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Inquiry: An
Interdisciplinary Journal
of Philosophy
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The Moral Significance

of Collective Entities
Keith Graham
Published online: 06 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Keith Graham (2001) The Moral Significance of

Collective Entities, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy,
44:1, 21-41, DOI: 10.1080/002017401300075974
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/002017401300075974

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Inquiry, 44, 2142

The Moral Significance of Collective

Entities1
Keith Graham

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University of Bristol

The claim is that some collectiv e entities can be thought of as part of the moral
realm by virtue of their status as objects of moral concern. Collectivities are defined
in terms of irreducibl y corporate action and distinctive condition s of persisting
identity. Their lack of sentience does not preclude moral concern, and their raison
detre may render moral concern for them appropriate . Recent attempts by Pettit,
McMahon, and Broome to limit the moral realm to individual s are considered . They
are rebutted on the grounds that they rest heavily on pre-existin g moral intuitions ;
they ascribe a stronger thesis than is necessar y to the sponsors of the moral
significanc e of non-individuals ; and they wrongly assume that what has value for
individual s must have value because it has value for individuals . Collectivitie s can
have moral importance even if they lack the intrinsic moral importance attaching to
human beings, and substantia l consequence s follow from that fact. In particular ,
routine appeals to the distinctness of persons become more problematic when
collectivities , themselves composed entirely of persons, have independen t moral
significanc e which needs to be taken into account. That will affect both assessment
of moral consequence s and the process of moral decision-making .

I. Introduction
The question addressed in this paper is whether collectivities can be thought
to be part of the moral realm. The answer returned is af rmative. In this
section I attempt to render the question more precise and indicate the different
grounds on which an af rmative answer might be given. In section II I make
clear how the idea of a collective entity is to be understood in this context,
explain what sort of irreducibility attaches to collectivities, and provide some
of the considerations for allowing moral signi cance to them. In section III I
offer critical re ections on some recent attempts to populate the moral realm
exclusively with individuals. In concluding, in section IV I indicate why some
important consequences may follow from admitting collectivities to the moral
realm.
The metaphor of being part of the moral realm may be cashed in terms of
the applicability of a characteristic vocabulary. A type of entity can be
regarded as part of the moral realm if and only if a certain range of epithets
can be applied to it. I take it for granted that there would be general agreement
about which epithets count as moral, even if there might be disagreement
around the margins and even though there would be strong disagreement
# 2001 Taylor & Francis

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Keith Graham

about the logical status of such epithets. I take for granted, so to speak, an
understanding of what counts as the moral realm and what counts as treating
an entity as a member of it.
Nevertheless, there are two quite different ways in which we might treat an
entity as part of the moral realm. I distinguish them now, in order largely to
eliminate one from subsequent discussion. We might treat an entity as a moral
agent or as a moral patient. That is to say, we might regard it as inhabiting the
moral realm either on account of what it does or on account of what happens
to it. We might believe that an entity engages in actions for which it is not
merely causally but also morally responsible, actions which can elicit
speci cally moral comment. In contrast, we might believe that it undergoes
states which are an object of speci cally moral concern. There is no guarantee
that every moral agent is also a moral patient or that every moral patient is
also a moral agent. A moral concern for the welfare of non-human animals
illustrates the latter point at least.
It is a matter of contention whether collective entities can ever be treated as
moral agents in the sense of being held morally responsible for what they do.2
I believe that they can be, but what I argue here is that they can be treated as
moral patients, that is, as the object of moral concern and consideration by
virtue of what happens to them. However, although the question of treating
collective entities as moral agents has here been set aside, in the sense that I
am not here principally concerned with the question of whether a moral view
can be taken of what they do, my de nition of such entities turns on three facts
about agency and my case for treating them as moral patients will turn in part
on considerations which arise from the fact that they are agents.
More precisely, my claim is that some moral status can be given to some of
the entities meeting the conditions of collectivity which I shall specify. It is
not my claim that all can be given that status merely by virtue of being
collective entities. Nor is it my claim that the moral status of any collective
entities could be exactly the same as that of individual human beings, the
paradigm case of entities occupying the moral realm.3 Decisions on questions
of that kind will depend on how far the analogy between collective entities
and individuals can be pressed: how far the morally relevant features of
individuals are present either literally or in analogue form in collective
entities. I try to establish the somewhat limited claim that some collective
entities share suf cient of the relevant features for it to be appropriate to apply
some moral vocabulary to them.

II. Collectivities and Collective Good

I begin from what I hope are three uncontentious facts about an individuals
membership of a collective entity.4 First, it is a truism that sometimes an

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The Moral Significance of Collective Entities

23

individual human beings action gains its main signi cance only as part of a
collective action. For example, when I cast a vote, the main signi cance of
what I am doing resides in the fact that I am acting in concert with a number
of other people, that I am in fact acting as a member of an electorate. I can be
described as marking a cross on a piece of paper, or pulling a lever on a
machine, but these descriptions do not get us to the fact that I am voting.
Voting is an action which I can perform only as part of an electorate, and
hence when we do describe me as voting there is an explicit or implicit
reference to the collective entity, the electorate, which is ineliminable.
Secondly, the action-description applying to the individual in a case of this
kind is sometimes different from that applying to the collectivity. For
example, whereas what I do is describable as casting a vote in an election, it is
only the collective entity, the electorate, which can be described as returning
a government to power.
Thirdly, the persistence of the collectivity as an entity does not depend on
the persistence of the particular individuals who compose it. For example, the
British electorate continues to exist despite the entry and exit of many of its
members over a period of time. In that respect it differs from an ad hoc group
of individuals who constitute an informal collectivity which is pushing a car
up a hill. Such individuals may well disperse simultaneously in a way which
brings the life of that collective entity to an end. In one terminology, this ad
hoc group is an aggregate collectivity, whereas the British electorate is a
conglomerate collectivity.5
For the purposes of the present discussion, a number of individual human
beings form a collective entity if and only if all three of these conditions are
ful lled: that is, if and only if (i) they act in ways whose signi cance can be
adequately captured only by an ineliminable reference to some corporate
body as part of which they are acting, where (ii) what that corporate body
does is distinct from anything which they as individuals can do, and where
(iii) the corporate body is a persisting one whose survival is relatively
indifferent to the particular individuals which compose it at any particular
moment. This is a very wide and inclusive speci cation of collective entities,6
and many ordinary human activities will fall within its scope: things that
people do, for instance, as members of committees, families, clubs, football
teams, battalions, juries, or electorates.
At this point it might be objected that we have not been given any reason, in
the enumeration of these conditions, to accord ontological status to collective
entities. After all, it might be said, all we have in these examples are
collections of individual human beings doing certain things together. The
moral status of individual human beings themselves is never in doubt. But if
no other kind of entity has been called into existence in the course of this
characterization, then there is no distinct type of entity about whose moral
status questions could then be raised.

