Niel Bezrookove

Under what conditions can a group be responsible, and be held responsible, for what it does, and what does its responsibility imply for its members? Drawing on Margaret Gilbert’s account of joint commitment, I distinguish random aggregates, groups, groups which act as a group, and fully self-governing groups. A group is constituted by the joint commitment of its individuals to see to it that something is done; it acts as a group only where its individuals act on group reasons by way of procedure, a rule maintained by their joint commitment which settles what each may and must do, and what the group has thereby done. What a group does supervenes on what its members do, but the group, as a plural subject, is the agent of its acts. Combining the rational relations view of responsibility with Shoemaker’s distinction between attributability, answerability, and accountability, and Scanlon’s account of self-governance, I argue that to act as a group is to be fit to be responsible: such a group is at least attributable for what it does, answerable where its procedures allow it to answer for its reasons, and accountable only where it is fully self-governing. Its responsibility falls on its individuals according to their standing in its procedures. Responsibility gaps remain possible, and a narrow case of irreducible group responsibility, attributability without blame, survives; but where a group cannot act as a group, its individuals owe one another, by their joint commitment, the procedures that would make it fit, and voids in which no one is responsible arise only for harms no adequate procedure would have made foreseeable.

A critique of ontology which introduces seepage, the process of properties revealing themselves from the matrix forms of an object. What follows is the observation that these properties have their own system of relations, placed in the context of a culture of objects which engages a revealing process. An argument is presented for considering organization as the principle which allows for seepage, understood as an inherently informative and intuitive process where the organization of objects reveals some property and consequently makes us less uncertain about the object. Objects are deposited to be a continual process where the properties represented by the organization of its constituent parts change as they seep beyond its matrix. An object cannot inform us of all of its properties immediately, rather we acquaint ourselves with them as they are brought forth and become enframed as part of how we understand said object.

τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν: Another look at being, asking what a interlocutor means to show by saying they feel themselves to be something. An ambiguity of the verb "to be" is disambiguated to reveal that it can be meant to show what something is and a process of being something. The relationship between being and essence is made by describing engagement through the encounter, giving us a non-exhaustive account of something's essence. Practice is then understood as a process within a social context where humans form the senses in which one can be, with their possibilities informed by encounters with what is substantive of those senses. The resulting implications with regards to authenticity, social belonging, and anthropology are briefly discussed.