Institutions in Action: The Nature and the Role of Institutions in the Real World (Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, 12) 3030326179, 9783030326173

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Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12

Tiziana Andina Petar Bojanić   Editors

Institutions in Action The Nature and the Role of Institutions in the Real World

Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality Volume 12 Series Editor Raul  Hakli,  Dept of Political & Economic Studies,  University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Managing Editors Hans Bernhard Schmid, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland Jennifer Hudin, University of California, Berkeley, USA Advisory Editors Robert Audi, Department of Philosophy, Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, USA Michael Bratman, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, USA Cristiano Castelfranchi, Cognitive Science, University of Siena, Siena, Italy David Copp, University of California, Davis, Davis, USA Ann Cudd, University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA John Davis, Marquette University, Milwaukee, USA Wolfgang Detel, Department of Philosophy, University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany Andreas Herzig, Computer Science, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France Ingvar Johansson, Philosophy, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden Byron Kaldis, Department of Philosophy, University of Athens, Athens, Greece Martin Kusch, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria Christopher Kutz, Law, University of California, Berkeley, USA Eerik Lagerspetz, Department of Philosophy, University of Turku, Turku, Finland Pierre Livet, Department of Philosophy, Universite de Provence, Marseille, France Tony Lawson, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Kirk Ludwig, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA Kay Mathiessen, Information Science and Philosophy, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA Larry May, Philosophy Department, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA Georg Meggle, Institute of Philosophy, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany Anthonie Meijers, Department of Philosophy, University of Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Seumas Miller, Philosophy, Australian National University and Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia Uskali Mäki, Academy of Finland, Helsinki, Finland Elisabeth Pacherie, Cognitive Science, Jean Nicod Institute, Paris, France Henry  Richardson, Department of Philosophy, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., USA Michael Quante, Department of Philosophy, University of Münster, Münster, Germany John Searle, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, USA Michael Tomasello, Department of Developmental Psychology, Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, Germany

First book series in Philosophy of the Social Sciences that specifically focuses on Philosophy of Sociality and Social Ontology. Covers a new and rapidly developing field that has become one of the key topics of the international philosophical world. Aims at an interdisciplinary approach that will bring new perspectives to the study of such topics as communication, unintended consequences of action as well as social structures and institutions. This book series publishes research devoted to the basic structures of the social world. The phenomena it focuses on range from small scale everyday interactions to encompassing social institutions, from unintended consequences to institutional design. The unifying element is its focus on the basic constitution of these phenomena, and its aim to provide philosophical understanding on the foundations of sociality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality covers the part of philosophy of the social sciences which deals with questions of social ontology, collective intentionality (e.g. collective knowledge, joint and collective action, joint mental states) and related philosophical topics. The series will include monographs and edited collections on philosophical and conceptual questions concerning social existence as well as conceptual and theoretical analyses of social notions and collective epistemology. In principle, all phenomena dealing with sociality are covered as long as they are approached from a philosophical point of view, broadly understood. Accordingly, the works to be published in the series would in general be philosophical—without regard to philosophical schools and viewpoints—and they would meet the highest academic and intellectual standards are met. However, the series is interdisciplinary not only in an intra-philosophical sense but also in the sense of encouraging highlevel work from other disciplines to be submitted to the series. Others who are active in the field are political scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and researchers of artificial intelligence. The resulting interdisciplinary approach will give new perspectives to the study of topics such as social interaction, communication, unintended consequences of action, social structures and institutions, the evolution of collective intentionality phenomena, as well as the general ontological architecture of the social world. The series discourages the submission of manuscripts that contain reprints of previous published material and/or manuscripts that are below 150 pages / 75,000 words. For inquiries and submission of proposals authors can contact [email protected], or contact one of the associate editors. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10961

Tiziana Andina • Petar Bojanić Editors

Institutions in Action The Nature and the Role of Institutions in the Real World

Editors Tiziana Andina Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences University of Turin Torino, Italy

Petar Bojanić Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory University of Belgrade Belgrade, Serbia

ISSN 2542-9094     ISSN 2542-9108 (electronic) Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality ISBN 978-3-030-32617-3    ISBN 978-3-030-32618-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

The Importance of Institutions in Social Reality

We often consider language as a significant indicator of what is happening in the world – and rightly so. Indeed, language generally reveals the degree of respect that people have for institutions. And when this degree is low – that is, when someone does not grant the right respect to a given institution – we say that this lack of institutional respect must be underlined or even punished. In fact, institutions are considered – sometimes with a hint of rhetoric – something that must be protected, defended, and removed from the sphere of power and conflict, not because they are extraneous to conflict but because they are interpreted as arbitrators that have the task, essential to any democracy, to represent the third party between the ones involved. To be or to represent an institution means precisely to be at a higher level, taking a neutral stance with regard to the parties involved, in order to formulate a judgment that is a guarantee of impartiality. In this sense, because it is impartial, an institution should also have the power and moral authority to represent all those who belong to it. Therefore, one of the main characteristics of institutions, as well as of their representatives, consists in acting from a place that is neutral, not because it does not belong to anyone but because it belongs to all those who are represented by that institution. In this sense, we must also consider the institution as a common good. Institutions (entities such as states and governments but also universities, courts of justice, or parliaments) are therefore common goods – universals, in a way – that belong to all citizens of a State, to all the members of a community. Therefore, they must be treated with the same care and attention that we have, or should have, for the natural resources of the Earth, the common lands that belong to a nation, the seas or anything else does not belong to anyone, since, ultimately, it belongs to the sum of generations that have lived or will live on Earth. That said, it is evident that the ontological question about the identity of an institution is crucial from a philosophical perspective. In order to answer the question of the nature of the power managed by institutions, one has to answer another question concerning the nature and identity of the things we call institutions. In other words, what are institutions? How can we define them, provided that it is possible to agree on a definition? v

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Can they be considered as collective subjects, as claimed by some theorists, or do we have to understand them differently, as a class of specific objects with particular properties? And if we choose this second option, what kind of entity would they be, and what properties would define them? What kind of relationship is there between the institutions and the singular subjects? What and how many types of relationships can there be between institutions? The ontological inquiry therefore takes precedence to that of other areas of philosophy, especially political and moral philosophy, which deal with or refer to institutions. Many institutions are in fact political subjects – think of the States – and, at the same time, they are also the political instruments needed for the implementation of justice. In other words, institutions, whatever they may be, are inspired by justice and have the task of promoting it. Whatever the metaphysical option we decide to adopt to describe the nature of institutions, another decisive question is that of their relationship with individuals. This is true whether we decide to interpret institutions as subjects that are other than individuals, that is, not coinciding with the sum of the individuals that compose them, or whether we decide to interpret them as collective subjects. Since existence over a considerable time span seems to be one of the properties that define the essence of what we call an institution, it is evident that, above all in the political and ethical debate, the question of trust between institutions and citizens is crucial. A relationship of trust seems to be a necessary condition for the institutions to be able to last over time and to carry out their task: namely, the protection of individuals also through the application of justice. Finally, a last aspect to consider concerns the question of the relationship between institutions and those elements – such as norms, laws, and contracts – that have a normative basis. Can we reasonably understand normativity as the foundation of institutions? If so, should we think of normativity as external to the institutions or internal to them? This volume collects contributions from various theoretical and methodological orientations, aimed at investigating the theoretical cores related to the nature of institutions, their identity, and the normativity which inspires and grounds them, with the goal of bringing the debate on institutions back to the center of social ontology. Torino, Italy Belgrade, Serbia

Tiziana Andina Petar Bojanic

Contents

1 Social Corporations as Social Institutions ��������������������������������������������    1 Raimo Tuomela 2 Institutions and Functions����������������������������������������������������������������������    9 Francesco Guala and Frank Hindriks 3 Epistemic Virtues of Institutions������������������������������������������������������������   21 Snježana Prijić Samaržija 4 What Is an Act of Engagement? Between the Social, Collegial and Institutional Protocols������������������������������������������������������   37 Petar Bojanić 5 Play It by Trust: Social Trust, Political Institutions and Leisure��������   51 Nebojša Zelič 6 Individual Morality and the Morality of Institutions��������������������������   73 Thomas M. Scanlon 7 States and Transgenerational Actions����������������������������������������������������   89 Tiziana Andina 8 From Capital to Documediality��������������������������������������������������������������  107 Maurizio Ferraris 9 The Basis of European Cooperation������������������������������������������������������  123 Jonathan Wolff 10 Ways of Compromise-Building in a World of Institutions ������������������  135 Emmanuel Picavet Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  147

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Chapter 1

Social Corporations as Social Institutions Raimo Tuomela

Abstract  In this article I discuss “societal and communal” corporations and call them “social corporations”. They are public organizations owned either by a state or other public community, and they provide services at least to their “host” groups. Such a corporation is a non-profit (or approximately non-profit) organization in that it typically does not strive for profits going beyond those covering what maintaining its services cost to members. It is argued in this paper that such a social corporation (e.g. school, hospital, or mail service made into corporations) ideally functions as a kind of “extended” social institution. Such an extended institution (social organization) depends on more basic institutions like language, money, and property and provides services by their host group (e.g. “us”) for its target group. I argue that ideally properly functioning social institutions should be based on full-blown we-thinking, viz. we-thinking in the we-mode (criteria: group reason, collective commitment, and a collectivity condition) as well as the collective acceptance of a fact or property as institutional; see Tuomela (The Philosophy of Sociality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Moreover, the creation of institutions ideally requires we-thinking in which group members together create an institution for them e.g. by declaration (in Searle’s (Making the Social World. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) speech-act sense) or, alternatively, by ordinary agreement-making. Extended social institutions (e.g. organizations like schools) involve constitutive and regulative norms in addition to positions, practices and goals that determine the services that are being provided. Institutional norms thus include constitutive norms that in part determine the institution’s goals and the services it is supposed to provide for its members (generally “us”). The goals are satisfied in part due to the institutional activities and practices as well as the “institutional services” that are supposed to satisfy the institution’s goals.

R. Tuomela (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland University of Munich, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_1

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A social corporation in my sense involves goals as well as collectively accepted constitutive and regulative rules plus the employees’ norm-governed social practices for reaching their goals. Accordingly, the employees and other members in general have positions involving status functions (deontic powers). The corporate goals include the provision of reasonably priced relevant social services for “us”, viz. the host group. The arguments of this article give support for the central claim that the social corporation that in general is “by the people for the people” functions as a social institution in the extended sense. In more general terms, a social corporation exists in a host community (or state) and involves a normative organization with positions – thus statuses and powers – for the individuals. Keywords  Social corporation · Social institution · Extended social institution

I. In this paper I will discuss “societal and communal” corporations and call them “social corporations”. They are public organizations owned either by a state or other public community, and they provide services through their activities at least to their “host” groups. Such a corporation is a non-profit (or approximately non-profit) organization in that it typically does not strive for profits going beyond those covering what maintaining its services cost to members. I will argue in this paper that such a social corporation (e.g. school, hospital, or mail service made into corporations) ideally functions as a kind of “extended” social institution. Such an extended institution (social organization) depends on more basic institutions like language, money, and property and provides services by their host group (e.g. “us”) for their target group. Social corporations serve the members of their host groups for free or at least for reasonable prices. Social institutions and facts based on them conceptually pertain to the members’ and employees’ social groups (e.g. communities, states), and are thus necessarily group phenomena (as are corporations). Social institutions are typically created and maintained by “our group” for “us”. My account of well-functioning institutions is based on we-thinking and we-acting in the “we-mode”. A central element here is collective acceptance (as attitude or as action) that involves performative conceptual construction through constitutive rules, viz. a kind of normative “analytic statements” that typically create and define social practices (e.g. those that constitute a traffic system). Regulative rules in contrast tell us how to act in this kind of situation (e.g. in order to correctly cross a street). In Searle’s theory social institutions are systems that enable the creation and maintenance of status functions, and all institutional facts are status functions (Searle 2010, p. 23); and status functions create deontic powers (viz. rights, duties and other reason-giving factors that give the target people desire-independent reasons to act, viz. reasons independent of relevant antecedently had desires). The above claims hold true for my account as well. I argue that ideally properly functioning social institutions should be based on full-blown we-thinking, viz. we-thinking in the we-mode (criteria: group reason,

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collective commitment, and a collectivity condition) as well as the collective acceptance of a fact or property as institutional; see Tuomela (2007, 2013). Moreover, the creation of institutions ideally requires we-thinking in which group members together create an institution for them e.g. by declaration (in Searle’s (2010) speech-­ act sense) or, alternatively, by ordinary agreement making and by collective acceptance of the so created institution. The “performative” element here can typically be expressed as follows for the old-time squirrel pelt currency in Finland: “We, qua group members, hereby take squirrel pelt to be money in our group”. Squirrel pelt then has been made money, and if the members act accordingly, squirrel pelt will functionally be money in the group. II. Social institutions (such as the basic institutions of money, marriage, and private property) in my account (Tuomela 2007, 2013) consist of a norm system including constitutive and regulative norms as well as social practices conducive to the satisfaction of these norms and relevant institutional goals. According to my account, constitutive norms say what the social item under discussion “is” – being at least partly defining statements and thus analytic ones – and what special institutional status or institutional role it has (e.g. that squirrel pelt is money and thus has the status of money for the members of the collective). In contrast, regulative norms say how the entity X (here: squirrel pelt) with its new status Y (viz. money) concretely functions, should or may function, e.g. that squirrel pelt may be used for buying goods. Also extended social institutions (e.g. organizations like schools) involve constitutive and regulative norms in addition to positions, practices and goals which determine the services that are being provided. Institutional norms thus include constitutive norms that in part determine the institution’s goals and the services it is supposed to provide for its members (generally “us”). The goals are satisfied in part due to the institutional activities and practices as well as the “institutional services” that are supposed to satisfy the institution’s goals. III. In general, constitutive rules are a kind of normative definitions of relevant social items and in that sense “group-constitutive”. Also new social reality may be created by the institutional constitutive norms (viz. “X counts as Y in C”) often generated through relevant group members simply declaring that something such as e.g. squirrel pelt (X) is money (Y) (assuming the presence of collective acceptance, perhaps only tacit acceptance). Constitutive rules may but need not in my account always have the form of Searle (2010) “X counts as Y in C”. For squirrel pelt to be money in a functionally rational sense, the group must then make squirrel pelt money by its explicit or implicit (we-mode) acceptance. The members must accept this matter in part by their actual intentional use of squirrel pelt as money, which also collectively serves to reproduce the institution in question. Thus the group’s money is created in epistemically objective terms by the acceptance of squirrel pelt as money. To comment on my view of social institutions in general, they belong to the social reality as its central elements. In my account they are not based on mere sequences of relevant individual actions leading to suitable equilibria  – as some game-theoreticians (e.g. Schotter 1981) earlier claimed but require for their