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Consider some views which seem to support this objection. John Searle
suggests: In a sense there are things that exist only because we believe them
to exist. I am thinking of things like money, property, governments, and
marriages. 7 An important aspect of these things is that they may involve
collective intentionality, where I am doing something only as part of our
doing something.8 On the one hand, Searle believes that such collective
intentionality is biologically primitive and cannot be reduced to individual
intentionality.9 On the other hand, he does not believe that this commits us to
the existence of a super-mind oating over individual minds. All intending
takes place inside individuals brains; it is just that in some cases I intend
only as part of our intending. The intentionality that exists in each individual
head has the form we intend.10
In a similar spirit, Ronald Dworkin distinguishes between what he terms a
practice view of collective entities, which he favours, and a metaphysical
view, which accords ontological priority to them. He observes that an
orchestra, for example, has a collective life not because it is ontologically
prior to individuals but because of the attitudes and actions which those
individuals take up.11 As he puts it more generally elsewhere, . . . communal
action depends not on the ontological priority of community over individual,
but on a certain kind of shared attitudes among individuals.12
Now we should recognize that at least in a broad and crude sense the
actions of collectivities are supervenient on the actions of their constituent
individuals. The individuals provide the fuel, as it were, for the collective
action and there is simply nowhere else for it to come from. There is indeed
no super-entity which somehow acts all on its own initiative, and if the
individuals do not act then collective action does not occur. It should also be
conceded that some collective action depends on the shared attitudes of the
individual participants. The institutional facts whose nature so much of
Searles work has enabled us to clarify exhibit just that characteristic. But the
dependency does not proceed all in one direction here. If individuals have one
kind of priority in providing the raw material for collective action, then the
collectivity may have another kind, since reference to the collectivity itself
may be ineliminable for securing the most signi cant description of the
individuals behaviour. In the context of institutional facts, the existence of a
collectivity may bring with it the possibility of individual actions which are
literally inconceivable in its absence: scoring a goal is possible only where
there are teams of which one is a member. As well as this conceptual priority,
collectivities sometimes have a causal priority over individuals. Individuals
may come to possess powers and skills which as a matter of contingent fact
they would not possess were it not for the role of some collectivity in
developing them. Playing in an orchestra developed my music skills, say, or
playing in the team developed my dribbling skills. Both individuals and
collectivities will exhibit priority in a number of different ways, and this

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The Moral Significance of Collective Entities

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suggests that it is misconceived to think in terms of priority simpliciter, either

of the collectivity over the individual or vice versa.
Moreover, although many instances of collective agency depend on the
shared attitudes of the participants, we should resist the common view that all
instances do. In order to see why, consider the phenomenon of the unwitting
clique. Imagine a number of individuals who know one another well, have an
easy rapport with one another, and are liable to engage in exchanges which
presuppose a great deal of prior acquaintance with their interests, their sense
of humour and their ways of relating to one another. Such a group of
individuals may collectively exclude another individual from their social
exchanges, making it dif cult or impossible for the other individual to join in
banter, contribute to the humour of the occasion, and so on. This group of
individuals would constitute a collectivity of the kind speci ed above: the
signi cance of what each of them was doing would not be adequately
captured without reference to the fact that they were doing it as part of the
whole group; no individual would be doing what the group as a whole was
doing, namely freezing a person out of a whole social atmosphere; and the
clique would survive a change in its composition. But of course the members
of the clique might act in this way quite unwittingly and unintentionally
they might, indeed, be morti ed to discover that this is what they had been
doing.
The phenomenon of the unwitting clique is important for at least two
reasons. First, although it may not be of any great signi cance in itself, it
provides the model for social phenomena of more consequence. For example,
the process it embodies may be reproduced in circumstances where a native
population visits certain kinds of psychological or cultural exclusion on
strangers in their midst (immigrant workers, perhaps), or in circumstances
where a police force practises institutional racism without its individual
of cers intending this to be the case. Second, and more pertinent to present
purposes, it demonstrates that not all cases of collective action depend on
shared attitudes of the kind required by the Searle/Dworkin account among
the individuals who compose the collectivity.13 There can be good reasons for
postulating collective action even where the protagonists themselves do not
recognize that it is occurring. Accordingly, there can be collective action
which is not merely in the minds of the individual constituents of the
collective agency since it is not in the minds of the individual constituents at
all. The plurality involved in collective action, therefore, does not lie solely
(or necessarily at all) in the propositional attitudes of the members of a
collective agent.
My response to the objection that collectivities have no ontological status,
and therefore the question of their moral status does not arise, comes to this.
Conditions (i)(iii) described earlier are often jointly instantiated. Individuals
engage in collective behaviour which goes beyond cases of contingent,

