Herman Witzel - A Pragmatic Approach to Agency in Group Activity

Herman Witzel

A Pragmatic Approach to Agency in Group Activity

Practical Philosophy

Edited by

Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Neil Roughley,
Peter Schaber, and Ralf Stoecker

Volume 23

ISBN 978-3-11-062811-1

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-062862-3

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-062908-8

ISSN 2197-9243

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951615

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

www.degruyter.com

A pragmatic approach to agency in group activity is my philosophical contribution to the research field of group action, group intentionality and action theory in general. The results presented are relevant for philosophers, sociologists, business ethicists and all people who create, organize or manage groups. Accordingly, I kept the text self-contained with all technical terminology highlighted and explained as well as properly referenced for background reading.

My approach builds towards a theory of agency which bridges individual agency and agency in groups, but it does so by starting from practical insights about group activity, rather than from our understanding of individual agency. Interactions and structures within group activity are often out in the open, ready to be observed and analyzed. Many philosophers have exploited this accessibility to provide deep insight about agency in group activity. To my knowledge, however, none have given these insights priority over how we think individual agency works. In this sense, I turn the direction of building action theory around, and the result is a practical view of agency that respects the large variety of expressions of agency, combined with a clean approach to relevant terminology and concepts.

My personal motivation for the research presented here is both practical and theoretical. The practical motivation comes from my time at a management consulting firm where I served various companies over several years. As a consultant, I found myself in a strange position: we had enormous influence on the decisions made, yet we rarely ever actually made the decisionsour clients did. We also rarely took responsibility for these decisions and we rarely ever carried out the decisions and lived through the consequences. What exactly was our role in these situations? How did our actions and decisions relate to what happened in these companies? What was our shareof responsibility? I am certain many people in all kinds of businessesfrom employees to managersask these questions themselves at least occasionally. As for myself, I found the answers presented in this thesis to be helpful and actionable.

My theoretical motivation comes from a completely different direction: my first academic contact with philosophy during my studies of physics took me into discussions about free will and ethics. For both topics, an understanding of action and agency is crucial; free will is ultimately expressed in free agency, and ethics must relate our actions to the things we are responsible for. The main positions of action theory, in turn, have a strong focus on individual human agents and, more particularly, on what is happening in the minds of these agents. This focus is as understandable as it is elusive; we know very little about how our minds work, while the things we do know scientifically often leave us puzzled. To me, this was never a good theoretical foundation. Accordingly, I developed an approach to action theory that leaves me much more confident to take its lessons to other areas of philosophical discussion.

With these ideas and motivations, I was determined to start my work on A pragmatic approach to agency in group activity, but more was required. I was fortunate to find an extremely helpful and good-willed environment both professionally and personally. Special thanks go to Ralf Stoecker. He supported my transition from being a physicist and consultant to being a philosopher. His engagement, inspiration, advice, philosophical intelligence and insight were invaluable to me personally and to the quality of my work. I could not have wished for a better supervisor, and I am deeply thankful for this. I also want to thank Johanna Wagner for sharing an office with me, enabling countless philosophical discussions, and for just being the kind, open-minded person she is. This creative environment was complemented by inspiring colleagues like Christian Neuhuser, Christian Nimtz, Almut von Wedelstaedt, Peter Schulte, Pia Becker and many more. I am also very grateful to Bielefeld University. The dissertation, published here as an improved version, was successfully completed and defended at its Departement of Philosophy.

Outside of my home university, I also found a thriving and inspiring scientific community. I am grateful for the exchanges with countless truly committed philosophers. Special moments of insight and clarity of approach were inspired by conversations with Michael Bratman, Stephen Butterfil and Bence Nanay, even though they might not be aware of it. Ultimately, I hope that in publishing this work, I give back a little of what I received from this community.

Finally, none of this would have been possible without the unwavering support of my family and friends. My wife enabled me to pursue philosophy when we adapted to our new life as a family. I am deeply thankful for her gifts of love, happiness and both a daughter and son, who have inspired me in their own right. My friends helped me to keep things in perspective, brainstorm, think outside myself and bounce around ideas. I look forward to continuing lifes adventures with them by my side.

U.S. strikes ISIS camp in Lybia, How ISIS recruits children then kills them, Uber losing 1$B a year in China, Ford plans four new SUV models, Apple rebuffs FBI, sparks anger and praise. These headlines are taken from the arbitrarily chosen day February 19th, 2016 from the CNN website (Botelho and Starr, 2016; McLaughlin, 2016; Yan, 2016; Isodore, 2016; Botelho et al., 2016). They are completely comprehensible as long as one knows the groups in these statements, e.g., the U.S. and China are governmental states, ISIS is a terror organization, Ford, Uber and Apple are business corporations, FBI is an intelligence agency. Headlines like this are also ubiquitous. Looking at any other news website on any other day yields similar statements.

The ubiquity is owed to the tremendous importance of groups and their activity in our societyespecially in our time (French, 1995, for a historic perspective). The comprehensibility, in comparison, is not so easily explained. At face value, the headlines state that the respective groups display agency. They perform actions and they interact with each other. The headline about Apple and the FBI even suggests they can be praised or blamed for their actions. When taken literally, such statements refer to groups as if they were agents engaged in full-blown agency.

The literal interpretation, however, is problematic: groups are not beings themselves; they are groups of human beings. Human beings, on the other hand, are agents. The immediate suggestion is that groups are not really agents themselves, but merely groups of agents. Saying a group acts, consequently, is a simpler way of saying the members of the group act. The appearance of group names in these statements is merely for abbreviation (Ludwig, 2014, for such a claim in more technical detail). The abbreviation-interpretation, too, is immediately challenged. The first headline from above, for example, could easily read U.S. pilots strike ISIS camp in Lybia, but this would be ambiguous: U.S. pilots might strike an ISIS camp without the U.S. striking the campmaybe they have gone rogue, or they are striking the ISIS camp for another state like Iraq with Iraq military equipment allowed by the U.S. government. Even if the U.S. pilots strike the ISIS camp within their regular duty, they only perform the very last stage of the strike, namely actually dropping the bombs. Other agents gathered relevant intelligence, decided the strike and prepared it. It is not immediately obvious how the overall activity of striking the ISIS camp can be understood solely in terms of the individuals agency.