The irreducibility of collective obligations

Abstract

Individualists claim that collective obligations are reducible to the individual obligations of the collective's members. Collectivists deny this. We set out to discover who is right by way of a deontic logic of collective action that models collective actions, abilities, obligations, and their interrelations. On the basis of our formal analysis, we argue that when assessing the obligations of an individual agent, we need to distinguish individual obligations from member obligations. If a collective has a collective obligation to bring about a particular state of affairs, then it might be that no individual in the collective has an individual obligation to bring about that state of affairs. What follows from a collective obligation is that each member of the collective has a member obligation to help ensure that the collective fulfills its collective obligation. In conclusion, we argue that our formal analysis supports collectivism.

Resist or Give in to an Alternative: Post-Decisional Evaluations of Cost, Value and Regret in the Choice

“…For the latter has been registered the absolute highest cost ever, whereas, whenever the option was a situation that was equally pleasurable or an obligation, the subject evaluated the choice of renouncement by attributing a lower cost to the decision he has made. It is interesting to underline that the resistance to an obligation constituted a relatively easy choice for the subject, especially if we consider how much it would cost him to renounce a personal utility and even more so if he had to derogate an antecedent commitment (Zimmerman, 1986;Sousa, 2009;Vedder, 2019;Tamminga & Hindriks, 2019).…”

The Issues Of The Dialogue Of A Modern Subject With The Society

“…On the one hand, this brings the theoretical analysis of the relation between the subject and society as close as possible to their actual interaction in practice, since, for example, it shows the strengthening of the role of the superstructure in the determinants of social movement in the changed subject (Erman & Möller, 2019;Sankaran, 2019). But, on the other hand, revision of class demarcation has negative consequences in theory when the dialectics of collective and individual is violated (Tamminga & Hindriks, 2019). The inclusion of the analysis of changes in rationality in the system of fundamental properties of the modern social subject that determine its existential certainty is https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2019.12.04.464 Corresponding Author: Vera Zhilina Selection and peer-review under (Zhilina, 2018;Kara-Murza, 2016;Majeed, 2018;Pruzhinin, 2004;Sushentsova, 2017).…”

“…The falsity of opposing these characteristics is proved convincely through a logical analysis. The collective manifests itself when the collective acts as a subject, and the individual when its members act as individual subjects, and they do not intersect (Tamminga & Hindriks, 2019). If the "death" of the subject occurs in theory, now there is a threat of destruction of the bearer of the social.…”

An impossibility result on methodological individualism

“…Truth-conditions for the formulas in the social language L (and hence for the formulas in the individualistic language L i ) are specified in terms of deontic game models (see Tamminga and Hindriks (2020)). These models represent the individual actions and the group actions that are available to a finite set of individual agents and evaluate the deontic admissibility of these actions.…”

“…Their connections to game theory have been explored byKooi and Tamminga (2008),Tamminga (2013),Van De Putte et al (2017), Duijf (2018, Chs. 1 and 4) andTamminga and Hindriks (2020).…”