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Keith Graham

temporary coordination (as in the case of a number of individuals who on one

unique occasion happen to cooperate in jointly lifting some heavy object).
They form themselves into collective agencies which have a lifespan distinct
from and sometimes longer than that of the individuals who compose them.
The existence of committees and clubs, and indeed of cliques, implies the
need to recognize persisting structures whose conditions of existence are
distinct from those of their constituents. The actions of those persisting
structures are similarly distinct from those of their constituents. Sometimes
individuals collectively perform actions which not merely are not but could
not be performed by an individual. Wars are declared by states, policies are
initiated by governments, cultural exclusion is practised by populations,
departments are closed down by the senate when no individual is empowered
to do such a thing. In any tolerably comprehensive account of our social life,
reference to collectivities and their actions is unavoidable. Such reference,
moreover, does not occur only in opaque contexts. It is not just that a number
of individuals take themselves to be collectively declaring war: they do so.
And in any case, sometimes a number of individuals collectively perform
actions which they do not even take themselves to be performing. Irreducible
reference to collectivities, therefore, occurs in our best descriptions of the
social world.
But suppose it is allowed that reference to collectivity entities is irreducibly
present in any adequate description of the social realm, that we could not say
all that we reasonably want to say about what goes on in that realm, what
things are done, without mentioning them. Still, it is a separate matter, and a
highly contentious one, to claim that they are part of the moral realm. It is one
thing to describe the doings of battalions, electorates, families, or cliques, and
it might be allowed that we should lose much of the richness of our
conception of the social world if such descriptions disappeared. But it is a
much more special matter to evince speci cally moral concern for entities of
this kind, and it might fairly be objected that new arguments must be
presented for the further step, not merely of positing their irreducible presence
in the ways described so far, but of also applying a moral vocabulary to them.
That matter needs separate argument, to which I now proceed.
I address now what might be taken as the most basic reason for refusing to
apply predicates evincing moral concern to collectivities. I mentioned earlier
that non-human animals may be objects of moral consideration, and that is
already to populate the moral realm with something besides individual human
beings. But it may be thought that calling attention to this case will hardly
help to advance the argument for including collectivities under the heading of
moral patients. For, of course, what individual human beings and non-human
animals share in common is sentience. And that is precisely what
collectivities lack, so it may be thought out of the question that they should
then be reckoned among moral patients.14

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Will Kymlicka puts forward an argument of that kind in an apposite

context, where he is criticizing Charles Taylors contention that a community
may have a moral claim for protection, independently of any claims of
individual members.15 Kymlicka objects:
Groups have no moral claim to well-being independently of their members groups
just arent the right sort of being to have moral status. They dont feel pain or pleasure.
It is individuals, sentient beings whose lives go better or worse, who suffer or ourish,
and so it is their welfare that is the subject-matter of morality. It seems peculiar to
suppose that individuals can legitimately be sacri ced to further the health of
something that is incapable of ever suffering or ourishing in a sense that raises
claims of justice.16

I nd Kymlickas argument unconvincing, because it is not clear to me why

we should tie morality to anything as narrow as sentience. To do so is to
ignore many of the less bodily harms that even sentient creatures can visit on
one another: such things as deception or offensiveness, for example. These
harms are squarely in the moral realm when sentient individuals visit them on
one another, but that has nothing to do with their sentience. So why should
such harms not also be in the moral realm when they are visited on or by
collectivities? (Think how upset politicians get if they think that Parliament
has been deceived by one of its members.) In other words, the interpretation
of suffering and ourishing in a narrow physical way is too narrow to capture
many of the concerns of morality. When they are interpreted in a wider way,
there is no obvious reason why, say, issues of justice should not arise between
collectivities or between a collectivity and an individual.17
So much can be said in a negative vein: that the absence of sentience in
collectivities is not a suf cient reason to exclude them as patients from the
moral realm. Can anything be said in a more positive vein? There is one thing
that can be said, though it will not on its own take us far enough. That is that
the idea of a collectivity, as such, ourishing is a perfectly intelligible one.
Take a football club as one example of a collective entity as de ned earlier.
Given what a football club is, it is ourishing if it is winning games and
championships; and, given what the surrounding society is like, if it is doing
so in conditions of nancial solvency. Such a collectivitys ourishing is a
quite distinct matter from the ourishing of the individuals who go to
compose it. This is best illustrated by the fact that a given set of individuals
may be so hopeless at promoting the aims of the club that the best way to
ensure that it begins to ourish again would be to replace them all with other
individuals who are more competent at promoting its aims. It will then
ourish but they may not. In a similar way, it could be that I best promote the
ourishing of a collectivity to which I belong by driving myself into the
ground for its sake. At the extreme, I might literally sacri ce myself so that it
can ourish.18

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The example of the football club is important for illustrating how a concern
for the well-being of an entity constituted entirely of individual human beings
may be distinct from a concern for the well-being of its constituents: these
two things can easily come apart from each other. But the reason the example
does not take us far enough is that the ourishing of a football club is neither
moral nor morally signi cant.19 Are there other examples where the
ourishing of some collectivity is more plausibly of moral signi cance?
Consider the phenomenon of the couple.20 Each individual within a couple
will be morally important, but it is perfectly plausible to regard the couple
itself, indivisibly, as morally important. The relationship, or what happens
between people, as we signi cantly put it, may have independent weight.
Thus, three con icting states of affairs may respectively represent what is best
for X, what is best for Y, and what is best for the couple.21 X and Y might or
might not then each subordinate what is best for them as an individual to what
is best for them jointly, but the fact that there is such a choice to be made at all
suggests that independent importance is attached to the couple itself.
This example too, however, may fail to carry conviction. For one thing, it
may be felt that a couple fails to meet condition (iii) of the speci cation of
collectivity given above, in that a couple, unlike larger units, cannot survive
the secession of even one member. It would no longer be that couple indeed,
it would no longer be a couple at all.22 For another and connected thing, it
may be held that the whole raison detre of coupledom is so closely bound up
with the well-being of individuals that there could be no case here for
evincing independent moral concern for the couple itself. What is good for
the couple simply must mean what is good for X, thought of in terms of their
relationship with Y and what is good for Y, thought of in terms of their
relationship with X, as opposed to what might be good for each of them
considered independently of their relationship to each other.
I shall have more to say in section III about the relation between a moral
concern for a collectivity and a moral concern for individuals. At this point I
attempt to progress the claim that collectivities can be the object of moral
concern by adopting a different strategy from that of appealing to particular
examples in the hope of gaining the readers agreement. Instead, I invite
readers to construct their own example according to the following recipe.
Imagine any collective entity whose whole raison detre is to promote or
sustain some important moral value. Imagine, for example, that a number of
people come together to form an organization for that purpose: it might be the
ending of slavery, the establishment of socialism, the protection of traditional
forms of life, the maintenance of an atmosphere of collegiality. In these
circumstances, the collective entity will ourish to the extent that it is
succeeding in promoting its aims, and it will be entirely reasonable to regard
its ourishing as something morally desirable and its enfeeblement as
something morally undesirable.23 Nothing turns on acceptance of any