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u­ nderstanding broader conceptual elements such as the social statuses and deontic powers of the participating persons. To say a bit more about social institutions, their purpose is typically to create order in the community by solving coordination problems and collective action dilemmas as well as establishing equilibria (e.g. Nash equilibria). Institutional solutions to social dilemmas are typically expected to be beneficial for the host group (“us”) in question. Social institutions not only enable new kinds of activities to come about (think of the examination rights that a new professor acquires) but they may also economize reasoning by making it more routine and computationally less demanding. Routine behaviors and practices that are coordinated towards reaching action equilibria, will be institutionalized and codified under suitable conditions. Such institutionalization, based on collective acceptance, makes existing social practices norm-governed and gives them a special institutional status. Institutions in general normatively constrain people’s behavior but may also enable them to act in new ways through giving relevant role-holding members (or employees) the institutional power to act in ways that are not possible without institutions and specific institutional statuses or roles. Institutions tend to facilitate, economize, and “routinize” activities and thinking about those activities. Institutions create order by providing individuals with group-based collective and derived individual reasons for the members to take part in the group’s normatively governed activities accepted by the group to satisfy its goals. IV. To summarize, social institutions and institutional facts in general depend for their existence and functionality on collectively accepted constitutive and regulative rules (norms) as well as status functions (and the entailed deontic powers) and on social practices accepted by the group for satisfying the rules in question. At least in the creation phase of an institution such collective acceptance ideally ought to be we-mode acceptance (“we collectively accept item Y for our group”, see Tuomela 2013, ch. 2). The main argument for this is that we-mode acceptance and consequent action will be better coordinated in we-mode cases than in individualistic (viz. I-mode) cases. That squirrel pelt is accepted to be money in a group need not rely on previously formed social institutions (except language, broadly understood). However, the group members must of course relevantly grasp the notion of money and what it empirically presupposes (e.g. that it is a feasible medium for financial exchange and storage of value). (For more on the above themes, see my book Social Ontology (2013), esp. ch. 8). The above remarks comply with the normative fact that a rationally functioning we-mode group normally ought to satisfy—and in typical cases also maintain its ethos (its constitutive values, goals, beliefs, norms and practices, etc.)  – see my book The Philosophy of Sociality (2007). Accordingly, the group can satisfy and promote its ethos only through its members’ appropriate ethos-respecting and normatively ethos-guided activities. Let me finally note that the ethos of the (host) group can often be regarded as the central part of the “culture” of the group. Suppose a we-mode group has conferred a special institutional status (and accompanying function) to an item (e.g. squirrel pelt in medieval Finland or kuna

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pelt in Croatia) by its we-mode collective acceptance of a constitutive group norm (e.g. the norm “it ought to be the case in the collective that squirrel pelt counts as money in the group” or, briefly, “squirrel pelt is money in it”, normatively understood), whereby squirrel pelt is partly constituted as money. A constitutive rule, can be said to conceptually and ontologically (partly) definitionally “quasi transform” (X in “X counts as Y in C” into an institutional object or property (or sometimes fact) Y, e.g. squirrel pelt into money, viz. squirrel pelt is taken to be money. Thus institutional activities (e.g. buying goods) related to X may become conceptually and ontologically dependent on Y.  As said, a regulative rule, in contrast, usually regulates people’s actions by telling them how to act, e.g. in institutionalized traffic to stop at red light. Constitutive norms can be viewed as higher-order both ontologically (qua being in group contexts for the group and not only directly for its individual members) and conceptually because they belong to the institutionally created Y-level (cf. Searle 2015). My central thesis in the above account of social institutions has been that the status and function of an institutional item (e.g. money, marriage) is conceptually and ontologically generated by collective acceptance. This serves to create the host group’s institution (or at least the contained status functions). A social corporation in my sense involves goals (that partly are conceptualized as to function as its ethos) as well as collectively accepted constitutive and regulative rules plus the employees’ norm-governed social practices for reaching their goals. Accordingly, the employees and other members in general have positions involving status functions (deontic powers). The corporate goals include the provision of reasonably priced relevant social services for “us”, viz. the host group. A social corporation’s employees are supposed to act so that both the ought-to-be and ought-to-do group-level norms together with their individual counterparts will be obeyed, leading to the satisfaction of the ethos. V. As to the central thesis of the present paper that social corporations function as extended social institutions, we can now see why this is so. The above suggests that the social corporation that is typically of the kind “by the people for the people” functions as a social institution in the extended (viz. “organization”) sense (recall the examples of school, hospital, mail service, etc.). The social corporation exists in a host community or state and generally involves a normative organization with positions and with status functions involving deontic powers for the individuals as well as special constitutive and regulative norms guiding its goal-directed practices (e.g. in the form of services). Any real-life corporation is a collective (and not merely a single legal person) and contains e.g. shareholders, a board of directors, managers, and other employees. To summarize some of the central features of my account of the functions of social institutions: (i) Basic social institutions tend to solve (or dissolve) coordination problems and collective action dilemmas and to give cooperative, collectively beneficial solutions (e.g. in terms of equilibria) to these problems. Social institutions accordingly can be expected to create order in society.

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(ii) Due to their capacity to solve collective action dilemmas, social institutions help to satisfy basic human needs and interests in an orderly and economic fashion on both the collective and the individual level (in the latter case by offering group-based reasons for the members’ participatory actions). (iii) Social institutions may also make new kinds of behaviors conceptually and ontologically possible relative to the pre-institutional situation (cf. constitutive rules as creating new institutional items), and they may normatively create new institutional properties and statuses for the actors in question. (iv) Social institutions tend to make institutional activities routine and accordingly make such activities psychologically and computationally undemanding or at least simpler. (v) Social institutions tend to take care of the division of labor in society so that a member of society can free herself from multiple tasks and can concentrate on those that she is best at performing, leaving room for innovation. (vi) Functioning in the we-mode in many cases leads to more rewarding results both collectively and individually than functioning individualistically, in the I-mode (see the arguments based on game-theoretic equilibria discussed in Tuomela (2013), esp. ch. 7). Individualistic, e.g. I-mode accounts, in some cases give too many equilibria in relation to we-mode ones and hence tend to create less order than the latter. The above points give an argument for designing institutions so that they are based on we-mode we-thinking for the group that can often keep its identity when its members change.

1.1  S  ummary: Social Corporations Function as Extended Social Institutions. Extended social institutions are norm-governed social organizations with positions and position holders plus the relevant status functions and deontic powers related to them. Extended institutions fall short of being corporations but they are yet at least ideally capable of action. The following features of extended institutions or institutions in the organization sense are summarized here: (a) Briefly, a social institution in the extended sense (e.g. public university, school, army, hospital, communal mail service) is a social organization that provides services for some group in a way that may resemble normal governmental services e.g. in the fields of education, security, and healthcare. (b) These services are typically non-profit or approximately so. The organization in question may have the form of a social corporation as characterized in this paper. The following hypothesis can be conjectured in the “spirit” of our above discussion: Extended social institutions, viz. organizations that are institutions

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in the organization sense (e.g. schools and hospitals) can be “incorporated” so as to be able to function as social corporations in the sense of this paper. (c) Social institutions in the extended sense generally presuppose such more basic institutions such as money and private property. (d) The institutional services created and maintained by a group that is an extended (communal or societal) institution’s host group or host community are generally non-profit, or at least their service is based on relatively low fees that are used for the maintenance of the services in question. (e) As seen, an extended social institution involves norm-governed positions and social practices including those needed for providing the aforementioned institutional services. In addition to regulative norms, an extended institution’s norms include constitutive norms conferring special institutional statuses and powers to the members (e.g. eligibility for medical service) and to the position holders of the institution. (f) The members of the host group are disposed to be collectively aware of (a)–(e). See Tuomela (2002: 221–233), for my earlier, partly mathematical account of institutions in the extended sense or, as said in that work, in the organization sense. Finally, recall that a social corporation has an ethos containing its basic goals and presupposes basic institutions; it also involves collectively accepted constitutive and regulative rules as well as the members’ norm-governed positions and social practices for achieving their (positional) goals. It may also involve shares and shareholders. The ethos of the social corporation includes at least its central goals and principles, which are supposed to provide reasonably priced relevant social services for all of us, viz. the members collectively forming the host group. A social corporation’s employees are supposed to act so that both the ought-to-be and ought-to-do group norms (and the corresponding may-do norms) together with their individual counterparts will be obeyed and lead to the satisfaction of the ethos (the constitutive goals, etc., of the corporation). The individual members (employees) of a corporation act to this effect in their status-expressing positions that involve deontic powers. The above account gives evidence for the central claim of this presentation that the social corporation that in general is “by the people for the people” functions as a social institution in the extended sense. In more general terms, a social corporation exists in a host community (or state) and involves a normative organization with positions – thus statuses and powers – for the individuals. Acknowledgement  I have presented this paper to audiences of philosophers at the University of Vienna, the University of Munich (LMU), the University of Belgrade, and at the Hungarian Academy of Science in Budapest. I wish to thank the participants for excellent comments. Furthermore, I wish to thank my wife Maj Tuomela for collaboration on this paper and Miguel Garcia for insightful comments.

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References Schotter, A. (1981). The economic theory of social institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. (2010). Making the social world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. (2015). Status functions and institutional facts: Reply to Hindriks and Guala. Journal of Institutional Economics, 11(3), 507–514. Tuomela, R. (2002). The philosophy of social practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuomela, R. (2007). The philosophy of sociality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuomela, R. (2013). Social ontology: Collective intentionality and group agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press (paperback 2016).

Chapter 2

Institutions and Functions Francesco Guala and Frank Hindriks

Abstract  What is an institution? And what distinguishes one type of institution from another? We answer these questions using a functionalist approach: types of institutions are identified by their function, or the coordination problems they solve; token institutions are specific solutions to these problems, or equilibria of strategic games. The functionalist approach provides some insights into the limits of reform, or the extent to which institutions – like marriage, property, or democracy – can be modified without turning them into entities of a different kind. Keywords  Institutions · Functions · Equilibria · Reform

2.1  Introduction Institutions are familiar and ubiquitous. The computer Francesco is using right now has been produced by an American corporation, that is, by an institution. Frank’s office is in a building owned by the University of Groningen, another institution. As we are writing this paper we occupy institutional roles – we are two professors of philosophy and economics. Unsurprisingly, given their importance, the nature and functioning of institutions has been the object of intense debate both by philosophers and by social scientists. What is an institution? What distinguishes one type of institution from another? What makes the University of Groningen a university, for example, and not a corporation? What makes us professors, rather than, say, managers or priests? Answering these questions requires, in philosophical jargon, the specification of identity criteria. Providing such criteria however is not just a metaphysical problem  – it also has practical and political implications. One such implication, for F. Guala (*) University of Milan, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] F. Hindriks University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_2

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instance, concerns the issue of change. How malleable are institutions? How much can an institution change, before it becomes something else? For a concrete example, consider the debate concerning the nature of marriage. In many countries, the extension of marriage contracts to homosexual couples has ignited vehement reactions. Conservatives have claimed that such reforms would affect profoundly the nature of the institution, to such an extent that the new contract should not be called “marriage” anymore. In typical provocative (and ungrammatical) style, a politician of the Italian party Lega Nord has recently declared, for example, that Since with the gay issue they put all sorts of things together, everything and its opposite, I will celebrate unions for dogs, cats, for everyone. Gay people can come to register, but then let everybody else do it!1

Or consider – for the sake of political equanimity – the reactions of several liberal politicians and intellectuals to the constitutional reforms proposed by the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. According to two scholars, Erdoğan’s aim is to transform the country into a majoritarian authoritarian system centred on one man. What Turks are risking is nothing less than “democide” – the scholarly term for voting to abolish democracy itself (Watmough and Ozturk 2017).

