Piet Fritz Pankratz

This paper clarifies the metaphysical relation between corporate agents and their members under Kendy Hess’s holist account of corporate agents. While Hess emphasizes that corporate agents depend for their existence on the structured participation of their members, the precise nature of this dependance relation remains insufficiently articulated. I argue that corporate agents are non-reductively grounded in their members: they exist in virtue of the structured participation of individuals within enduring social organizations. Grounding thus explains the ontological dependence of corporate agents on their members. However, on Hess’s view, corporate agents possess capacities and properties that can only be attributed to the organized whole. The grounding relation leaves these distinctive capacities and properties insufficiently explained. To address this, I introduce a modified notion of emergence (“emergence+”), according to which corporate agents’ capacities and properties depend upon, yet are not reducible to, their members. I further argue that grounding and emergence+ are complementary rather than competing relations. Taken together, grounding and emergence+ offer a more complete account of the corporate agent–member relation and clarify central but underdeveloped metaphysical commitments of Hess’s holism.