the subject's response.

n this paper, I examine the charge that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s ‘Child as Scientist’ program, outlined and defended in their 1997 book Words, Thoughts and Theories is vitiated by a form of ‘cognitive individualism’ about science. Although this charge has often been leveled at Gopnik and Meltzoff’s work, it has rarely been developed in any detail. I suggest that we should distinguish between two forms of cognitive individualism which I refer to as ‘ontic’ and ‘epistemic’ cognitive individualism (OCI and ECI respectively). I then argue - contra Ronald Giere – that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s commitment to OCI is relatively unproblematic, since it is an easily detachable part of their view. By contrast, and despite their explicit discussion of the issue, their commitment to ECI is much more problematic.

It is sometimes thought that the normative justification for responding to large-scale violations of human rights via the judicial appararatus of trial and punishment is undermined by the desirability of reconciliation between conflicting parties as part of the process of conflict resolution. I take there to be philosophical, as well as practical and psychological issues involved here: on some conceptions of punishment and reconciliation, the attitudes that they involve conflict with one another on rational grounds. But I shall argue that there is a conception of political reconciliation available which does not involve forgiveness and this forms of reconciliation may be the best we can hope for in many conflicts. Reconciliation is nevertheless likely to require the expression of what Darrell Moellendorf has called 'political regret' and the denunciatory role aspect of punishment makes it particularly well-suited to this role.