Normative Theories and Institutional Obligations and Rights

For now, let me set aside the worry that institutional actional events are not actions in the proper or privileged sense. And let me also set aside for now the society-centered theory.

First, as far as I can tell, if institutional entities are capable of intentional action, then any moral theory can allow that they have moral obligations. The only exceptions I can think of would be theories that postulate only a restricted range of obligations governing actions of kinds that institutional entities clearly would be incapable of performing, such as riding a bicycle or eating a cake. We can safely set aside such theories to focus on more familiar ones.

Society-centered theory is a form of rule consequentialism (Copp forthcoming), and I think that other forms of rule consequentialism can also allow for the idea that institutional entities have moral obligations. Elsewhere, I have argued that act consequentialism allows for institu­tional obligations (Copp 2007a; Copp 2012). Consider now the Kantian view that an agent is to act only on a maxim that it can at the same time will to be a universal law. If institutional entities are capable of acting on maxims in some relevant sense, and if they are capable of“willing” — as I will argue in what follows — then, arguably, again, institutional entities are agents in the scope of the theory.

Second, let me turn to the worry I mentioned. I think it simply is not true that, if institu­tional entities are agents that can have moral obligations and bear moral responsibility, it follows that they have rights, and that we are obligated to show respect for them, as ends-in-themselves. We are not forced to view institutional entities as having the same sort of moral value, or the same rights, as persons do, simply in virtue of viewing them as agents. According to the society­centered theory, it is an empirical issue whether institutional entities of one kind or another have any rights or any moral value. The issue is what kinds of rules the ideal moral code would include. It is not likely that it would include rules requiring agents to respect institutional entities of every kind, including criminal gangs. Furthermore, note that we are not viewing institutional entities as persons. We are instead, in this section, assuming that they are agents cap­able of acting intentionally. Even if there is an obligation to respect persons as ends in themselves, nothing follows about our obligations toward institutional entities.

One important point that distinguishes institutional entities morally from persons is that institutional entities are not independent agents. I believe that they do act, as I will explain in what follows, but they do not act on their own, pursuing values that they have in their own right. Instead, their actions are constituted by actions of relevant individual persons (Copp 1976; 1979), and their having the values they do have is constituted by the attitudes, values, and dispositions of relevant individual persons (Copp 1979; 1995). The Kantian intuition that per­sons must be treated with respect, as ends-in-themselves, is best understood, for my purposes here, as the idea that rational agents who have set ends for themselves — ends that they have in their own right — must be treated with respect as ends-in-themselves.

We could say more about the features that distinguish institutional entities morally from persons. They do not have conscious experiential states. So they do not experience pain and they do not experience emotional states in the way that human beings do. They do not form emotional attachments. These matters are important, but for present purposes I set them aside.

Of course, we have not agreed at this point that institutional entities are agents capable of intentional action. We have agreed only that institutional entities are capable of being involved as doers in institutional actional events. The interesting question we are left with is whether this is enough to support the idea that they are capable of having obligations, or whether it must be shown that institutional entities are agents, properly so-called, capable of performing actions, properly so-called. I now turn to this question.

7.5