Are these merely exaggerated reactions driven by political passion? Or is something more serious going on? Is marriage really going to become a different institution, if the right to marry is extended to gay and lesbian people? Has Turkey become a non-­ democratic country, after Erdoğan’s reforms were narrowly approved in the referendum? In this paper we will argue that these questions are symptoms of a deeper philosophical issue. We will call it “Caligula’s Problem”, in honour of the infamous Roman emperor. According to the historian Suetonius, Caligula appointed his horse, Incitatus, a priest and promised to make him a consul. Now, most people would agree that a horse cannot possibly be a priest or a consul. By appointing Incitatus, in fact, Caligula intended to humiliate the clergy and the senate, and eventually to destroy these institutions. Caligula’s horse is a historical curiosity, but at the same time suggests that the arguments against gay marriage and constitutional reforms cannot be dismissed too easily: there seem to be limits to institutional change after all. But what are they? Surely institutions are not completely static entities. They can evolve, to some extent, while retaining their identity. So, to what extent are we entitled to reform or re-design a given institution, without turning it into an entity of a completely different kind? Unfortunately, we cannot answer these questions unless we have at least a rough idea of what an institution is. In the next section therefore we will briefly outline a theory – the theory of institutions as rules-in-equilibrium – that tries to overcome the limitations of other existing accounts (Guala and Hindriks 2015; Hindriks and Guala 2015; Guala 2016). Then in Sect. 2.3 we will illustrate the relationship between institutions and functions. Section 2.4 is devoted to the important ­distinction  Gianluca Buonanno, radio interview on Radio 24, 27 October 2014.

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between tokens and types of institutions, and explains how the theory of kinds as property clusters can be adapted to the case of institutions. Section 2.5 concludes with some remarks on the politics of institutional reform.

2.2  A (Very Short) Theory of Institutions Existing approaches to the study of institutions can be divided in two broad categories: those that define institutions as systems of rules, on the one hand, and those that see them as equilibria of strategic games on the other. The rules account is close to our vernacular, pre-scientific understanding of institutions. Just like rules, institutions regulate behavior. They indicate certain actions as appropriate or mandatory in specific circumstances.2 The institution of private property, for example, regulates the use of resources by indicating who has access to them. The institution of money regulates the use of paper certificates in economic transactions. And the institution of marriage regulates the behaviour of two or more individuals who pool their resources to raise children, manage property, and help each other in various ways. But if institutions are rules, who makes the rules, and how do they regulate behaviour? Stating a rule is clearly insufficient to bring about an institution. To see why, just consider that there are plenty of ineffective rules: rules that are officially or formally in existence but that are nevertheless ignored by the majority of people.3 Traffic lights in Milan are regulations, in Rome they are suggestions, and in Naples they are just decoration, as the saying goes. But since the rules are formally the same in Milan, Naples, and Rome, there must be something else going on. There must be some special ingredient that makes people follow the rules in some circumstances and ignore them in others. Equilibria accounts of institutions tell us what the special ingredient is: effective institutions are backed up by a system of incentives that motivate people to follow the rules (e.g. Lewis 1969; Schotter 1981; Sugden 1986; Calvert 1998; Aoki 2001; Binmore 2010; Bicchieri 2006; Hédoin 2017). An equilibrium in game theory is a profile of actions or strategies, one for each individual participating in a strategic interaction. Each action may be described by a simple sentence of the form “do X” or “do Y”. The defining characteristic of an equilibrium  – which distinguishes it from other profiles – is that each action must be a best response to the actions of the other players or, in other words, that no player can do better by changing her strategy unilaterally. If the others do their part in the equilibrium, no player has an incentive to deviate.

2  The idea of institutions as “rules of the game” (Spielregeln) is already in Weber (1910: 459). (On institutions as rules see also Parsons 1935; North 1990; Knight 1992; Mantzavinos 2001; Hodgson 2006.) 3  To be clear: we are not referring to ‘dormant’ institutions here, but to rules that are systematically disregarded or violated.

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Fig. 2.1  The traffic light game

Since the actions of a strategic game can be formulated as rules (“do X”, “do Y”), equilibrium-based and rules-based accounts of institutions are mutually compatible. From the point of view of an external observer, an institution takes the form of a behavioural regularity that corresponds to the equilibrium of a coordination game. But each equilibrium strategy also takes the form of a rule that dictates each player what to do in the given circumstances. To sum up: the equilibrium requirement is important because rules by themselves lack the power to influence behaviour. But together with the right system of incentives, rules can function as signals that coordinate the behaviour of large groups of individuals. Institutions, in a nutshell, are rules in equilibrium – rules that people are motivated to follow.4 To illustrate, let us take a simple problem of traffic regulation. Suppose that two drivers, Ann and Bob, meet very often at a crossroad. In the absence of a traffic light, there are three obvious strategies that they could follow: Ann stops and Bob goes; Ann stops and Bob goes; they both toss a coin and stop or go with 50% probability. The first two solutions however are unfair: unless one of them has a special claim, why should he or she always be privileged? The third solution is more acceptable from this point of view, because the payoffs are symmetric, but unfortunately is inefficient: half of the time, Ann and Bob will have an accident. There is, of course, another solution: introducing a traffic light. If Ann and Bob play the conditional strategy ‘Stop if red, go if green’, they will obtain an equilibrium that is efficient and fair, because it ensures that neither of them will be penalized in the long run. One way to represent the new equilibrium is by means of a payoff matrix like the one depicted in Fig. 2.1. The shaded area represents the original situation faced by the two drivers. The cells that correspond to ‘Stop, Go’ and ‘Go, Stop’ are the unfair equilibria of the original game (with payoffs [2, 3] and [3, 2]). Although the third equilibrium is not represented explicitly, it can be obtained by randomizing behaviour over the strategies ‘Stop’ and ‘Go’. The traffic light equilibrium, finally, lies at the intersection between the new conditional strategies ‘Stop if red, go if green’ (in the bottom-right corner). If there is 50% probability that the light is green (or red) every time Ann and Bob approach the intersection, then the payoffs are those represented in the cell of the matrix that lies in the bottom-right corner [5/2, 5/2].

 Aoki (2007), Greif and Kingston (2011), Guala and Hindriks (2015), Hindriks and Guala (2015), Guala (2016) propose to view institutions as “rules in equilibrium”. On the role of incentives, see also Smit et al. (2014). 4

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2.3  Institutions and Functions This analysis may seem unnecessarily complicated, but serves an important purpose. Using the idea of institutions as rules in equilibrium, in fact, we can explicate the important relationship that holds between institutions and functions. This in turn will shed light on the stability of institutions, and the extent to which they can retain their identity when they change – the main topic of this paper. Because they solve problems of coordination and cooperation like the one discussed above, institutions have a function: the function of helping people to find an arrangement that is mutually beneficial. Looking at the game matrix in Fig. 2.1, for example, we can see that using the traffic light the players can avoid the inefficient outcomes (Go, Go) and (Stop, Stop). So, the traffic light and the rules of traffic contribute to the well-functioning of society and to the well-being of its members, by facilitating the smooth flow of cars. This does not mean that the traffic light equilibrium is the only possible solution, of course, or the best one for all players: the Row player would prefer (Go, Stop) for example, and the Column player would prefer (Stop, Go). But it is a solution, with peculiar characteristics (like payoff symmetry or fairness) that other solutions do not have. Now, depending on the specific coordination problem they help solve – or their specific function – we can classify institutions into separate classes or kinds. For example: all institutions that make the interaction with other drivers safer and more efficient belong to the class of traffic rules institutions. The advantage of functional definitions is that they abstract away from the innumerable ways in which the same goal (traffic regulation in this case) may be achieved in different contexts. For this reason, functions are used not only by social scientists, but also by biologists when they theorize about physiological traits. An eye, for example, is an organ that perceives and represents the environment through the detection of light. Eyes come in different guises, as each token eye (the eye of a wasp or the eye of a mammal) exploits different light-detection mechanisms. Nevertheless, there are general theoretical principles that hold for eyes across the species. And similarly, in our case, there are interesting generalizations that apply to different traffic rules, property regimes, or marriages, regardless of the specific ways in which each token institution works.

2.4  Tokens, Types, and Clusters of Functions The fact that institutions can be classified according to their functions points us in a promising direction. Some arguments against the reform of cherished institutions are probably based on the conflation of a historically given form of organization with the general kind it belongs to. To disambiguate we shall introduce a simple distinction that most philosophers are familiar with: the distinction between tokens

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and types.5 Tokens are particular entities located in space-time. For example: Francesco’s laptop is a token with certain unique characteristics (its serial number, for example, and a little scratch on its keyboard), with a specific history (it came into being sometimes in 2013) and location (it is usually in Milan, although it has travelled widely across Europe). Nonetheless, it is it not totally unlike other laptop computers. It is a computer of a certain kind (a MacBook Air), with characteristics shared with other similar machines. A MacBook Air is a type of computer, and as such it is not spatio-temporally restricted in the same way. In a sense, it has many locations – as many as its instantiations. Now, the type-token distinction can be applied to social entities as well. Money and marriage, for example, can become instantiated in innumerable ways. They are institution-types. Marriage as currently codified in Dutch law in contrast is a specific form of marriage, characteristic of a particular society during a particular period of time. Similarly, the Euro is a particular instantiation of money, characteristic of a specific time and place. The Euro and marriage-as-codified-in-Dutch-law have a beginning, a geographical location, and inevitably will come to an end. Within the rules-in-equilibrium framework, a token institution is a particular way of solving a certain kind of problem or set of problems. It is characterised by specific rules and coordination devices, such as the traffic light that we have discussed in the previous sections. Institution-types instead can take different forms, in the guise of different rules and different coordination devices. Institution-types are identified by their functions: an institution of type T is any set of rules in equilibrium that does X, Y and Z. The rules of traffic for example are any set of rules that regulate drivers’ behavior to make transportation safer and more efficient. These goals can be achieved in different ways, e.g. via different coordination devices and different rules. But what unifies the various (token) institutions is their function: what the rules and coordination devices help accomplish. Marriage (as a type) is an institution that solves a cluster of related problems, including procreation, maintenance, education, and the socialization of kids; mutual economic help, inheritance; and affective support. ‘Our’ institution of marriage – marriage as currently codified in the Dutch or the Italian law, say – is one way of solving these problems. But there are many other alternatives: family arrangements can be monogamous and polygamous, poligenous and polyandrous, exogamous and endogamous, matrilineal and patrilineal, matrilocal, patrilocal, bilocal and neolocal, polyamorous, consanguinal, affinal, affiliative and fictive (the list could be longer). Each of these arrangements is regulated in different ways, and gives rise to different equilibria in the coordination problems that marriage contracts are supposed to solve. Figure 2.2 tries to represent the type-token distinction visually, within the framework of the rules-in-equilibrium account. Each token institution within the dotted area regulates a set of games, or solves a set of related coordination problems. The

5  The same point can be cashed out in terms of particulars and universals, individuals and classes, or similar notions. There are subtle differences between these concepts that, however, do not matter for our purposes (but see Epstein 2016, and Hauswald 2018, for a discussion).

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Fig. 2.2  Institution types and tokens

problems (games) within each dotted area are related and therefore tend to be regulated jointly, in ‘clusters’. Marriage rules for example typically solve problems of cooperation, sexual access, procreation, inheritance (etc.) simultaneously. Each of these coordination problems however has several possible equilibria (represented by E in the cells of the various games). The shaded cells represent the profiles of actions (equilibria) that are prescribed by each token institution. So in this case, for example, we could have three different kinds of institutions that solve the games in the cluster, each in a different way. But they would all be token instances of the same type of institution: the institution of marriage, say. Notice that the token institution depicted on the far right of Fig. 2.2 solves only two problems out of three. This is meant to illustrate the fact that membership in a type is relatively flexible, and to emancipate the functionalist approach from the idea that a ‘true’ institution of type T (a ‘true’ marriage, for example) must be able to fulfill some essential function (like procreation, say). At the same time, however, the theory should not allow too much flexibility. We do not want to end up saying that anything counts as a marriage contract. We cannot solve Caligula’ problem unless we place some restrictions on the sort of functions that an institution must fulfill in order to belong to the type in question. One way to do it is by noticing that the functions of institutions tend to come in packages. For example: the functions of money (the type) tend to be correlated in interesting ways. Being a store of value is a precondition for being used as a medium of exchange, for the trivial reason that trading takes place over time: if the value of a currency decays too quickly, then that currency cannot solve the problem of coincidence of wants.6 Or, to take another example: investment in kids’ welfare and 6  There is a problem of coincidence of wants when Ann wants to trade fruit for vegetables, Bob wants to trade vegetables for meat, and Carol wants to trade meat for fruit. Currencies solve problems of this kind by working as media of exchange.

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education is costly, so it is not a mere coincidence that most marriage contracts regulate both child-rearing and financial support. The functions are correlated because marriage institutions solve a cluster of problems that are objectively related to one another. One way to develop this idea is to follow the tradition of ‘real kinds’ pioneered in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill, John Venn and William Whewell, and updated recently by Richard Boyd. The kinds identified by (our best) scientific theories are clusters of properties held together by ‘homeostatic’ causal mechanisms.7 Because the properties tend to be co-instantiated, real kinds support inductive inference. For example, the rules of traffic can be used to predict drivers’ behavior. But the existence of a specific rule can also be used to predict the existence of other rules that are likely to be part of the cluster: if there is a rule that prescribes driving on the right, for example, there is also probably going to be a rule that prohibits overtaking on the right. These inferences are useful for pragmatic purposes, but can also be used to test theoretical hypotheses and to find out about the way the world is structured. The properties of natural and social kinds can be investigated scientifically, in other words. The main difference is that, in the case of institutional kinds, the relevant properties are functional.