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particular example here, and indeed nothing turns on the raison detre of the
collectivity being morally positive. If a group of people formed the Society
for the Destruction of Morality this collectivity would enter the moral realm,
in the sense de ned in section I, because its ourishing would be something
morally undesirable.
Two objections might be raised to this argument. First, it might be objected
that the example is a cheat, since it simply packs in moral considerations
which can then be appealed to subsequently to show that the collectivity is a
moral patient. Secondly, it might be objected that the example proves too
much, since it shows that absolutely anything can be an object of moral
concern. A hat or a wastepaper bin could be an object of moral concern if
morally signi cant consequences followed from its destruction for example,
if someone were attached to it for sentimental reasons and its destruction
would cause them great distress. But if absolutely anything could be a moral
patient, then there would be nothing especially about collectivities as
originally de ned which would be at all germane to their status as moral
patients.
I believe that both objections should be resisted. First, if the aim is to
establish that some collectivities can be objects of moral concern, as against
the view which would con ne that status to individual human beings, then it is
legitimate to build into an example of a collectivity any particular additional
features which might be required to ensure that it has that status. There can be
no embargo on endowing the collectivity with properties which turn out to be
relevant to the question whether it can be the object of moral concern unless
there were some independent reason for such an embargo. To be sure, the
concern with what happens to a collectivity in these circumstances will arise
from the moral nature of the consequences of what happens to it, rather than
arising directly and intrinsically from what happens to it. That is to say, the
failure to ourish of a collectivity C devoted to realizing desirable moral
property P will be bad, on account of the importance attached to P, rather than
bad for the collectivity C (or at most, if it is bad for C this will be because it is
bad anyway, rather than vice versa). In that respect the case may differ from
the moral concern with what happens to an individual human being, where it
may indeed be because something is bad for the individual human being that
we can conclude that it is bad. But then, as I have indicated, we must expect
differences here. Collectivities do not have automatic moral status in the way
that human beings do; nor, where they do have moral status, will it be exactly
the same as that of a human being.
On the other hand, and in answer to the second objection, the fact that a
collectivity can be endowed with the property of promoting some moral value
indicates why it is especially appropriate to suggest that they enter the moral
realm as moral patients and to link this to their agency. Unlike hats or
wastepaper bins, collectivities can aspire to, intend to, attempt to, and actually

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Keith Graham

produce states of affairs which are themselves morally freighted. It is not

de nitive of collectivities that they should actually do so, and constituting a
collectivity is clearly neither a necessary nor a suf cient condition of being a
moral patient. But collectivities have a signi cantly appropriate potential for
acquiring that status, precisely because they share some of the features of
individual human beings. What happens to them may be of moral signi cance
because what happens to them may carry implications for what, otherwise,
they would be in a position to do.
This is the case for assigning collectivities to the moral realm. It is bound to
seem rather exiguous, and in the following section I attempt to strengthen it
by relating it to a number of suggestions in recent discussion of these issues.
They all revolve around the idea that if we endow collective entities with
moral importance at all, such importance is merely derivative from the moral
importance attaching to individuals. One point that should be stressed is that
this idea is not necessarily incompatible with the claim put forward at the start
of section I. The claim that collectivities are part of the moral realm is not
itself a theory as to why they are, and it might be that the explanation as to
why they are must be couched in terms of their value to individuals. I shall
attempt to cast doubt on that explanation but I also indicate that even if it is
correct the entry of collectivities into the moral realm has independent
signi cance.

III. Collectivities and Individual Good

The unique moral importance of individuals is expressed trenchantly by
Philip Pettit in endorsing what he calls the personalist assumption, the
assumption that the relevant constituency for judging the normative adequacy
of political institutions is human beings. He quotes with approval Benthams
advice: Individual interests are the only real interests. Take care of
individuals; never injure them, or suffer them to be injured, and you will have
done well enough by the public.24 Pettit acknowledges the possible rejoinder
that many goods are not properties of individuals but rather of corporate
entities, goods like the solidarity of a community or the continuity of a
culture. His response is that personalism need not be blind to such goods.
While the goods are not properties of individuals, they are still properties that
make an impact on individuals; persons will fare differently, depending on
whether they belong to a fractured or solidaristic community.25
Christopher McMahon similarly sponsors moral individualism and rejects
the idea that the goods of organizations, understood as distinct organisms,
deserve moral consideration.26 Partly this is held to be because the lives of
organizations are so different from those of natural persons. They might in
principle last for ever, in which case their claims might simply lose their

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urgency. Or they may split into two organizations, or readily undergo ssion
and fusion, in which case we lose a grip on what their interests as
organizations actually are. Partly it is held to be because it would be pointless
to treat organizations as having moral claims unless they could sometimes
outweigh those of individuals. But, McMahon argues:
Suppose that an organization is threatened with nonexistence because all of its
members have discovered more worthwhile ways to spend their time, and no other
people are interested in replacing them or would be interested in replacing them in the
future. For example, suppose that the only members of a corporation are its employees
and they all receive more attractive job offers. It seems absurd that there could be any
moral objection to the departure of the members on the ground that the organization
will cease to exist if they leave.27

John Broome takes up a position similar in a number of respects to that of

Pettit and McMahon. He embraces what he calls the principle of personal
good, which says, roughly, that one alternative cannot be better than another
unless it is better for someone.28 He then entertains the possibility that
something non-personal, such as the preservation of a culture, might be
thought morally desirable.29 He suggests that for such a thought to clash with
the principle of personal good it would have to be held that it is sometimes
good to preserve a culture even if this is not in the interests of those whose
culture it is, nor in anyone elses interests. He argues as follows:
Suppose the progress of materialism breaks up a culture. People have radios and
bicycles, and think themselves better off, but they no longer speak their ancestral
language and join in communal celebrations. It might be claimed that the results of
this development are bad. But would that mean: they are better for the people, but bad
all the same? Or would it mean: the people think themselves better off, but actually
they are not, because their loss is greater than they think? If the latter, it is simply
reminding us that culture is a good, for people, whose value people do not always
recognize. If the former, then it is de nitely denying the principle of personal good.
But the former claim seems implausible to me. Would it really have been better to
preserve the culture, even at the cost of denying the people the genuine bene ts of
material progress? I doubt it.30

