Two Types of Groups
Distinguishing between two kinds of groups, organizations and goal-oriented collectives, will help assess Archer and Baker’s moral responsibility for the collective actions they help to causally advance.
As we will see, differences in these two ideal-type groups’ internal structures will permit a theorist to ascribe the injustice of the collective action the group perpetrates in different ways to the group members.Organizations are long-standing, formally-constituted groups with stable roles and rotating personnel, like companies, the military, religious orders, and government departments. The structure of organizations will typically determine what their members know, and therefore can intend, with respect to the collective actions the organization performs. Atypical organization members will know or intend things about the collective actions, in a sense, in spite of the organization’s structure.
A key aspect of organizations important for us to address in order to understand the role played by organization members’ individual intentions and motives is what some theorists call a corporate intention (French 1987; Isaacs 2011; Pettit 2003). Corporate intentions are not simply an aggregate of the group members’ intentions, for two reasons. First, individuals cannot intend complex collective actions. If an intention is a kind of mental event that directs a specific, deliberate action, then an individual person cannot, strictly speaking, intend to win a baseball game; build a cruise ship; or win a war. These ends can only be accomplished through the collective action of groups. As we will see, a person can intend to do something to contribute to a collective end and can be motivated to see the fulfillment of the collective end.
Second, something functionally similar to an individual’s intention is created through the organization’s unique protocols, irreducible to any one organization member’s intention.
These protocols are what Seumas Miller calls “joint mechanisms” or Peter French calls “corporate internal decision structures” (Miller 2001: 174; French 1987: 143; Pettit 2003: 182; Isaacs 2011: 68), sets of interlocking behaviors such as a decision-making procedures or protocols for transmitting orders used to coordinate actions and bring about certain types of outcomes within organizations. Joint mechanisms allow for variations based on the participants’ varying desires and inputs. For example, company bylaws might indicate that certain decisions are to be made by a board of directors through a vote, but each board member is free to vote as she wishes (Miller 2006: 174—6). It follows that the mechanism’s output (a subordinates’ carrying out orders, the outcome of a vote, etc.) can be contrary to some of the participants’ preferences. Importantly, the resultant corporate intention may not reflect the personal intention of any of the participants (Isaacs 2011: 30).Corporate intentions are functionally identical with human intentions in the sense that they have the same relation to corporate actions as individual intentions do to individual actions (Isaacs 2011: 30, 37; Pettit 2003: 179, 182—3). They lead the collective to act. A business’s corporate intention, set by a planning team, such as “Model 4032 of item X will be produced in time for the third quarter” directs employees to engage in specific actions which will interact in such a way that the business produces model 4032 in the third quarter (described further below). The term “policy” might be profitably substituted for “corporate intention” but I will defer to received usage. To be clear, organizations are not super-persons with corporate urges, corporate emotions, and the like. Whatever we wish to call them: these intentions, “intentions,” or policies are corporate in the sense that they are irreducible to the human intentions of any one group member.
Apart from organizations, much group action takes place in another kind of group relevant to our concern with group responsibility since it is a group voluntarily formed in order to accomplish some goal.
A “goal-oriented collective” is an ad hoc group assembled by its members for the accomplishment of a particular shared goal—like a group of campers, picnickers, or bank robbers (Isaacs 2011: 24). Unlike organizations, characteristic members in goal-oriented collectives know the collective end the group exists to bring about and intend to make causal contributions in order to bring about that end because they are motivated to see its fruition. Whereas typical organization members have their knowledge of, and intentions toward, the organization’s collective actions framed by the structure of the group, the influence between members’ subjective states and the group structure flows the other way in goal-oriented collectives. Such groups get their characteristic features from their founding members’ (and similarly disposed entrants’) horizontally coordinated, meshing intentions to perform actions contributing toward the commonly identified collective end (Bratman 1999) and their identical motives to bring about the collective end that constitutes the group’s raison d’etre. There may be ambiguous cases where ad hoc groups become more formalized over time and take on more of the qualities of organizations. I will refer to goal-oriented collectives in what follows as an ideal type. I do not claim that these are the only two types of groups, but these two clearly cover much of the collective contexts for action.19.4