2.5  Institutional Change and Reform We are now ready to solve Caligula’s problem: how far can a (token) institution change before it becomes something else – an institution of a different kind? If we identified the institution-type (marriage, say) with a set of specific rules, rather than with their functions, we would be led into mistake. We would be led into thinking for example that changing the rules even slightly would make the contract that binds and regulates the behaviour of two partners a completely different kind of institution. Gay unions, according to this reasoning, would not be marriages. But French ‘PACS’ (PacteCivile de Solidarité) and Italian ‘Unioni  Civili’ are contracts of the same kind as ordinary marriage contracts. They belong to the broad category of institutional devices that different societies use to regulate the behaviour of people engaged in complicated life-projects that require extensive coordination and cooperation. As a society, we are entitled to explore new ways to regulate behaviour, when we feel that current rules are not good enough for our purposes. Nonetheless, the functionalist approach has the advantage of reminding us that the identity of any entity is robust to a limited range of manipulations only, and that there are changes to an institution that would turn it into something else. Just as the 7  A mechanism is ‘homeostatic’ if it has the tendency to bring a system back to its equilibrium state when there is a small perturbation. The idea is that the entities that possess the standard properties of the cluster tend to persist and to proliferate, while those that lack some properties tend to acquire the missing property or disappear. See e.g. Boyd (1991).

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term “senator” cannot be stretched so far as to include the appointment of Caligula’s horse, so there are arrangements that cannot be legitimately called “marriage”, regardless of what we want the latter to be. But how much change can an institution survive? We have argued that a type of institution can be identified in terms of a cluster of problems. A token institution consists of a set of rules that solve those problems in a particular context. This leaves considerable flexibility concerning who can be a member of an institution. The institution of money is not affected by the introduction of new currencies, which rely on different rules and perhaps even different kinds of objects. Similarly, a new institution of marriage could be open to a wider set of citizens than the traditional pool of heterosexual people. Admittedly, this would change the rules of the game. However, as long as the underlying cluster of problems that they solve is similar enough, the new institution is a token of marriage. Membership is somewhat flexible, because (token) institutions are made of rules, not people. Their identity can remain the same even if the members of the relevant group are replaced at once. (That’s why institutions are immune from mereological puzzles like the ship of Theseus – see Hindriks 2012.) And even rules are subject to change, because (type) institutions are constituted by problems, not rules. Institutions are vulnerable to certain kinds of reform for a different reason. If institution-kinds are identified by the functions they fulfil, then a reform that affects the functions may affect the identity of the institution as well. An equine senate, for example, would probably be unable to fulfil a number of functions that democratic assemblies typically fulfil. Similarly, one might challenge the claim that gay marriage is a form of marriage on the grounds that it is unable to perform enough of the functions that marriage contracts typically fulfil. Addressing arguments of this kind would require another – much longer – essay. It would require a deep study of the functions of marriage, and of the ways in which such functions are served by different systems of rules. Such a study would probably reveal that the identification of sharp boundaries is rather difficult. Since the boundaries of clusters are fuzzy (Boyd 2000), the adjudication of borderline cases must be informed by comparisons of explanatory power and inductive potential. If the inclusion of Caligula’s equine senate in the class of democratic assemblies led to significant explanatory loss (without corresponding inferential gain), then there would be good reasons to exclude it from the institutional kind senate. Similarly, we should evaluate whether including gay unions in the institution of marriage would lead to significant explanatory and predictive losses, in order to adjudicate the issue of “gay marriage”.8 The important point is that what marriage is, or what deserves to be called “marriage”, according to this approach, does not depend on our subjective intentions or moral beliefs (although these may make a difference to how marriages function in practice). It does not depend on what people regard as desirable. It depends rather on how the world is, in particular what kind of problems the institution of marriage

 Hauswald (2018) and Guala (2018) discuss this issue in more depth.

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solves (in its various instantiations). To be sure, these problems are in part defined by the needs and desires people have (or the payoffs of their strategies). But, against this background, the ways in which they can be solved is an objective matter. Elsewhere (Hindriks and Guala 2019) we have proposed to distinguish the “etiological” from the “teleological” functions of institutions, and this distinction turns out to be useful here as well. While etiological functions explain why token institutions exist and persist (namely, to generate cooperative benefits), teleological functions are projected by the members of society onto real and possible token institutions, to assess whether they are able to promote values such as equality, fairness, freedom, or justice. This distinction helps to keep some important questions separate. A reformist focuses on teleological functions when she asks a normative question such as 1. Which bundle of rules do we want to introduce in our legislation, or which equilibrium do we want to implement? While a scientist asks a somewhat related etiological question when she asks 2. Would the reformed system of rules still fulfill the functions that institutions of this kind typically fulfill? The functionalist approach thus saves the idea that what marriage is, is an objective issue that can be tackled scientifically. It also helps to keep the scientific (etiological) question distinct from the political (teleological) question of which one, among the many possible versions of marriage, we want to adopt. Keeping them separate is important because the answer to each question must be justified in a different way, using different methods of investigation, and relying on a different kind of expertise. If we are asking a descriptive question concerning the nature of a type of institution, then the experts to whom we must delegate the task are anthropologists, sociologists, or economists. But if we are asking a normative question about which token institution we should adopt in our legislation, then the experts are judges, political actors, and moral theorists. So it is important that we have very clearly in mind what kind of question we are asking, and who are the specialists with the competence to answer it. All that scientific experts can do is expose certain arguments in favor of or against change as illegitimate. More precisely, they can point out the extent of the Caligula problem and indicate how much change an institution can undergo before it ceases to belong to a particular type. Acknowledgements  Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the “Playing by the Rules” conference held at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Rijeka (May 2016) and the “Culture, Cognition and Action” workshop held at the Centre for the Study of Social Action (March 2017). We are grateful to several members of these two audiences for their comments during and after the talks.

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References Aoki, M. (2001). Toward a comparative institutional analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Aoki, M. (2007). Endogenizing institutions and institutional change. Journal of Institutional Economics, 3, 1–31. Bicchieri, C. (2006). The grammar of society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Binmore, K. (2010). Game theory and institutions. Journal of Comparative Economics, 38, 245–252. Boyd, R. (1991). Realism, anti-foundationalism, and the enthusiasm for natural kinds. Philosophical Studies, 61, 127–148. Boyd, R. (2000). Kinds as the ‘workmanship of men’: Realism, constructivism, and natural kinds. In J. Nida-Rumelin (Ed.), Rationality, realism, revision (pp. 52–89). Berlin: De Gruyter. Calvert, R. L. (1998). Rational actors, equilibrium, and social institutions. In J. Knight & I. Sened (Eds.), Explaining social institutions (pp. 57–94). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Epstein, B. (2016). Replies to Guala and Gallotti. Journal of Social Ontology, 2, 159–172. Greif, A., & Kingston, C. (2011). Institutions: Rules or equilibria? In N. Schofield & G. Caballero (Eds.), Political economy of institutions, democracy and voting (pp. 13–43). Berlin: Springer. Guala, F. (2016). Understanding institutions: The science and philosophy of living together. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Guala, F. (2018). Replies to critics. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 48, 630–645. Guala, F., & Hindriks, F. (2015). A unified social ontology. The Philosophical Quarterly, 65, 177–201. Hauswald, R. (2018). Institution types and institution tokens: An unproblematic distinction? Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 48, 594–607. Hédoin, C. (2017). Institutions, rule-following and game theory. Economics and Philosophy, 33, 43–72. Hindriks, F. (2012). But where is the university? Dialectica, 66, 93–113. Hindriks, F., & Guala, F. (2015). Institutions, rules, and equilibria: A unified theory. Journal of Institutional Economics, 11, 459–480. Hindriks, F., & Guala, F. (2019). The function of institutions: Etiology and teleology. Synthese, online first. Hodgson, G. M. (2006). What are institutions? Journal of Economic Issues, 15, 1–23. Knight, J. (1992). Institutions and social conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, D.  K. (1969). Convention: A philosophical study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mantzavinos, C. (2001). Individuals, institutions, and markets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, D. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parsons, T. (1935). The place of ultimate values in sociological theory. International Journal of Ethics, 45, 282–316. Schotter, A. (1981). The economic theory of social institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smit, J. P., Buekens, F., & du Plessis, S. (2014). Developing the incentivized action view of institutional reality. Synthese, 191, 1813–1830. Sugden, R. (1986). The economics of rights, co-operation and welfare. Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edition 2004. Watmough, S., & Ozturk, A. E. (2017, April 14). Will Turkey’s referendum mark the end of democracy and the birth of ‘Erdoğanistan’? www.theconversation.com Weber, M. (1910). Diskussionsrede zu dem Vortrag von A.  Ploetz über Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft. In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (pp.  456–462). Tübingen: Mohr.

Chapter 3

Epistemic Virtues of Institutions Snježana Prijić Samaržija

Abstract  In everyday speech, we don’t only attribute virtues and vices to individuals, but also to institutions. In doing so, we implicitly assume that these collective entities are certain kinds of agents, the bearers of epistemic features – states, attitudes, beliefs, actions or like – for which they can be blamed or applauded. In this paper, I will inquire how we can responsibly ascribe epistemic features to institutions, and assess the meaning of attributing virtues and vices to institutions. These questions require a more comprehensive investigation of whether those collective entities should be regarded as collective agents, whom we can attribute with virtues and vices. My interest lies with the following questions: What makes an institution a collective agent, or what makes it a collective epistemic agent? Does an institution display epistemic virtues as an epistemically autonomous collective, or as a cluster of virtuous individuals? What, precisely, makes an institution an epistemically virtuous collective agent? I will argue in favour of the following claims: (i) as a social entity, an institution is an autonomous collective epistemic agent (ii) being an epistemic agent, the intellectual virtues (vices) displayed by institutions are identical to those displayed by individual agents, (iii) the virtues (vices) displayed by an institution as a whole should not be reduced to the virtues (vices) of its virtuous (vicious) members, that is, a virtuous institution is not (necessarily) an institution of virtuous individuals (and vice versa). Finally, I will offer the preliminary stance that an epistemically virtuous institution is an institution which applies scientific knowledge (knowledge about what is real) in everyday life (knowledge about how to act) in order to improve the quality of overall life for all (knowledge about what is good or bad for citizens). Keywords  Institutions · Epistemic virtues · Collective agents · Social epistemology

S. Prijić Samaržija (*) Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_3

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In everyday speech, we don’t only attribute virtues and vices to individuals, but also to various kinds of groups. We habitually say that the jury is fair-minded, the police is racist, the government is corrupted, the university is snobbish, or that the committee is tolerant. It is just as common to hear that an institution made a good decision or that it didn’t recognize its advantages, that it is considerate of its employees by perceiving their talents or that it wisely invests in science and culture. Even more precisely, we are accustomed to saying that universities are intellectually responsible for the competences of young generations, that the government expresses a unjustified attitude toward gender issues, that the jury made a rational choice based on the given evidence, that the committee irrationally privileges the free rider strategy or that the media did not investigate the case in an intellectually conscious manner. In doing so, we implicitly assume that these collective entities or institutions are certain kinds of agents, the bearers of epistemic features – states, attitudes, beliefs, actions or like – for which they can be blamed or applauded. A common objection is that such utterances are purely metaphorical and that they truly refer to individual members of the institutions or to the executive members ultimately responsible for institutional decision-making processes. In this paper, I will tackle the questions of responsibly ascribing epistemic features to institutions and the meaning of ascribing virtues and vices to institutions. These questions require more comprehensive investigation of the nature of those collective entities, as collective agents, to whom we can ascribe virtues and vices. This research thematically belongs to the field of social epistemology and its intense recent discussions about the epistemic qualities of doxastic states of groups, as well as about assessing the epistemic consequences of institutional misconduct and defining the epistemic virtues of different social institutions and practices. In this sense, the standard analytical approach assesses epistemic quality from the veritist perspective: collective beliefs of institutions are epistemically virtuous if they generate propositions, beliefs and decisions that are correct, truth-sensitive, truth-­ conductive or like (Goldman 2010; Goldman and Blanchard 2015). It is important to stress that recent discussions in social epistemology have been growing increasingly open to practical applications of epistemological research, so these enquires can be considered a kind of real-world epistemology. As a proponent of this approach, I argue that such research should aim to define how an institution can exercise virtues and, furthermore, to offer institutions concrete suggestions about exercising specifically epistemic virtues. However, such a project of applied social epistemology needs to begin by answering the following questions: What makes an institution a collective agent, or what makes an institution an epistemic collective agent? Does an institution display epistemic virtues as an epistemically autonomous collective or as a cluster of virtuous individuals? What, precisely, makes an institution an epistemically virtuous collective agent? I would like to argue in favour of the following claims: (i) as a social entity, an institution is an autonomous epistemic collective agent (ii) being an epistemic agent, the intellectual virtues (vices) displayed by institutions are identical to those displayed by an individual agent, (iii) the virtues (vices) displayed by an institution as a whole should not be reduced to the virtues (vices) of its virtuous (vicious)

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individuals, that is, a virtuous institution is not (necessarily) an institution of virtuous individuals (and vice versa). Finally, I would like to offer a preliminary general proposal of what should be taken into account when defining an epistemically virtuous institution.

