Agents and Doers, Actions and Actional Events
To this point, we have left it open whether institutional actional events are actions, properly so-called, and whether institutional doers are agents, properly so-called. Further, we have not had a serious discussion of the issue whether or not it is only the actions, properly so-called, of agents, properly so-called, that can be governed by obligations.
Suppose it turns out that, given some privileged concepts of action and agent, institutional actional events are not actions and institutional doers are not agents. Before concluding that institutional entities have no moral obligations, we need an argument to show that, in order to have an obligation (under the privileged concept of obligation), an entity must qualify as an agent (under the privileged concept) capable of doing what qualify as actions (under the privileged concept).The society-centered theory gives us a way to think about this question. For suppose that the ideal code would include both standards that directly regulate institutional actional events and the transitional rule. In that case, it does not matter whether institutional actional events qualify as actions and whether institutional doers qualify as agents. For according to the theory, the point of morality is to help ameliorate the problem of sociality. On our supposition, the ideal code would impose requirements on institutional doers, requirements encoded in the standards that directly regulate institutional actional events. It does not matter whether these requirements qualify as obligations under some privileged concept of obligation.
Indeed, if the point of morality is to help ameliorate the problem of sociality, and if a moral code that included standards that directly regulate institutional actional events would be better designed (other things being equal) to ameliorate the problem than a code that included no such standards, then, I think, the ideal concept of obligation would classify moral requirements that are incumbent on institutional entities as moral obligations.
What does this mean? It means, I propose, that whatever concept we actually express with the term “moral obligation,” ideally we would express a concept such that requirements imposed by the ideal code would count as moral obligations, so understood. Given such a concept, requirements imposed by the ideal code on institutional entities could correctly be classified as obligations.I do not want to rest my case on the plausibility of the society-centered moral theory, however. To give my argument a wider reach, I need to address two of the questions I raised before: whether institutional actional events are actions, properly so-called; and whether institutional doers are agents, properly so-called. The other question I raised before — the question whether it is only actions, properly so-called, of agents, properly so-called, that can be governed by obligations, properly so-called — will be of little interest if it turns out that institutional actional events are actions and that institutional doers are agents. It is of course obvious that institutional doers differ in many ways from individual agents. They have members whereas individual agents do not. They are organized under constitutive rules of various kinds11 — laws, regulations, institutional practices or norms, or the like — and their existence depends on this being so, whereas this is not the case for an individual agent. Further, institutional actional events differ in many ways from standard examples of actions performed by individual agents. An institutional actional event is constituted by actions performed by individual agents. It would not occur but for actions performed by individual agents who are of course distinct from the institution and whose role in bringing about the event is, in typical cases, determined by the constitutive rules of the institutional entity. This is not the case where typical actions of individual agents are concerned (Copp 1979).12 The question, however, is whether any of these differences are conceptually critical such that they entail, given the nature of the privileged concepts, that institutional doers are not agents and that institutional actional events are not actions.
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