Abstract. We propose a new framework to unify three conceptions of institutions that play a prominent role in the philosophical and scientific literature: the equilibria account, the regulative rules account, and the constitutive rules account. We argue that equilibrium-based and rule-based accounts are individually inadequate, but that jointly they provide a satisfactory conception of institutions as rules-in-equilibrium. In the second part of the paper we show that constitutive rules can be derived from regulative rules via the introduction of theoretical terms. We argue that the constitutive rules theory is reducible to the rules-in equilibrium theory, and that it accounts for the way in which we assign names to social institutions.
It is a commonplace within philosophy that the ontology of institutions can be captured in terms of constitutive rules.
Abstract. Recent empirical research conducted by Joshua Knobe has uncovered two asymmetries in our judgments about intentional action and moral responsibility. First, people are more inclined to say that a side effect was brought about intentionally when they regard that side effect as bad than when they regard it as good. Second, people are more inclined to ascribe blame to someone for bad effects than they are inclined to ascribe praise for good effects. These findings suggest that the notion of intentional action has a normative component. In this paper I propose a theory of intentional action on which one acts intentionally if one fails to be motivated to avoid a bad effect. This explains the asymmetry concerning intentional action. The praise-blame asymmetry is explained in terms of the claim that praise depends on being appropriately motivated, whereas blame does not.Frank Hindriks (f.a.hindriks@rug.nl) University of Groningen Published in 2008, Philosophical Quarterly 58, 233: 630-41. 2 Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame AsymmetryJoshua Knobe (2003aKnobe ( , 2003bKnobe ( , 2004a has discovered an asymmetry in our judgments about praise and blame in relation to the side effects that our actions generate. When a side effect of someone's action is harmful, we are far more inclined to blame that person than we are inclined to praise someone when the side effect is beneficial -even though in neither of the two cases she cared about the occurrence of the effect. I believe there is a simple explanation for this praise-blame asymmetry, which many regard as puzzling. When the side effect has positive moral worth, the person does not deserve any praise, because -by hypothesis -the fact that her action would have that effect did not play any role in her reasoning. After all, she did not care about the occurrence of the effect. When the side effect has negative moral worth, she does deserve blame, because the fact that her action would have the harmful effect should have played a role in her reasoning while it did not.Knobe also reports an asymmetry in our judgments concerning intentional action. We are more inclined to judge that an effect is brought about intentionally when the effect is harmful as compared to when the effect is beneficial. This second finding can be explained in a way that resembles the proposed explanation of the praise-blame asymmetry, or so I shall argue. Concerning the beneficial effect we judge that it is not brought about intentionally because the effect did not play any role in the practical reasoning of the person at issue. In relation to the harmful effect, we do conclude that it is brought about intentionally. In this case, the person ignores a consideration she should treat as a reason against performing the action. Again, the fact that the relevant person does not care about bringing about the effect is crucial to the explanation of this asymmetry concerning our judgments about intentional action.My hypothesis, then, is that both asymmetries can be explained in terms of the ...
Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations depend on their members for their existence, but the members of an organization can be where the organization is not. The designated office of an organization, however, need be little more than a mailbox. I argue that the problem can be solved by conceptualizing the relation between social entities and non-social entities as one of constitution, a relation of unity without identity. Constituted objects have properties that cannot be reduced to properties of the constituting objects. Thus, my attempt to solve the Location Problem results in an argument in favor of a kind of non-reductive materialism about the social.Keywords Constitution · Constitutive rule · Location · Organization · Non-reductive individualism · Normative power · Social ontology · Status Mathematical, mental, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview. Mathematical entities present an ontological puzzle to philosophers because they are abstract. How the relation between mental and physical properties should be conceptualized is complicated by qualia because of their inherently subjective phenomenology. And the moral domain resists reduction, many believe,
Abstract:Current debates in social ontology are dominated by approaches that view institutions either as rules or as equilibria of strategic games. We argue that these two approaches can be unified within an encompassing theory based on the notion of correlated equilibrium. We show that in a correlated equilibrium each player follows a regulative rule of the form 'if X then do Y'. We then criticize Searle's claim that constitutive rules of the form 'X counts as Y in C' are fundamental building blocks for institutions, showing that such rules can be derived from regulative rules by introducing new institutional terms. Institutional terms are introduced for economy of thought, but are not necessary for the creation of social reality.