3.1  Institution as a Collective Entity Although various kinds of institutions can exhibit different degrees of structure and formality, they can all be identified as social or collective entities. The nature and ontological status of institutions or institutional facts has been meticulously elaborated by John Searle (1995, 2010). According to Searle, institutions differ from other collective entities, such as a group of people on board of the same bus, the owners of Swedish cars, participants of a cocktail party, or gay communities, in sharing a clearly outlined approach to constructing and defining their aims and social function, as well as to specifying their constitutive rules. An institution is a social construct generated by collective recognition and collective acceptance of its specific status function. For example, a government is formed when individuals within a single society collectively recognize the need for a certain organizational body, and when they collectively accept to ascribe this organizational entity the goal, or the status function of managing the state. Similarly, the institution of a jury rests upon collective acceptance of its status function of making unbiased decisions on the basis of evidential proof. In order for these or other status functions or goals to construct an institution, they need to be collectively recognized, ascribed to a relevant collective entity and collectively accepted. An institution cannot exist unless its surrounding community collectively accepts its existence and the justification of its existence through its main purpose. This makes it essential for the community to collectively recognize the function, goal and purpose of the institution, as well as the accompanying constitutive rules for attaining those aims. Only then can an institution attain its “deontic powers”, or its rights and obligations. The very act of recognizing and ascribing goals and purposes, such as accrediting universities with the purpose of providing higher education or assigning juries the goal of making unbiased decisions in court, enables institutions to fulfil their societal aims and functions. An important aspect of Searle’s theory of institutional facts is the stance that, in order for an institution to attain its goals and fulfil its status function, the existence of a collective goal or function ought to be founded on collective intentionality. In other words, status functions are intentionality-relative. For example, if a group of scientists wished to solve a certain theoretical or practical problem, they will divide their responsibilities on the basis of the collective intention to solve the problem, and appropriately coordinate their actions. By cooperating with each other, they will participate in the common aim through immediate individual intentions and actions. Likewise, members of a wider community share the intention of ascribing

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s­ cientific-­research institutions the status of problem-solving agents. However, it is important to accentuate that Searle contends that, although each individual has their own intentions and all intentionality takes place in individual minds, collective intentionality is nevertheless not reducible to individual intentions. For example, each scientist and citizen participates in the collective intention of successful research institution through individual agency. Full understanding of institutions requires the additional concept of constitutive rules. It could also be said that an institution is a system of (linguistically expressible) constitutive rules that we collectively agree to adhere to (Searle 1995). Collective acceptance of constitutive rules grants institutions social affirmation of its defined status function or goal. In his later book, Searle particularly stresses the importance of speech acts in accepting constitutive rules, creating status functions and, finally, constructing institutions. Namely, Searle asserts that speech acts, as declarations, “change the world by declaring that a state of affairs exists and thus bring that state of affairs into existence” (Searle 2010: 12). This renders the social obligation of citizens towards institutions inseparable from speech acts (both oral and written); an utterance, or the performance of speech or a linguistic act, makes the speaker obliged to adhere to their promise. We can briefly summarize this discussion about the prerequisites of constructing an institution. Collective recognition or collective acceptance within a community is necessary because an institution cannot exist unless a community collectively recognizes and accepts it by assigning the institution a “status function”. Collective acceptance through declarative speech acts confirms that entities have come to possess certain status functions (by being represented as having those functions). Linguistically expressible constitutive rules establish institutions by specifying the target of our collective intentionality. So, the whole of institutional/social/collective reality is derived from the collective acceptance of declarative speech acts related to the ascription of status functions to entities. This leaves us with the following question: are such constructed institutions the type of collective agent that can be ascribed epistemic states and be evaluated as virtuous, or not?

3.2  Institution: From a Collective Entity to Collective Agents As I have previously emphasized, there are many types of collective entities or many kinds of groups: from merely statistical (a group of people who drive Swedish cars) and explicitly self-identified groups (gays) to more structured, procedurally organized groups (teams, committees, juries, governments, states, etc.) (Fricker 2010). However, not every collective entity as such is a candidate for being a collective agent. The fact that groups or collective entities can be radically different raises the question of defining those entities that can be ascribed the status of a collective agent. The status of a collective agent and collective agency is important for appraising collective (epistemic) conduct in terms of virtue and vice. In that sense, this

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question can be articulated as an inquiry about the necessary requirements for considering an institution, as a collective entity, an agent capable of exhibiting virtues and vices. Let us consider three reasonable proposals of the preconditions for attaining the status of an agent: (i) structured constitution and conduct, which means that the entity needs to be at least loosely governed by a set of norms or procedures (Fricker 2010); (ii) joint commitment to some future goal or the existence of volatilely accepted common goal of the entity (Gilbert 1989); (iii) the capacity of rational and reflective control of its goals, which presupposes the general account of agency as essentially tied to rationality (Pettit 2014). Each of these proposals, as well as their combination, suggests potentially relevant conditions for attaining agency. Given the aforementioned definition of the nature of institutions, it would seem that, among other collective entities, they are particularly capable of satisfying these conditions. An institution is a collective entity with a stable internal structure whose conduct is defined through a set of constitutive rules and corresponding procedures, recognized and accepted by the surrounding community. As we have had an opportunity to see, an institution necessarily practices joint commitment to its goals. An institution is actually constructed by collective acceptance of a status function and constitutive rules by its members as well as by the wider community. Finally, it would seem that the purpose of an institution (to serve a certain status function or goal) makes it obliged to exercise rational and reflective control of these goals through procedures which insure that the goals are successfully realized. Since an institution has to attain its goal, it needs to be constantly aware of the institutional modus operandi. So, if any collective entity can be a proper candidate for a status of an agent, institutions seem to be particularly plausible. This also implies that, being an agent, institutions can be considered virtuous or vicious. But, what is actually meant when calling an institution virtuous? Sometimes collective epistemic features (virtues) may be a matter of a sufficient percentage or the number of members who display this trait as individuals. Intellectually virtuous members, as individuals, can make a collective agent intellectually virtuous (e.g. some research teams). However, is it realistic to expect that all, or the majority of members of an institution, will display comparable intellectual virtue? What majority would be necessary and/or sufficient for attaining the status of a virtuous institution? Or, does it mean that, apart from some misleading discourse about institutions as collective agents, there is no such thing as a virtuous institution, but only virtuous members of an institution? This leads to the question of whether an institution can display virtue even if its members, as individuals, are not virtuous. Or, can an institutional decision be irrational (or epistemically unjustified, of sub-optimal epistemic quality), despite extremely rational members who permanently generate rational individual beliefs and decisions? The debate between summativists and non-summativists, a relevant topic of collective epistemology, may prove to be helpful. Summativists hold that collective epistemic phenomena – collective belief, collective epistemic justification, collective knowledge, collective epistemic virtue or like – can be understood entirely in terms of individual phenomena. On the other side, non-summativists differ by

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a­ rguing that collective epistemic phenomena cannot be understood in terms of individual phenomena (Lackey 2014). Some authors favour the clearest formulation of summativism, precisely articulated by Gilbert: a group G believes that p if, and only if, all or most members of G believe that p (Gilbert 1989). Namely, if we generally defined summativism as a stance that collective phenomena can be understood entirely in terms of individual phenomena, many non-summativists (such as John Searle and Raimo Tuomela) would probably fit the description of summativists, as at the beginning or the end we always return to individuals (Tollefsen 2015). Similarly, Lahroodi defined summativism by writing that “a group G has the trait T if, and only if, all or most members of G have T” (Lahroodi 2007: 288). The account may refer to as “summative” because the group’s belief, according to this interpretation, is a function of the sum of individual beliefs with the same content as that ascribed to the group. We ought to differentiate summativists and non-summativists within the debate about forming collective beliefs, from those who take a stance only regarding the issue of justifying collective beliefs. For example, Alvin Goldman defends a very specific summativist approach which considers justified collective belief the result or aggregate of the justifications of individual beliefs. Goldman calls the function which takes individual attitudes as inputs and yields collective beliefs as the output a belief aggregation function, and then proposes a way of aggregating the justification of group belief – a justification aggregation function (Goldman 2014). On the other side, non-summativists’ argumentation is grounded on the divergence argument: there can be divergence between phenomena at the collective level and the corresponding phenomena at the individual level. A collective entity can justifiably believe p despite the fact that not a single member justifiably believes that p. For instance, a jury as a group can justifiably believe that the defendant is innocent (on the basis of judge’s rejection of some evidence), even though not a single juror justifiably believes this proposition because it is defeated for each of them as individuals by the actually reliable hearsay evidence. (Lackey 2014). A collective can possess a feature (virtue or vice) present in few or even none of its individual components. The group can also lack a feature, even though many or even all individuals possess it. For instance, a football team can be competitive even though none of its members are competitive individuals; the government can display nationalism, even though the majority of ministers are not nationalists; an institution can make an irrational decision even though its members as such are not making an irrational decision. Worries about collective judgmental rationality were first identified by Kornhauser and Sager, in the context of courts of law, resulting in what is known as “the doctrinal paradox” (Kornhauser and Sager 1986). They explicate an instance in which the final judgment of a group can be irrational despite the fact that the individual judgments of all the members of the body are rational: through a natural mode of aggregation, the majority vote, the collective agent exhibited inconsistence in affirming that the defendant acted despite being obliged not to act, while going on to deny that the defendant is guilty. However, each individual judge had a

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perfectly consistent set of judgments1 Since it seems that there can be systematically rational group agents whose judgments are not suitably tied to those of their ­members, we can wonder about its implications for the epistemic virtue of rationality at the collective level (Goldman 2010). There seem to be concrete examples of group beliefs/attitudes that do not necessarily reflect the beliefs/attitudes of individuals (List and Pettit 2011). Also, some virtues or vices are intrinsically tied to institutions as there is no lower level of group or institution independent features to which higher level features can be reduced. Instead of being the mere by-product of some invisible hand (misunderstanding or lucky accident), these group features are generated by a specific inner structure aimed at attaining the collectively accepted common goal (attaining better ranking, reaching a rational or impartial decision, attaining a decision of the best epistemic quality, or like). As we have seen above, Searle rejected the summative account by arguing that collective intentionality cannot be reduced to individual intentionality. Rather, he purports that individuals have the capacity of “we believe” and “we intend.” (Searle 1995, 2010). Raimo Tuomela offers another account of group belief that rejects summativism, as there is no requirement that all or most members believe that p (Tuomela 2004). Gilbert outlines a classic non-summativist view known as the joint acceptance account; according to her, joint commitments are not reducible to a sum of individual commitments, but they are formed by each individual expressing their willingness to be jointly committed with others as a body (Gilbert 1989, 2004). Gilbert is not a non-summativist because she thinks that the individual is irrelevant to understanding collective phenomena – they are crucial for understanding collective phenomena – but because she thinks that group belief (and group knowledge, as

 This illustrative example conveys a trial in which three members of a jury decide on whether the defendant breached a specific contract by considering (i) whether he was obliged not to act and (ii) whether he had acted despite these restrictions. The first judge held that the defendant was obliged not to act and still acted, thus breaching the contract. The second concluded that, since he was obliged not to act and satisfied the obligation by not acting, he didn’t breach the contract. The third judge didn’t think that the defendant was obliged not to act, so the fact that he acted couldn’t be considered a violation of the contract. To sum up – two judges rationally concluded that the defendant wasn’t guilty, while only one thought that he was. Thus, the defendant was proclaimed innocent by majority vote. However, if we were to subject the decision making process to scrutiny, we would find that two judges held that the defendant was obliged not to act and another two held that he acted. In this sense, it would seem that the defendant was obliged not to act and still acted, which clearly implies his guilt. This would mean that the verdict of his innocence, aggregated from the final conclusion of all three judges, is an irrational decision – the majority held that he was obliged not to act, but still acted. 1

Judge 1 Judge 2 Judge 3 Court

Obliged not to act True True False True

Acted True False True True

Breached the contract True False False False

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well as other group attitudes).cannot be reduced to summing up individual beliefs with the same content as that attributed to the group. Moreover, Gilbert attempts to accentuate that each feature manifests the willingness of individuals to collectively constitute a plural subject of the goal in question. (Gilbert 1989). It ought to be stressed that non-summativists are not generally unified and that they disagree regarding the questions of whether groups are legitimate bearers of cognitive states or not (epistemic agent collectivists vs epistemic agent individualists) and whether group properties and states can (i) be explained solely in terms of a collection of individual attitudes suitably interrelated, or (ii) there is something irreducible about group attitudes (reductionist and anti-reductionist). John Searle, for instance, is an anti-reductionist: group beliefs cannot be reduced to a collection of individual “I-beliefs” suitably interrelated. Rather, they are constituted by “we-­ beliefs”. These are sui generis states. However, they are the states of individuals rather than not groups, so he is an epistemic agent individualist. Gilbert, too, is an anti-reductionist, because at the heart of group belief and group knowledge is a joint commitment that is not reducible to the personal commitments of individuals. But unlike Searle, she thinks that joint commitments constitute plural subjects to which beliefs may be ascribed. So she is an epistemic agent collectivist. (Fricker 2010; Lackey 2014). It is possible to participate in the summativism vs. non-summativism dilemma from a balanced perspective: weak non-summativism and strong summativism have emerged as options respectful of the complexity of the issue at hand. On one side, weak non-summativism can engage the reasoning behind considering group beliefs a certain function of individual ones, though not as a mere numerical sum or aggregated percentage. Meanwhile, strong summativism remains open to interpreting group beliefs as an aggregate or the sum of individual ones, but presupposes a more complex form of aggregation than trivial additions or accepting the stance of the majority. Some kind of non-summativism is additionally supported by the fact that the practices undertaken by institutions with the goal of generating beliefs and decisions of the best epistemic quality, or the goal of being virtuous – can differ from the practices which generate the best individual beliefs. For example, in order to make the best possible decisions, epistemically virtuous institutions do not have to encourage and reward only the best individual beliefs and the best individuals, as practices of rewarding and favouring epistemic diversity have continuously proven to be more fruitful. Epistemic diversity efficiently generates beliefs of high epistemic quality because it involves a wider and more complex evidential base necessary for developing a critical attitude towards the currently leading stance, thus providing a better context for argumentation and refutation. All of these features guarantee a better final epistemic result. In other words, emphasising the epistemic virtue of institutions in the endeavour of producing high-quality beliefs and making good decisions clearly isn’t reducible to merely encouraging the virtue of individual epistemic agents. Rather, it argues for developing an epistemically optimal institutional environment for generating such desirable epistemic outcomes. For example, while some authors have defined this epistemically optimal institutional environment for