I now put forward three reasons for nding the line of argument expressed by
these thinkers unpersuasive.
First, it relies heavily on an appeal to pre-existing moral intuitions. Perhaps
such an appeal is inevitable at some point and in some way in an argument of
this kind; but we should take care that it is not too locally based, and it is
important to be able to support it with argument. For example, someone in
Japan or Korea might not take the insouciant attitude that McMahon relies on
in talking of the survival of a rm. A collectivity, while not itself being of the
kind described towards the end of section II which has some moral goal as its
raison detre, may nevertheless have an admirable history and a present

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which embodies such qualities as loyalty and honour. And that may be
thought enough to make its survival a matter of some (even of moral)
importance.
The point here is that initial intuitions may be dislodged, or formed
differently, when we realize that a collectivity may be a locus of moral
qualities even if that is not the reason for its existence. The passing of a rm
might be a matter of regret from a moral point of view, even though the role of
a rm is the wholly non-moral one of making money. A similar point might
be made nearer home, with the example of a university department with an
illustrious history. Different initial intuitions are likely here because different
views are possible about the role of a university department. It might be
thought that the educative role is itself a moral one, in which case the intuition
would be that the demise of a department was morally undesirable. But it
might instead be thought that the fostering of intellectual virtues was not itself
a moral matter, in which case the initial intuition would be that its demise was
of no moral signi cance. But, in a similar way to the case of the rm, that
initial intuition might be loosened if it were realized that the department had
been the locus of a concern for the well-being of students, the fostering of an
atmosphere of friendly and supportive collegiality. There will be former
members of the collectivity to consider, in view of the role which it played in
their life and their present feelings towards it. For that reason the continuity of
that particular collectivity may be of moral importance as a matter quite
distinct from the fortunes of the current members of it. It might well then be
thought regrettable that it should disappear, even if it does so because all
present incumbents nd better offers elsewhere. It makes a difference when
the locus of moral virtues is a collectivity, even if its virtues gain their
importance wholly via their importance for individuals.
Consider how the appeal to intuition works in Broomes argument. He
expresses scepticism about the claim that certain developments might be good
for people but bad all the same, since involving the destruction of a notionally
non-personal good, a culture. He doubts whether it would be better to
preserve the culture at the cost of denying a different kind of good to the
people. Hence, he claims, the apparently non-personal good either turns out
not to be non-personal or else it could not plausibly trump the personal. But
the appeal to intuition only supports the conclusion that personal good is not
outweighed; it does not support the conclusion that there is no other kind of
good involved. Maybe its true that it wouldnt have been better to preserve
the culture at that cost. But that does not show that no other kind of good is
involved besides personal good. Instead, it might follow from the fact that
personal good always trumps impersonal or collective goods.
That leads to the second point about these arguments. They ascribe to the
sponsor of the moral importance of collectivities a stronger thesis than the
sponsor really needs to espouse. They assume that there would be no point in

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such sponsorship unless the importance of non-individuals were sometimes

held to outweigh that of individuals. But that is not so. Consider an analogy to
explain why. Suppose you hold a moral theory according to which rights are
always trumps. It would not follow that you then had to dismiss the rest of
morality as simply redundant. At the very least you would need further
theoretical resources to deal with situations where rights simply didnt enter
the picture or were equally balanced. In an analogous way, a perfectly tenable
position would be to hold that the moral status of individuals was such that it
did always outweigh that of collectivities, but that nevertheless there is
something there to be outweighed. The moral status of collectivities would
matter, for example, when it came to settling issues between collectivities
where no individuals goods as such were at stake, or where individuals
goods were evenly balanced. We might therefore well have reasons for
believing that collectivities have moral claims even if these were always
outweighed by those of individuals.
The third weakness I perceive in these arguments arises from a concession
that they all seem to embody. In each, it seems to be allowed that the
speci cation of certain goods is non-individual: solidarity, community,
culture, and so on are more abstract than individuals are. But it is held that
the explanation of why these things are goods must consist in their being
good for individuals. An analogy may again help to uncover the weakness
here.
I may have one of two attitudes towards things that I value: I may value
them only because I have chosen them or, on the contrary, I may choose them
only because I think they have value independently of my choices.31 As an
example of a choice-dependent value, I may take up some hobby, for example
doing The Times crossword puzzle or playing chess, where I dont think there
is anything intrinsically worthwhile or valuable in doing those particular
things, but I happen to derive enjoyment or absorption or stimulation from
doing them. The activities associated with those particular projects, then,
would not strike me as having any value if I had not made such a choice: there
would be no reason for me to engage in them. On the other hand, there are
projects that I may regard as valuable independently of my choosing them.
Here, I dont value them because I have chosen them; rather, I choose them
because I think they have value. I might take up playing a musical instrument
or setting up and running a soup kitchen for needy people in that spirit. That
is, I might regard these as things that have value, things there is reason to do,
and not merely reason for someone who has chosen to do them.
This distinction is reproduced in the context of collective entities. I may
belong to the lunchtime common room crossword puzzle collectivity, which,
with its rich combined classical, scienti c, philosophica l and literary talents,
completes The Times puzzle in an impressively short time. But I would feel
that the world was in no way less valuable for me or anyone else if it did not