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Abstract. Intuitions about intentional action have turned out to be sensitive to normative factors: most people say that an indifferent agent brings about an effect of her action intentionally when it is harmful, but unintentionally when it is beneficial. Joshua Knobe explains this asymmetry, which is known as 'the Knobe effect', in terms of the moral valence of the effect, arguing that this explanation generalizes to other asymmetries concerning notions as diverse as deciding and being free. I present an alternative explanation of the Knobe effect in terms of normative reasons. This explanation generalizes to other folk psychological notions such as deciding, but not to such notions as being free. I go on to argue against Knobe that offering a unified explanation of all the asymmetries he discusses is in fact undesirable.Frank Hindriks (f.a.hindriks@rug.nl), University of Groningen Knobe (2010a, 316) defends the view that 'moral considerations actually figure in the competencies people use to make sense of human beings and their actions'. This means that moral considerations legitimately influence attributions of folk psychological notions. His point of departure is the finding that has become known as 'the Knobe effect', which is an asymmetry in our use of the term 'intentional action'. Knobe discovered it when he ran his seminal chairman experiment. Consider a chairman of a company who sets out to implement a profitmaximizing business strategy. As it turns out, the strategy has an unintended effect on the environment. The chairman, however, disavows any interest in the environment.In the help condition of the experiment, the effect on the environment is beneficial; in the harm condition the side effect is harmful. Most people (82%) say that the chairman harms the environment intentionally, even though only a minority (23%) say that he helps the environment intentionally (Knobe 2003a). Apparently it makes a difference to our intentionality attributions whether an effect has moral significance or not, and whether its moral significance is positive or negative. Knobe's Unifying Competence Theory: Moral ValenceMany commentators regard the Knobe effect as surprising or puzzling, and many believe that it is a bias in our attributions of intentionality. Nadelhoffer (2004bNadelhoffer ( , 2004cNadelhoffer ( , 2005Nadelhoffer ( , 2006a, Nado (2008) are among those who regard the effect as a bias. 5 so they argue. Many of them also believe that the fact that people blame the chairman for harming the environment leads them to say that he harmed the environment intentionally. 4 As they are not inclined to praise the chairman for helping the environment, people are not motivated to impute intentionality to him. Knobe (2010) refers to this as 'the Motivational Bias Hypothesis'. 5 He criticizes this approach, arguing that no positive evidence for this hypothesis has been produced (ibid., 323). 6It is important to realize, however, that all those who regard the Knobe effect as puzzling have reason to embrace a bias ex...
Corporate responsibility requires a conception of collective agency on which collective agents are able to form moral judgments and act on them. In spite of claims to the contrary, existing accounts of collective agency fall short of this kind of corporate autonomy, as they fail to explain how collective agents might be responsive to moral reasons. I discuss how a recently proposed conception of shared valuing can be used for developing a solution to this problem. Although the resulting conception of corporate autonomy is useful for making sense of corporate responsibility, it also gives rise to what I call 'the Corporate Autonomy Problem'. Autonomous collective agents are in principle entitled to the same rights as autonomous individual agents. However, at least some individual rights, such as the right to vote, the right to life, and the right not to be enslaved cannot plausibly be attributed to collective agents. This intuition is supported by normative individualism, the position according to which corporate agents are not entitled to nonderivative rights at all. I argue that without a proper solution to this problem-I sketch the available options-saving corporate responsibility requires giving up on normative individualism.Collective agents are often blamed for what they do, and sometimes praised. US President Barack Obama, for instance, praised the Supreme Court for its decision on the Affordable Care Act. 1 In addition to moral responsibility, people often ascribe rights and obligations to collective agents. A controversial case is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a 2010 ruling of the US Supreme Court. According
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