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attaining high-quality beliefs as a system of rewarding the institution’s individual members (Kitcher 1990, 2001; Strevens 2003), others accentuate the importance of developing strategies of intellectual engagement – an approach that encourages dialogue between individuals coming from different cognitive and epistemic backgrounds (Weisberg and Muldoon 2009). Certain authors have opted for strategically planned avoidance of rushed or premature consensus (Zollman 2007, 2010). None of these cases reduces the methods of managing epistemically virtuous institutions to methods of merely encouraging the epistemic virtue of individuals – instead, they focus on the individuals’ personal relations and the interplay between their beliefs. Anyway, all kinds of non-summativism offer a template for arguing in favour of collective virtues, i.e. the epistemic virtue of an institution. The non-summativist approach explains the situation in which a collective agent possesses a virtue or vice  – on the basis of joint commitment or collective acceptance of a common goal – regardless of the fact that the majority of its members lack the same virtues (or vices) as individuals. It is entirely possible that an intellectual virtue (or vice) displayed by an institution cannot be found in all or most of its members. We have made it equally evident that institutional acts, procedures or methods of attaining epistemically high-quality beliefs and decisions are neither identical with nor reducible to individual approaches to forming epistemically valuable beliefs. To summarize, we began with the assumption that it is common and intuitive to ascribe actions, intentions, motivations, and doxastic states to institutions. We have then proceeded to show that there are adequate reasons for considering such ascription ontologically and epistemically legitimate, rather than just metaphorical. Furthermore, we have proven that an institution is a collective agent that can both be ascribed epistemic states and be evaluated as epistemically virtuous or vicious. In this sense, institutions can be considered the same kind of epistemic agent as individual epistemic agents. However, we have also shown that the virtue of an institution diverges from the sum of the virtues of its members, and that encouraging the development of epistemically virtuous institutions isn’t reducible to making each individual agent epistemically virtuous. Given the aforementioned divergence, we must tackle the question of whether the epistemic virtues and vices of institutions can be considered identical to those ascribed to individual agents. Can we assess institutional beliefs and decisions using the same criteria used for evaluating individual beliefs? Can we meaningfully claim that an institution is a rational agent, that it generates truth-conductive beliefs, that it exhibits epistemic responsible decision-making, and like?

3.3  Collective Epistemology Meets Virtue Epistemology It is interesting to note that, unlike individual epistemology, collective epistemology is unable to avoid metaphysics. Individual epistemology certainly presupposes that individual subjects exist, but doesn’t have to argue for or against their existence or the existence of beliefs. Any commitment to a plural subject or institutional beliefs

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contains an implicit debate about the possible existence of plural minds (faculties, intentionality, dispositions, brains or such) of a metaphysically spooky sort. Despite possible doubts, Fricker comments that there is no space for spooky ontological commitment as joint commitment is definitely the combination of individual commitments – it is the pooling of wills or other resources such as faculties (Fricker 2010). The same is claimed by Gilbert, who said that the pooling of wills generates an as-if group will “this will will be directed at an end, as if the wills belonged to a single person” (Gilbert 1989: 211). Sarah Wright suggests that the virtues ascribed to groups are identical to those ascribed to individuals. She introduces the distinction between two types of goals: telos and skopos show how a theory of epistemic virtue might be extended to groups. While attaining truth is the skopos, our epistemic telos may be – believing well. In other words, besides our final goal of reaching the truth (which might be obstructed due to different reasons), we can strive to exercise epistemic virtues (of responsibility, carefulness, conscientiousness or like). Both individual and institutional virtues primarily remain focused on predetermined goals. In addition, Wright points out that we could either think of a group’s goals as the mere sum of the goals of its individual members or as goals inherent to the group as a specific entity. For instance, the epistemic telos of an institution can be a long-standing disposition to believe well, “to believe in accordance with epistemic virtues” (Wright 2014: 126). Here, Wright clearly implies the fruitfulness of transposing virtue epistemology – and the focus of its epistemic evaluations on an agent’s virtue – into the field of collective epistemology. If an institution is an epistemic agent with an epistemic goal, there is no reason not to ascribe the same virtues to individual and collective epistemic agents  – such as groups, communities, social systems, institutions and like. Moreover, this would imply that epistemic evaluation ought to focus on the epistemic agency of an institution, rather than remain restricted to its products, such as true beliefs: for example, we can claim that an institution exhibits virtue because it forms beliefs in an epistemically responsible manner – it carefully conducts institutional research before making decisions, it engages all available evidence, it encourages epistemic diversity in order to attain a broader evidential base, it encourages critical interaction and intellectual curiosity between different individuals, and like. Epistemic virtues are institutional features that enable their epistemic fulfilment and development, understood as successful attainment of the common goal or purpose. This approach is particularly valuable because it doesn’t flee from the practical utility of normative approaches, which generate a critical stance towards different epistemic processes and their outcomes by precisely differentiating epistemic virtues from epistemic vices. Thus, this approach makes it equally possible to characterize an institution as epistemically thorough, conscientious and innovative, and as superficial, biased, overly cautious and inconsistent. While some proponents of virtue epistemology consider epistemic responsibility the fundamental virtue due to its intrinsic importance for securing autonomous epistemic development (Zagzebski 1996, 2003; Code 1987; Fricker 2007; Montmarqet 1992, 1993; Roberts and Wood 2007), others perceive it as an important as a means

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for attaining the epistemic goals of truth or justification (Sosa 1980, 1991, 2007; Goldman 1992; Greco 1999, 2000, 2002, 2011). Regardless of whether we understand epistemic responsibility as the responsible disposition of an institution that leads towards the final epistemic goal of attaining correct or truth-conductive beliefs and decisions, or as a desirable virtue in itself – there is a certain consensus that it is a generic concept of virtue from which we can infer all other epistemic virtues. It primarily emphasises the active role of an epistemic agent and the element of choice (motivation) related to epistemic agency. In that sense, epistemic responsibility can be understood as intellectual conscientiousness  – the commendable incentive to attain truth or another epistemic virtue such as intellectual impartiality and openness, willingness to exchange ideas, awareness of one’s own fallibility, control of excessive epistemic enthusiasm, necessary caution, intellectual curiosity and courage, intellectual humility and kindness, and like. To conclude, an institution is a collective agent that can exhibit epistemic virtues even when its individual members lack this virtue as persons (and vice versa). So, in order for an institution – to be epistemically virtuous – it is not required that all or most of its individual members are epistemically virtuous. It is required that an institution displays the epistemic virtue necessary for behaving in a way that produces beliefs and decisions of the highest epistemic quality. Being an epistemic agent per se, the virtues of an institution are the same as the virtues of an individual agent – thus, the institution can be subjected to the same evaluation as the individual agent. If the epistemic virtue of an institution can be considered an epistemic virtue at all, it needs to at least somewhat resemble the concept we are familiar with in individual epistemology. Otherwise, why would we think that institutional virtue is virtue? The theories and concepts of virtue epistemology, although tailored specifically for individual epistemic agents, can be successfully extended to collective ones.

3.4  The Epistemic Virtue of Institutions The epistemic virtue of an institution relates to fulfilling the purpose, goal or status function defined by joint commitment or collective intention. If the purpose of an institution was to make impartial judgements, as is the case with juries, or to provide just and efficient leadership, as is expected from governments, we must inquire how epistemic virtue contributes to attainting these specific goals and purposes. Is the epistemic virtue of an institution reducible to merely practicing the kind of epistemic agency that most efficiently leads towards the goal, reminiscent to the ancient virtue of techne? Or should institutional virtue be understood outside the narrow scope of attaining goals, but as continuous cultivation of the dispositions and capacities necessary for systematically virtuous performances. I will attempt to explain my account of institutional virtue on the basis of the ancient distinction between theoretical and practical epistemic virtues (R.  Parry 2014). Ancient philosophy emphasises the unity of three different aspects of theo-

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retical and practical knowledge. Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics not only share a common distinction between the theoretical and the practical, but also perceive virtue as the unity of theory and practice. Virtue is a kind of “the craft of life” that presupposes conscientious understanding of the universe, the Stoics claimed. Practice needs to be grounded on an account, something that involves theoretical understanding, according to Aristotle. According to Plato, whereas techne is associated with knowing how to do certain activities, episteme sometimes indicates a theoretical component of techne associated with understanding. Plato goes on to claim that techne is informed by knowledge of forms (Parry 2014). Episteme can be understood as an analysis (abstract calculation which judges or distinguishes the things we already know) and as commanding knowledge (Polit. 259e) (Plato 1997: 299). Aristotle describes three approaches to knowledge or epistemic virtue: episteme, techne and phronesis (Aristotle 1999). Whereas techne denotes technical know-how, episteme relates to theoretical know–why, and phronesis emphasizes practical knowledge. Aristotle stresses the tension and unity between theoretical and practical knowledge. While techne deals with things that change, in the sphere of variable (production, action, experience, context-dependent, goal-oriented) (NE, 1140a1–23) (Aristotle 1999: 88–89), episteme refers to something far beyond everyday experience, universals and necessity (scientific, abstract, analytical and deductive knowledge, first principles, truth and certainty) (NE, 1139b18–36) (Aristotle 1999: 88). However, Aristotle introduces also the additional concept of phronesis: “To grasp what prudence (phronesis) is, we should first study the sort of people we call prudent. It seems proper to a prudent person to be able to deliberate finely about things that are good and beneficial for himself (…) it follows that prudence is not science nor yet craft knowledge. It is not science (episteme), because what is achievable in action admits of being otherwise; and it is not craft knowledge (techne), because action and production belong to different kinds. The remaining possibility, then, is that prudence is a state grasping the truth, involving reason, concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human being. For production has its end in something other than itself, but action does not, since its end is acting well itself. That is why Pericles and such people are the ones whom we regard as prudent, because they are able to study what is good for themselves and for human beings; we think that household managers and politicians are such people.” (NE, 1140a24–1140b12) (Aristotle 1999: 89) The Stoics make a similar distinction between two virtues  – techne and episteme – two notions of knowledge and craft that flow together in forming the science and art of living. While techne is a systematic collection of cognitions unified with practice for some advantageous goal in life, episteme is secure and cannot be shaken for any reason (Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta 1, 1964: 21) (I, 73). Zeno considers phronesis to be knowledge (episteme) (Plutarch 1962: 20–21) (Moral. 441a). According to Sextus, the Stoics say that phronesis, being knowledge (episteme) of the good and the evil, enables techne concerning life (Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta 3, 1964: 156) (IX, 598).

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It seems that these lessons from ancient wisdom lead to the conclusion that the notion of epistemic virtue refers not only to techne, understood as epistemic behaviour best suited to attaining a specific goal, but to the unity of episteme  – the knowledge about what is real, techne – the knowledge about how to act, and phronesis – the knowledge about what is good or bad for people. In order to be virtuous, an institution ought to exercise thus understood epistemic virtues. A virtuous institution is not only virtuous on the sense of techne – knowing how to attain a desirable goal (efficiently), but also in the sense of episteme and phronesis. More precisely, an epistemically virtuous agent is an individual who is epistemically responsible in searching for what is real and its proper application to various situations in life, all while aiming for the good and avoiding the bad for people. Similarly, an epistemically virtuous institution is an institution in which scientific knowledge (knowledge about what is real) is applied in everyday life (knowledge about how to act) with the aim of improving the quality of overall life for all (knowledge about what is good or bad for citizens). A virtuous institution cannot be only technocratically virtuous, but needs to be much more. Finally, let us return to the concrete issue of offering institutions plausible advice on being epistemically virtuous with regard to their foundational goals. We have seen that the shortcomings of the distinction between theoretical and practical epistemic virtues have been problematized since ancient times. Although it may be successful, an institution that merely develops know-how tactics for efficiently attaining goals in particular situations does not seem to display sufficient epistemic virtue. In order for an institution to be able to adjust to different circumstances and continuously attain its goals, it needs to ensure that its epistemic environment and conditions (procedures and practices) are based on theoretical epistemic know-why. Another crucial aspect of epistemic virtue is the development of practices that encourage epistemically just and morally appropriate beliefs. For example, institutions characterized by a strict social hierarchy tend to impose such moral prejudices that may endanger members of particular groups (Anderson 2014). It is equally common to witness situations of testimonial injustice – unjustifiably reduced trust towards members of certain groups vulnerable to social prejudice (Fricker 2007). Additional problems arise due to the fact that moral or cognitive prejudice are so deeply rooted and unconscious that they become difficult to neutralize or eliminate (Alcoff 2010). This is precisely why it should be explicitly emphasized that the task of attaining epistemically just beliefs must equally concern epistemically virtuous individuals and epistemically virtuous social institutions. For instance, educational systems that promote equality and make education more accessible to diverse social groups strive to protect the members of marginalized from experiencing testimonial injustice (Anderson 2012). Thus understood, the unity of techne, episteme and phronesis constitutes the epistemic virtue of an institution.