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exist. A fortiori I would feel that the world was no less valuable if I quit and
went for a swim every lunchtime instead. Alternatively, I may belong to a
collectivity whose activities I do regard as having value independently of my
choices. Let us suppose that it is a classical music ensemble or an
organization for promoting political or religious consciousness, and let us
suppose that I believe that the world would be a worse place, maybe for me or
for someone else, but maybe just objectively worse, if this collectivity did not
exist.
What is the signi cance of the distinction between choice-dependent and
choice-independent values for the present discussion? It is partly analogical.
When someone chooses to value something, we can push back the
explanation for this one stage by suggesting that some antecedently-existing
valuableness gives a reason for their so choosing. Sometimes, at least, the
value of the chosen thing does not proceed, or does not proceed only, from the
act of choice. Analogously, when Pettit et al. insist that collective goods
impact on individuals, we can allow that what they say is correct but point out
that it doesnt follow that the value of those goods proceeds from their impact
on individuals. Rather, we may wish to see those goods promoted and wish to
see their bene ts accrue to individuals, but precisely because we believe that
they are goods independently of that. We dont value them because they are
valuable for individuals; on the contrary, we think they are valuable for
individuals because we think they are valuable. That seems to me a plausible
thing to say about friendship, solidarity, culture, and similar things.
The distinction between choice-dependent and choice-independent values
has a further signi cance for the issue at hand. One view it is possible to take
of the moral consideration due to individual persons is that it is owed simply
because they are persons.32 The alternative, however, is once again to push
back the explanation one stage and cite those characteristics of persons in
virtue of which they are owed that kind of consideration. If we follow the
strategy of making reference to what it is about them that licenses that claim,
then we are liable to refer to some state or property or relation, abstractions
distinct from individuals themselves. Consistency then requires that, ceteris
paribus, any other entity exhibiting those characteristics is also entitled to
moral consideration.
It is not as if there is any shortage of plausible candidates for those
characteristics of persons which can be cited to explain why they are entitled
to moral consideration, rather than simply saying that they are so entitled
because they are persons. We have already had occasion to notice what is in
some ways the most obvious candidate, namely their sentience. Individual
persons are capable of a range of pleasant and painful experiences, and the
having of experiences of these kinds is something that matters morally. Nonhuman animals then enter the moral realm by virtue of the consistency
requirement: however unlike us they may be in other respects, they too are

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capable of feeling pain, for example, and if being in pain is something that
matters morally then it matter morally wherever it occurs.
Now sentience is not the only characteristic of human beings which is
pertinent to explaining why they are owed moral consideration. There is a
whole complex of characteristics which are pertinent, such as capacities for
self-consciousness, for rich and varied relations with others, the possession of
aspirations for the future and the ability to act so as to further them, capacities
for loyalty, creativity, amicable or loving relations. Once again, if the
presence of those states, relations, and properties explains the moral
importance of human beings, then their exhibition in other entities will,
ceteris paribus, confer moral importance on those other entities too. If, for
example, the capacity for having expectations frustrated is morally important,
then it will remain so whether manifested in human beings or in collectivities.
There are, to be sure, legitimate grounds for doubting whether all of these
characteristics could be possessed by collectivities. In particular, it might be
doubted whether collectivities as such experience emotions; and if they do
not, then they could not possess characteristics which are conceptually
connected with the having of emotions. Thus, it might be doubted whether
collectivities could have the capacity for love. I do not pronounce either way
on that question, but I do want to insist that there are many other pertinent
characteristics which are unproblematically possessed by collectivities. Thus,
for example, committees can have aspirations for the future and place their
trust in some other agency, and then they may subsequently have their trust
rewarded or abused. They can similarly be the bene ciaries of generosity or
the victims of deception. If it matters morally that states such as that of being
a bene ciary of generosity or the victim of deception should or should not
obtain, then it matters regardless of whether those subjected to them are
individual human beings or collectivities.
It might now be objected that we have in any case been given no reason to
suppose that it is the capacity for such things as love and loyalty which give
human beings moral status. Is it not rather our status as agents which demands
moral respect?33 There are two points to make in response to this question, the
rst clari catory and the second concessive. First, it is important to bear in
mind that my discussion is directed to the grounds on which we might
reasonably attach moral signi cance to what happens to an entity. As I
indicated in section I, this is to a large extent a separate matter from attaching
moral signi cance to what an entity does. It may be true that it is the fact of
agency which elicits moral respect speci cally, but also true that quite
different properties elicit moral concern of other kinds. Once again, the case
of nonhuman animals illustrates the distinction between extending moral
consideration to an entity and paying it a particular kind of moral respect.
Hence, although the agency of human beings may be essential for some kinds
of moral signi cance, it need not be essential for all.

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But secondly, the grounds for holding that a moral concern for what
happens to a collectivity is sometimes appropriate are in any case not
completely disconnected from matters of agency. It is a standing condition of
agency to be susceptible to the thwarting of actions (sometimes, though not
always, as a result of human intervention), and such thwarting can happen to a
collectivity as well as to an individual. It may happen, for instance, that the
neighbourhood associations plans to build a childrens playground, or the
committees decision to enact some change which lies within its competence
to determine, are thwarted in some way. And we may feel that something
morally undesirable has occurred precisely because the relevant collectivity
was the morally appropriate one for determining what state of affairs should
obtain. In these circumstances, what has happened to the collectivity may
become a matter of legitimate moral concern, but of course in this case (moral
patienthood arising from thwarted plans) the moral concern arises only
because the entity in question is an agent in the rst place. Being an agent, we
might say, already carries with it signi cant potential for also becoming a
moral patient.
It might then be countered that, after all, the thwarting of planned actions
cannot itself carry any moral signi cance unless it is accompanied by some
appropriate range of emotions on the part of the thwarted agent, that what
happens to collectivities in this regard does not carry any moral weight, since
collectivities do not share the other necessary characteristics possessed by
individuals. But that counter seems to me unpersuasive, or at best tied to a
particular morality rather than any assumption about morality as such.
Suppose that it were possible to administer some drug which left an
individuals general powers of agency intact but removed any accompanying
emotions normally present if planned actions were thwarted, so that the agent
simply did not mind. On a fairly restricted consequentialist view, this might
remove any moral objection to the thwarting; but for anyone who saw
something intrinsically wrong in it, the wrongness is not thereby removed.
Indeed, thwarting might be regarded as even more undesirable in those
circumstances. If it is possible to take such a view of thwarting when
unaccompanied by emotion in the individual case, then it is also possible in
the collective case.
What is arguably more important here for the thwarting to be a matter of
moral concern is not that it should be accompanied by certain emotions but
rather that the agency in question should itself have a certain character: that it
should be ratiocinative and deliberative rather than re ex or spontaneous. It is
the thwarting of agency of a certain richness, and a connection with overall
aspirations and considered choices, which carries moral signi cance. But
there is no problem in the idea that (some, though not all) collective agency
does have that character. Collectivities such as neighbourhood associations,
committees, and university senates can form projects, deliberate, take

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decisions, make choices, and then act on the decisions and choices they have
made. In those respects their agency is precisely like individual agency.
This long digression is intended to take the steam out of the arguments
described at the beginning of this section by providing reasons to back up the
third claimed weakness in them, namely that they do not justify the idea that
any moral desirability attached to collectivities is to be explained in terms of
its desirability for individuals. The claim has been that there is no reason to
stop at the unsupported assertion that certain things just are good for
individuals, and that it is possible to go further and identify states, relations,
characteristics, etc., which explain why this should be so, since those more
abstract things are themselves held to be valuable. But then a consistency
requirement dictates that those very considerations which are brought in to
explain why certain goods associated with collectivities are good for
individuals can also explain why there are goods present in collectivities
themselves, and their relations, which we should care about.