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References Alcoff, L. M. (2010). Epistemic identities. Episteme, 7(2), 128–137. Anderson, E. (2012). Epistemic justice as a virtue of social institutions. Social Epistemology, 26(2), 163–173. Anderson, E. (2014). The social epistemology of morality: Learning from the forgotten history of the abolition of slavery. In M. Brady & M. Fricker (Eds.), The epistemic life of groups: Essays in the epistemology of collectives (pp. 75–94). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aristotle. (1999). Nicomachean ethics (T. Irwin, Trans.), 2nd Ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. Code, L. (1987). Epistemic responsibility. Hanover: University Press of New England and Brown. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fricker, M. (2010). Can there be institutional virtues? In T. Szabó & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology (Vol. 3, pp. 235–252). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilbert, M. (1989). On social facts. New York: Routledge. Gilbert, M. (2004). Collective epistemology. Episteme, 1(2), 95–107. Goldman, A. I. (1992). Epistemic folkways and scientific epistemology. In A. I. Goldman (Ed.), Liaisons: Philosophy meets the cognitive and social sciences (pp. 155–175). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goldman, A. I. (2010). Why social epistemology is real epistemology? In A. Haddock, A. Millar, & D. Pritchard (Eds.), Social epistemology (pp. 1–29). Goldman, A. I. (2014). Social process reliabilism: Solving justification problems in collective epistemology. In J. Lackey (Ed.), Essays in collective epistemology (pp. 11–41). Goldman, A. I., & Thomas Blanchard, T. (2015). Social epistemology. https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/epistemology-social/. Accessed 19 July 2017. Greco, J. (1999). Agent reliabilism. In J. E. Tomberlin (Ed.), Philosophical perspectives. Volume 13 of epistemology (pp. 273–296). Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Co. Greco, J. (2000). Two kinds of intellectual virtue. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60, 179–184. Greco, J. (2002). Virtues in epistemology. In P. K. Moser (Ed.), Oxford handbook of epistemology (pp. 287–315). New York: Oxford University Press. Greco, J.  (2011). Virtue epistemology. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/. Accessed 19 July 2015. Kitcher, P. (1990). The division of cognitive labor. Journal of Philosophy, 87, 5–22. Kitcher, P. (2001). Science, truth, and democracy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Kornhauser, L. A., & Sager, L. G. (1986). Unpacking the court. The Yale Law Journal, 96, 82–117. Lackey, J. (Ed.). (2014). Essays in collective epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lahroodi, R. (2007). Collective epistemic virtues. Social Epistemology, 21, 281–297. List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design, and status of corporate agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montmarquet, J. (1992). Epistemic virtue. In J. Dancy & E. Sosa (Eds.), A companion of epistemology (pp. 116–118). Oxford: Blackwell. Montmarquet, J.  (1993). Epistemic virtue and doxastic responsibility. Savage: Rowman and Littlefield. Parry, R. (2014). Episteme and Techne. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/. Accessed 19 July 2017. Pettit, P. (2014). How to tell if a group is an agent. In J. Lackey (Ed.), Essays in collective epistemology (pp. 97–121). Plato. (1997). In J. M. Cooper (Ed.), Complete works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. Plutarch. (1962). Moralia (W.  C. Helmbold, Trans.). Vol, VI.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Roberts, R., & Wood, J. (2007). Intellectual virtues: An essay in regulative epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press. Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the social world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sosa, E. (1980). The raft and the pyramid: Coherence versus foundations in the theory of knowledge. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 5, 3–25. Sosa, E. (1991). Knowledge in perspective: Selected essays in epistemology. London: Cambridge University Press. Sosa, E. (2007). A virtue epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strevens, M. (2003). The role of the priority rule in science. Journal of Philosophy, 100(2), 55–79. Tollefsen, D. P. (2015). Rewiew. In J. Lackey (Ed.). Essays in collective epistemology. http://ndpr. nd.edu/news/essays-in-collective-epistemology/. Accessed 19 July 2017. Tuomela, R. (2004). Group knowledge analyzed. Episteme, 1(2), 109–127. von Arnim, H. (Ed.). (1964). Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta.. 4 Volumes. Stuttgart: Teubner. Weisberg, M., & Muldoon, R. (2009). Epistemic landscapes and the division of cognitive labor. Philosophy of Science, 76(2), 225–252. Wright, S. (2014). The stoic epistemic virtues of groups. In J. Lackey (Ed.), Essays in collective epistemology (pp. 122–141). Zagzebski, L. (1996). Virtues of the mind: An inquiry into the nature of virtue and the ethical foundations of knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zagzebski, L. (2003). The search for the source of epistemic good. Metaphilosophy, 34, 12–28. Zollman, K. (2007). The communication structure of epistemic communities. Philosophy of Science, 74(5), 574–587. Zollman, K. (2010). The epistemic benefit of transient diversity. Erkenntnis, 72(1), 17–35.

Chapter 4

What Is an Act of Engagement? Between the Social, Collegial and Institutional Protocols Petar Bojanić

Abstract  Engagement is not synonymous with commitment, even though both words are used in translations between English, French, and German. However, engagement is also not some supplementary phenomenon or a technical term that the phrase social acts already includes in itself or that the concepts of ‘commitment’ or ‘joint commitment’ somehow necessarily imply. In this article I would like to describe a special kind of social act and determine the function they have in relation between various agents. Most importantly, I would like to define their significance in the transformation of a group into an institution or higher order entity. My premise is that there are acts whose aim is to engage all others, since they refer to all of us together, and in so doing reduce negative (social) “acts” as well as various asocial behaviors within a group or institution. In this sense, engaged acts could alternatively also belong to a kind of institutional act, since they introduce certain adjustments to the institution, changing or modifying its rules, increasing its consistency and efficiency. Keywords  Institution · Engagement · Commitment · Social act · Negative social act

I would like to describe a special kind of social acts and attempt to determine the function they have in relation between various agents and most importantly define their significance in the transformation of a group or social group into an institution or higher order entity. My premise is that there are acts whose aim is to engage others or all others, since they refer to all of us together, and in so doing reduce negative

P. Bojanić (*) Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia Center for Advanced Studies, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_4

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(social) “acts” as well as various asocial behaviors within a group or institution. In this sense, engaged acts could alternatively also belong to kinds of institutional acts, since they introduce certain adjustments to the institution, changing or modifying its rules, increasing its consistency and efficiency. Engagement is not synonymous with commitment, even though the two words are used in translation between English, French, and German.1 However, engagement is also not some supplementary phenomenon or a technical term that the phrase social acts already includes in itself or that the concepts of ‘commitment’ or ‘joint commitment’ somehow necessarily imply. Let me begin by sketching the nature of neglect and diminishment of importance of the verb ‘to engage’ (or ‘engagement’ or ‘act of engagement’). Here is a list of a few basic characteristics of this specific protocol in relation to others, such as social, collegial, and committed acts: (a) Both engagement and commitment refer to the will (“commitmentof the will” [Gilbert 2013: 899]), but engagement explicitly assumes the transfer or import of certain burden or amount of burden that can then be compared to other similar engaged acts. Engagement is never the same as some other engagement, and the quantity of the burden (gage, pledge) always determines its efficiency and success, as well as strength of bond to some future actions that the engagement could initiate. This quantitative characteristic (e.g. amount of enthusiasm and will to perform some task or introduce or change a rule) has resulted in the verb ‘to engage’ becoming the condition for an action or simply preceding some following action (“The engagement of the agent is already needed before acting” [Toumela 2013: 121] “[…] they had indeed engaged in some acts” [Johnson 1973: 403]). If person P is engaged to be a manager of a company (to conduct certain business acts and make decisions), then the same person P could be very engaged at their new job. They would, in that case, produce many, rather than few, various acts, which could be described as engaged and be called acts of engagement. Engagement of person P at their new job could then incite other agents-coworkers to also engage and follow the engagement of person P in their own activities. In that sense, person P would not produce acts that ‘engage no one’ (the French equivalent of this would be ‘n’engage à rien’), that is to say, acts that leave others indifferent; yet, we could not say that these acts necessarily bind all other agents to follow the enthusiasm of person P. The act of engagement would therefore be one to which another act is joined, which it follows without obligation or coercion.2

1  Although ‘commitment’ is now often not translated at all into European languages, Howard S. Becker’s text or Margaret Gilbert’s ‘commitment’ are translated as ‘engagement’. While in the opposite direction, Sartre’s or Adorno’s ‘engagement’ is translated into (American) English as ‘commitment’. Cf. Becker (1960, 2006), Gilbert (2003: 15). ‘Joint commitment’ is translated into French as ‘engagement conjoint’ (Gilbert 2003: 152) and not as, for example, co-engagement, which would be much more straightforward. 2  Let me offer two comments regarding the act. In “On Promises,” Georg Henrik von Wright insists, in an entirely Aristotelian manner, that “the act cannot be performed solo. It requires two parties, (for example) promise-giver and promise-receiver. They are human beings. (…) When a promise is given collectively or jointly by several agents, or when a promise has more than one receiver, it seems that these cases are essentially similar to the simpler case” (Von Wright 1962: 287). In his “L’Acte symbolique,” Émile Bréhier defines the efficiency of an act with the possibility of it being interchangeable with another act or whether its author can be another subject: “l’acte est impersonnel” (Bréhier 1917: 350). In Theory of Constitutional Rights, Robert Alexy defines acts “as those which cannot be performed merely on the basis of natural abilities, but which presuppose constitutive rules.” (Alexy 2002 [1986]: 152)

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(b) If the term ‘engagement’ describes several or more “acts of engagement” then these acts should be frequent and directed at the same goal (“consistent line of activity”3). Both engagement and commitment share this characteristic because both protocols allow acts to issue and follow one another. Person P, engaged or committed to the new position of management, for example, produces acts that we can describe as strongly dedicated to the goal or task before them. It would appear as if person P no longer has a choice “and must continue the line of action, whether she is personally committed to it or not.”4 If after a period of time the commitment of person P is relegated because the promises, agreements, contracts or duties of person P surpass their personal preferences and enthusiasm (“she must continue the line of action”), I assume that the characteristic of engagement of person P on the contrary, still surpasses the obligations it has accepted and tasks to which they have agreed. (c) Commitment and engagement could be separated in the following manner: as a matter of fact, person P has been committed by the board or some committee to perform the job of the manager, much as person P has the capacity or authorization to commit or delegate various coworkers in the job at hand. Thus, person P has been committed to do something, and in turn this person has the “right to demand of someone a certain action,”5 to give command and thus obligate others. In that sense commitment is a chain operation that puts together multiple actors (committere; Zusammentun or zusamensetzen)6 in several ways: by each individually, through an act, places themselves under an obligation, by one who has a mandate to obligate others by command, fulfilling in that way an obligation given to them or ordered by someone else. Person P could be committed to performing act A (or person P could commit person S to performing act A). But also, person P could engage such that their actions are not at all obligating and are not in accordance with ‘commitment’. For example, person P attempts to improve the system as they encountered it in the new company and thus begins a quality improvement project that is outside their task description. This action has resonated and intrigued person S and they have decided to join. Regardless that with person S’s act of ‘joining’ person P has certainly created a certain normative order and an obligation between them (joining is also the condition for their joint action that Gilbert names as joint commitment), I nevertheless insist that this pseudo-obligation is purely temporary and can always be broken by either side (which is why I call it engagement and not [joint] commitment).7 It is the reciprocal response and

3  Both Becker (1960: 33) and Johnson (1973: 395) underscore this basic characteristic of commitment. 4  Johnson (1973: 395) differentiates personal and behavioral commitment. 5  It is ‘commitment’ (and not ‘joint commitment’) in its medieval uses that explicitly assumes of someone to do something. For Margaret Gilbert, however, ‘joint commitment’ is ground of ‘right’ to demand of one to do something or “a right against another person has the standing to demand a particular action from that person.” (Gilbert 2018: 11). 6  Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1966 [1922]: 955). 7  Gilbert’s interventions over the years have rendered the phrase ‘joint commitment’ rather vague. It seems to me that the reconstruction and introduction of the term engagement (along with related terms such as ‘act of engagement’) could in one way or another correct and pin down the meaning of joint commitment. Joint commitment would first of all be a semi-pleonasm as it only emphasizes one of the meanings commitment already carries within itself. Nearly 20 years ago, Gilbert introduced the phrase ‘relevant joint commitment’ that implies successful joint commitment if the actors, paradoxically, are more engaged or if they act in a specific way. “(…) people who can engage in joint activity;” or “(…) acting together as stemming from a prior agreement to engage in the relevant joint action;” or again “only if a certain condition is satisfied will he or Lily be committed through the relevant joint commitment.” (Gilbert 2014: 24, 26, 47) The problems only multiply in her book Rights and Demands: A Foundation Inquiry, in the chapter “The Ubiquity of Joint Commitment” (2018: 218–232) where the meaning of joint commitment is expanded and

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P. Bojanić answered call on behalf of person S (their engagement) to the action of person P that determines whether person P is indeed conducting engaged acts or not. Some conditions for person S to ‘be moved’ and then potentially join the common action (and not be ‘joined’ to it, that is, that there is no entity that decides) would be that person P publicly and transparently manifests their own goals, that they are of general interest or in the interest of all (members of the company, but also of the public at large). And when these acts are conducted jointly, when the reciprocal responses are joined (P+S+…), there is necessarily a change in the institution (company, organization, city, etc.).

Let us now consider a few more uses of the word ‘engagement’, to which we usually pay no attention or consider unimportant enough to specifically thematize. In a few places in “Valuing [the] Interpersonal. Relationships and Acting Together” (which mostly follows the 2007 German version “Interpersonelle Bezeihungen und gemeinsame Handlungen”), Betzler renders the French or French-German word Engagement into English as ‘engagement’. She also adds it (‘engagement’ and not ‘commitment’) in a few places to the English in comparison to the German. For example: A friendship or a band’s jazz improvisation can become a valuable engagement only if the participating persons relate to each other reciprocally (wenn sich die daran beteiligten Personen in besonderer und noch näher zu charakterisierender Weise wechselseitig aufeinander beziehen). (Betzler 2008: 259; 2007: 445)8

Engagement, then, is, or engagement (as a condition, evidently) exists, when several persons are in question (not only one) and they “relate to each other reciprocally.” In the forthcoming manuscript “Collegial Relationships” (which Betzler has graciously allowed me to consult), Betzler and Löschke mention this word nine times, e.g. “person who engages in the same business” or “kind of engagement for a common purpose,” etc. On page 13, we find the following formulation: Work relationship between colleagues is characterized by ongoing interactions that two colleagues engage in because of the relation that holds between them. These interactions are limited to the context of those features that constitute the status of colleagues, but they are enduring, orientated towards the other as colleague, rooted in a shared history and marked by shared expectations for future thoughts and actions. Two colleagues thus establish a relationship by actualizing interconnected but temporal chains of behavior.