IV. Conclusion
It will be evident, especially from the later parts of the previous section, that
I have not attempted here to produce a conclusive argument for the
allocation of collective entities to the moral realm. I have tried, rather, to
articulate some of the similarities between individual and collective agents,
and to suggest that we should in any case have recourse to abstractions
properties, relations, and so on in explaining the moral signi cance of
individuals themselves. When we do so, then certain collectivities can be the
object of moral concern because they exhibit, in their own right, some of the
properties and relations in virtue of which individual human beings elicit
moral concern. They can be the locus of bene cence, loyalty, cruelty, pride,
shame. They can be the victims of deception, they can experience generosity,
they can have their autonomy thwarted. What happens to a collectivity is
then something which can matter from a moral point of view. This claim
does not require that any non-human entity should be just like a human
being. Certainly no collectivities possess moral importance just qua
collectivities, in the way in which, arguably, human beings do qua human
beings; nor would it be possible for any collectivity to commit all of the
Seven Deadly Sins or infringe all of the Ten Commandments. But there is
suf cient overlap in properties for the fate of some collectivities to be
morally signi cant.
Suppose this is correct. What follows? What follows is that moral decisionmaking becomes much more complex. We cant turn our attention only to the
well-being of individuals in deciding how to act. I believe that will impact on
a number of conventional wisdoms, including the routine appeal to the idea of

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the distinctness of persons, the idea that each person has their own separate
life to lead. That idea is multiply ambiguous,34 and even when we get clear on
what it means to talk of the distinctness of persons it is another step to decide
what follows morally from it. And the process of deciding what follows
morally from it will certainly be complicated by the entry of collective
entities into the moral realm. For, of course, their entry is not like adding six
more objects to six objects already in a room. Collectivities are themselves
made up of persons and nothing else. Being a member of various collectivities
is part of what each distinct persons life is.
The moral signi cance of collectivities then impacts on the doctrine of the
distinctness of persons in the following way. In originally asserting the
doctrine, both Rawls and Nozick object to the idea of sacri cing the interests
of an individual to those of some other kind of entity.35 It becomes much less
clear whether that idea is objectionable when the type of entity in question is
itself composed of individual human beings, who may have rational grounds
for identifying with it. Though there is a distinction between the individuals
interests and those of the collectivity, the relation between the two becomes
problematic in a way which creates complications for the reasoning of moral
agents.
There will be at least three complications (though to pursue them further
would be to go well beyond the scope of the present paper). First, in
considering each persons well-being we shall need to consider them not just
as individuals but also as members of collectivities. What is good for them
qua individual may not be the same as what is good for them qua member of
a given collectivity, and balancing and trade-offs may be called for. Second,
when individuals are themselves engaged in moral reasoning they must take
note of their membership of collectivities. There will be more input to
consider, in terms of the independent weight to be given to the ourishing of
certain collectivities, than there would be if such membership held no moral
signi cance. And third, we shall need to recognize that some moral
reasoning is itself irreducibly plural in form. Sometimes the collective entity
whose well-being is an object of moral concern will be one to which we
belong and with which we identify. In those circumstances we may nd that
we are deciding what we should do, as a collective agency rather than as a
number of discrete individual agents, to protect the well-being of the
collectivity. 36
NOTES
1 I rst expresse d some of the views in this paper in a pair of lectures which I was invited to
give to the Department of Philosophy at University College London, and subsequentl y in a
talk at the Centre for Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St Andrews during
my tenure of a visiting research fellowship. I am indebted to both institutions for their
hospitalit y and to David Archard, John Broome, Malcolm Budd, John Haldane, Jerry

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5
6

7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

15
16
17

39

Valberg, Jo Wolff, John Skorupski, and other members of the audience s for helpful
comments. An earlier version of the present paper was then read to the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Bristol, to the Department of Politics at the University of
Birmingham, and to a conferenc e on the Individua l and the Community at the Institute of
Advanced Study of the University of London. I am also grateful to the audience s on those
occasion s for many helpful comments, and in particula r to Dario Castiglione , Andrew
Chitty, Colin Farrelly, John Horton, and Saladin Meckled-Garci a for their written
comments. An almost- nal version was read to the Oxford University Philosophica l
Society, and I am grateful to Bob Frazier, Joseph Raz, and other members of the audience
for helpful comments. My respondent on that occasion was G. A. Cohen, whose
characteristicall y acute comments have saved me from many errors.
The locus classicus for the claim that moral responsibilit y can be attributed only to
individual human beings is probably still H. D. Lewis, Collective Responsibility ,
Philosophy 23 (1948), pp. 318. For the claim that it can be attributed to collectiv e entities,
see P. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibilit y (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984); K. Graham, Collective Responsibility , in T. van den Beld (ed.), Moral
Responsibility and Ontology (Dordrecht /Boston: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 4961; and L. May,
Sharing Responsibilit y (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
That view appears to be adopted by Peter French, who argues that corporation s are full edged members of the moral community, of equal standing with the traditionall y
acknowledge d residents, human beings, and that they will have whatever privileges , rights
and duties as are, in the normal course of events, accorded to all members of the moral
community, Collective and Corporate Responsibility, op. cit., p. 32. Larry May, on the
other hand, denies that such groups should be construe d as full- edged moral agents. Cf.
Sharing Responsibilit y, op. cit., pp. 84, 192 n. 8.
In what follows I rely on the conceptio n of collectiv e entities put forward in K. Graham,
Collective Responsibility , op. cit.
Cf. P. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibilit y, op. cit., pp. 513.
Unlike many accounts , it does not make the presence of intention a de ning condition . See,
e.g., M. Bratman, Shared Cooperative Activity, Philosophica l Review 101 (1992), pp.
32741; R. Dworkin, Liberal Community, California Law Review 77 (1989), pp. 479
504; P. French, Collective and Corporate Responsibilit y, op. cit., pp. 4045.
J. Searle, The Constructio n of Social Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 1.
Ibid., p. 23; italics in original.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid., p. 26.
R. Dworkin, Liberal Community, California Law Review 77 (1989), pp. 479504, at
p. 494.
R. Dworkin, Equality, Democracy and the Constitution , Alberta Law Review 28 (1990),
pp. 32446, at p. 335.
Of course, the activities of the clique depend on the shared attitudes of its members towards
all kinds of things, but they do not depend on the constituen t members having a shared
attitude towards what they are collectively doing, i.e., acting as a clique.
Ronald Dworkin makes the point that an orchestr a only has a musical life, it does not have a
sex life or blood pressure or worries, and in the same way a nation may have a political life
but not a sex life (R. Dworkin, Liberal Community, op. cit., pp. 479504, at pp. 4957). It
must be broadly true that collectivitie s as such do not have sex lives, though exceptio n
would have to be made of a collectivit y whose raison detre was collectiv e sexual activity,
as in the practice of orgies.
C. Taylor, Justice after Virtue, Legal Theory Workshop Series. Faculty of Law: University
of Toronto, WS 1987-8, no. 3.
W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
pp. 2412.
Notice the shift in Kymlickas argument from the idea that collectivitie s have no moral
status to the idea that they have no status that might raise question s speci cally of justice.
These are distinct claims. My own counter-clai m is about moral status generally , but I see
no reason to agree with either of Kymlickas claims.

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18 That is an important possibilit y in the case of collectiv e biologica l entities. See J. ONeill,
Ecology, Policy and Politics (London/New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 22.
19 Not everyone would agree. Compare the remark of Bill Shankly, the former manager of the
English football club Liverpool: Somebody said Footballs a matter of life and death to
you. I said, Listen, its more important than that . That remark dictates the need to
distinguish the claim that assigning collective entities to the moral realm rises to the level of
bare conceptua l intelligibilit y from the claim that doing so has some signi cant degree of
plausibility . It is the latter that I am concerne d to establish in this paper. It is conceptuall y
intelligible that someone should bring fervour, even moral fervour, to the ourishing of a
football club, that they should regard it as something of massive importance, overridin g
what others would take to be the most important moral considerations . It is equally
conceivabl e that someone should take up the same attitude towards the preservatio n of their
familys reputation. But we (or at any rate I) would think that there was something
deranged in their doing so, and my assumption is that I shall not convince many readers of
the plausibilit y of assigning collectivitie s to the moral realm by calling attention to the
collectiv e good of a football club. Now that may raise the suspicion that my achievin g such
convictio n will turn on the contingent question whether there is any collectivity whose
ourishing happens to be regarded as morally important both by me and by my readers. The
argument which follows in the text is intended precisely to minimize that sort of reliance on
the particula r set of values which anyone happens to hold.
20 For similar argument, see A. Levine, The General Will (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. 21.
21 Cf. Some things have value to me and to you, and some things essentially have value to
us. C. Taylor, Cross Purposes: The LiberalCommunitarian Debate, in Philosophical
Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 190. Cf. Irreducibl y
Social Goods, op. cit., p. 139.
22 Georg Simmel argues to that effect. See The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K. H. Wolff
(New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 123.
23 There are important distinctions here. A collectivity s aim might be the achievemen t of
some state of affairs not yet extant, or it might be the sustainin g of some already-existin g
state of affairs. In the former case, once the state of affairs had been achieved the demise of
the collectivity might be appropriat e and unexceptionable . Its ourishing is therefore not
necessarily something of moral importance for all time. That is one of many respects in
which even morally signi cant collectivitie s may differ from human beings.
24 The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1 (Edinburgh : William Tait), cited in P. Pettit, The
Common Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 287.
25 P. Pettit, op. cit., p. 287.
26 C. McMahon, Authority and Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993),
p. 64.
27 Ibid., p. 65.
28 J. Broome, Weighing Goods (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 131. Broome adds the slightly
puzzling quali cation that the principle ought to be prefaced with Setting aside goods that
are entirely independen t of the good of people . . . (ibid., p. 166). However, he makes clear
that that quali cation is intended to deal with goods such as the survival of some living
species which are quite obviousl y separate from the good of people, and goods of that kind
lie beyond the scope of his discussion . His principle is explicitly designed to deal with
[c]ommunal goods, for instance, [which] seem to belong to people together, but not to any
individual (ibid.; italics in original).
29 See, for example, C. Taylor, Irreducibl y Social Goods, op. cit., pp. 12745.
30 J. Broome, Weighing Goods, op. cit., p. 169.
31 Ronald Dworkin makes a similar distinction between volitiona l interests , which arise from
desires I happen to have, and critical interests, whose importance is not in the same way
dependent on my happenin g to want something. See R. Dworkin, Liberal Community, op.
cit., pp. 4845.
32 That seems to be the view expresse d by Jean Hampton. She argues that if we say that moral
regard is to be paid because of some characteristic s which a person possesses , it turns out
to be done not because we have regard for him, but because we have regard for that within

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him which is the carrier of value. Instead, she prefers the view that we simply say that it is
our personhoo d itself which is valuable , and not any particular trait we have . . . (J.
Hampton, The Wisdom of the Egoist, Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1997), pp. 2151,
at pp. 36, 47; italics in original) .
This question has been raised by a referee.
I attempt to disentangl e some of the ambiguity in K. Graham, Being Some Body: Choice
and Identity in a Liberal Pluralist World, section 3, in Nationalism and Racism in the
Liberal Order, ed. B. Brecher, J. Halliday, and K. Kolinska` (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998),
pp. 17692.
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 29, 187; R.
Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 33.
For the importance of such plural agency, see, e.g., M. Gilbert, Living Together:
Rationality , Sociality and Obligation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little eld, 1996); M.
Hollis, Trust Within Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); J. Searle, The
Constructio n of Social Reality, op. cit.; and C. Taylor, Irreducibly Social Goods, op. cit.

Received 22 November 2000

Keith Graham, Department of Philosophy , University of Bristol, 9 Woodland Road, Bristol
BS8 1TB, England, UK. E-mail: Keith.Graham@bris.ac.u k