In addition to a common goal (‘business’ or ‘common purpose’), and individual action that is also simultaneous or reciprocal to those of others, a chain sequence of actions in a time to come, the first sentence of this passage indicates that in engagement / commitment, some kind of relation exists among colleagues (a kind of ‘primordial we’), which in this case precedes their engagements. Or else, these

surpasses promises, agreements and contracts (although it still retains normative power; it is unclear how this is possible) and where all intersubjective relations are reduced to joint commitment. 8  In the English version, Betzler mentions several times, “the valuable engagement” and connects it with “reciprocal interpersonal reference.” On page 261 of the English edition, Betzler writes: “In order to realize such engagements at all, the act of referring to others has to be valued for its own sake. But what turns valuable engagements of the kind mentioned into interrelational values is the fact that, in order to be realized, the participating persons must refer to each other reciprocally and for the sake of their relationship’s own value.”

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colleagues are ‘engaged’ by the interaction because it holds them together, which is termed ‘relation’ (“relation of collegiality”). If the first text presents engagement through simultaneous, above all reciprocal, actions, the other text makes engagement a consequence of something already given in advance through a “relation of collegiality.” And the guarantor or source of the latter is, for example, the institution (such as the university). Even if this second were the case, it seems to me there is no collision if we conclude that “valuable engagement” between colleagues will be one in which they “relate to each other reciprocally” and which simultaneously conducts the process of institutionalization (e.g., confirms the institution of the university and the rule of collegial communication). If colleagues conduct themselves institutionally or with collegiality or if they produce engagement acts, then this means that they “relate to each other reciprocally.” Based on observations found in texts here cited, it is still uncertain whether ‘engagement’ is an act or condition, and of what kind of ‘reciprocity’ we are speaking, given that engagement always begins with a certain asymmetry and stimulative activity or increased attention in relation to other actors. (“She, Martina is more engaged in the association to fight cancer from Martin,” or with the reciprocal response, “Martin has changed and become much more active and dynamic, working much more – Martina and Martin are now a real team or tandem.”)9 Further, it is uncertain whether engagement is part of what Adolf Reinach or Edmund Husserl call a “social act” (in the sense of a step or degree a social act can but does not necessarily have to contain – at issue is the rule of reciprocity) or is it actually an entirely special case of social acts whose function would be to institutionalize a group, to convert a group into an institution. What then is a social act? In the brief sketch “Nichtsoziale und soziale Akte,”10 Reinach offers a very deft definition of social acts, and summarily rejects and excludes everything not in the definition by calling it “nichtsoziale Akte” (which then functions as irrelevant refuse, that is to say, anything not a social act is not a social act – there should be no new special entity entitled nichtsoziale Akte).11 But

 Explaining in 1711 who Hercules was, the Earl of Shaftsbury says (in “A Notion of the Tablature, or Judgment of Hercules”): “He admires, he contemplates; but is not yet ingag’d or interested.” Cf. Berger, 2011: 36. In an English-German dictionary of 1763, the word ‘ingagement’ is translated as verbinden or anreizend. 10  Nichtsoziale Akte is Reinach’s phrase, which he mentions only in passing, in a short 1911 text (really a reconstruction of his lecture notes from Göttingen). The text was only published for the first time as part of his collected works (Reinach 1989a, b). Reinach never explicitly explains what are Nichtsoziale Akte (in the notes they are mentioned two or three times as opposite from social acts), nor indeed do almost any of his commentators. 11  In a few steps, entirely in rhythm with Reinach’s chapter on social acts, we can classify their difference from negative social acts: a social act is spontaneous (a negative is not). Spontaneity designates inner actions of the subject (innere Tun des Subjektes). A social act is not at peace in itself; it demands to be externalized (a negative not). A social act penetrates another (er dringt in den anderen ein), while the negative does not. A social act can be perceived, a negative cannot. A social act has an inner and external (phenomenal) aspect; negative acts only the inner. The expression of a social act is not accidental or inadvertent, while the negative one is. A social act can have many addressers and addressees (Soziale Akte können eine Mehrheit von Adressanten und eine Mehrheit von Adressaten haben), the negative cannot (Reinach 1989a, b: 158–161). 9

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right on the heels of this definition, he suddenly calls into question his own distinction with the example of prayer. The appearance form exists only because among us people things are such that we can only know our inner acts (unsere inneren Akte) by way of their appearance forms (Erscheinnungsformen). Prayer (das Gebet), for example, is a social act (ist ein sozialer Akt). The first [therein] exists, while the second not (it has no apparent form). The religious man assumes that the addressee hears the prayer without the apparent form (ohne Erscheinungsform vernimmt). Thus, a silent prayer is also possible (Darum ist also ein stilles Gebet möglich). (Reinach 1989a: 357)

Prayer is (the ist in the original is italicized)12 a social act because regardless of the uncertainty of existence of one who hears the prayer (here I follow Reinach’s realism) and with whom there is really no connection, there is, nevertheless, an inner act or experience, as well as an addressee of whom one who prays (the religious man) assumes not only the existence but acceptance of what is being sent (even if the believer sends nothing, that is, a series of unuttered words from a familiar protocol). In his book, however, Reinach reworks and enhances this “prayer” scene: Let us imagine a community that comprises beings capable of directly and immediately perceiving their mutual experiences. We would be forced to admit that in such a community, there very well could appear social acts that possess only soul, but no body. If we assume that a being to which we address ourselves in our social acts is capable of directly grasping our experience, we humans would in that way truly renounce the outward appearance of our social acts. Remember that silent prayer addresses God and seeks to manifest itself to him. It thus must be seen as a purely spiritual social act.13

 Reinach makes generous use of italics, while Husserl, around the same time (1910), in constituting social ontology and descriptive sociology in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität (Hua, 13, 1), insists on the use of the quotation marks. All the themes we have today in social ontology are already present in Husserl, but in an unsystematic way, in contrast with a few developed texts by Reinach. I would like to insist, regardless of the hesitations they have in common, that (a) there is an obvious influence of Husserl on Reinach, but also a contemporaneity – Husserl himself quite early discusses acts of address or communicative acts, and also “acts,” orders, acts of love, the unity of social life based on mutual and unilateral exchange (der Einheit eines sozialen Lebens, mit aktiver und reaktiver Wechseleinigung oder einseitiger Bezogenheit), and further conduct of a higher unity by way of acts that produce mutual consciousness of the actors (Hua, 13, 1) (Husserl 1973a: 98). (b) I would also like to insist on Reinach’s resistance to Husserl’s empathy and affection. (c) Husserl explicitly speaks of linguistic acts and a linguistic community, but in an entirely different and insufficiently focused way compared to Reinach. Later, Husserl opens the possibility of the existence of consciousness or cogito of a superpersonal unity. (d) Husserl is probably one of the first social ontologists who is aware of the importance of the document, of the ID (Ausweisung). (Hua, 13, 1) (1973a: 104) (e) Husserl neglects Reinach in his notes after the war (around 1920) when he speaks in detail of social acts. 13  “Denken wir uns eine Gemeinschaft von Wesen, die imstande sind, ihre gegenseitigen Erlebnisse direkt und unmittelbar wahrzunehmen, so werden wir anerkennen müssen, dass in einer solchen Gemeinschaft soziale Akte, welche nur eine Seele und keinen Leib besitzen, sehr wohl vorkommen können. So verzichten wir Menschen in der Tat darauf, unsere sozialen Akte in äussere Erscheinung treten zu lassen, sobald wir annehmen, dass das Wesen, an welches wir sie richten, unser Erleben direkt zu erfassen vermag. Man denke an das stumme Gebet, welches sich an Gott wendet und sich ihm kundzugeben tendiert, welches demnach als ein rein seelicher sozialer Akt betrachtet werden muss.” (Reinach 1989a, b: 161) 12

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The sentence “Let us imagine a community that comprises beings (Wesen) capable of directly and immediately perceiving their mutual relations,” as perhaps one of the crucial places of Reinach’s chapter on social acts, demands certain entirely different and more complicated examples from that of a religious person addressing an invisible addressee through prayer. And not only examples, but also, analogously, collectively engaged activity that would indeed turn non-social into social acts, or else entirely eliminate them.14 If we imagine a community in which negative social acts are eliminated in mutual interaction,15 then this would call into question one of the most important distinctions between social and non-social acts Reinach produced: a social act can have many addressers and addressees (Soziale Akte können eine Mehrheit von Adressanten und eine Mehrheit von Adressaten haben); a negative one, on the other hand, cannot. In contrast with his student, Husserl neither recognizes nor accepts any forms of asymmetry or non-reciprocity between social actors. Even when experimenting several times in notes taken later in life with the possibility for empathy to also be truly reciprocal and active, Husserl still rejects such an idea because I cannot see whether the other notices me simultaneously, whether they are observing themselves, that is, whether they are at all interested in me when I am directed at them. In order for true communicatio to take place (Husserl uses the Latin16), my activity needs to be explicitly declared and reciprocated (actively oriented towards me).17 Husserl insists on the word activity (Aktivität), directedness and project (Vorhabe), and insists on the will for something to be explicitly declared (Wille der Kundgebung) to the other (or others) as the main conditions for the social and communicative unity to take place (soziale, kommunikative Einigung). Husserl first insists (very early, around 1910) that intersubjective relations are in themselves real and that the individuals who conduct them are real (reale Individuen) (Hua, 13, 1) (1973a: 96–97). Further, acts, communicative acts (kommunikative Akte), “acts addressed to others” (die sich an den Anderen wenden) imply that the

 One of the foremost characteristics of engaged acts is the elimination of the negative, unengaged, non-social, anti-social acts (if they are acts at all). In “Negative ‘Actions’” Gilbert Ryle calls into question these acts as acts (“if they are acts”). Namely, negative actions (refraining, abstaining, postponing, shirking, neglecting, disobeying, overlooking, condoning, etc.) “is the class of acts which consist in the agent’s intentional non-performance of some specifiable actions” (Ryle 1973). 15  In St. Märgen, in 1921 Husserl develops “communal acts” or “acts in a social community” (Gemeinschaftsakte, Handlungen in der sozialen Gemeinschaft). Cf. Hua, 14, 2. (Husserl 1973b: 192–205). In April of 1932, Husserl speaks of various forms of linguistic expression and the expectation that the one to whom we have addressed a message answers, and of the disappointment if the answer goes missing. In order to receive an answer, it is necessary to give silence to one or those of whom we expect a response, which in a way is also a negative act. Hua, 15, 3 (Husserl 1973c: 474–475). 16  In saying so, Husserl is really saying that “communication creates unity” (Kommunikation schafft Einheit) (Hua, 14, 2) (1973b: 199). 17  “Ein Besonderes ist es nun, dass ich ihn verstehe als vice versa auf mich aktiv und explizit auf meine Bekundugen, auf meine darin bekundete Aktivität gerichtet” (Hua, 15, 3) (Husserl 1973c: 472). 14

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other is aware that they are being addressed (in denen der Andere bewusst ist als der, an den ich mich wende). The other needs to understand the address from which certain acts have been sent and respond with an act of the same kind (zurückwenden wird in einem gleichartigen Akte). “These are acts that produce a higher unity of consciousness of person to person (…)” (Das sind die Akte, die zwischen Person und Person eine höhere Bewusstseinseinheit herstellen) (Hua, 13, 1) (Husserl 1973a: 98). The third characteristic of social acts I would like to point out here, and which Husserl ingeniously develops, refers to the norm of the community (eine Gemeinschaftsnorm) or joint norm. Husserl finds that social acts are actually not norms that force, but rather that they are pseudo-norms or pseudo-obligations:18 “it is a common willing regulation (eine Einheit der Willensregelung), acknowledged by individuals and is a super-individual (überindividuell). (…) One who does not respond to a salutation, who does “not thank” is a lout (ein Flegel). (…) if I address someone politely, I have the right (Ich habe ein Recht) to expect a polite response from them, that is thanks as response to the polite salutation, etc.” (Hua, 13, 1) (Husserl 1973a: 105–106).19 In Freiburg in 1921, Husserl attempts one more perspective: he negates or eliminates social acts which are not social acts or not yet social acts. First, love, my love or admiration is not yet a social act of any kind. If I love, this is not yet an act of social love (Akte der sozialen Liebe). If I do something deliberately for another to notice and behave in a way that I am myself displaying – none of this is yet a social act. It is a social act if I do something hoping that the other, noticing my intention, will respond in their way (Hua, 14, 2) (Husserl 1973b: 166).20 In the same year, Husserl discovers something else new by analyzing the family. He demonstrates how a temporary unit (vorübergehende Gemeinschaft) turns into an orderly institution (geregelten Institution) if its members routinely eat together. Having meals together (social acts) are the basic elements for the institution (der Stiftung) of the family as a social institution (soziale Institution). For a family to be a family (for a ‘We’ to become an institution) it is insufficient to be side by side, to live next to or  This would be another decisive characteristic of engaged acts that is never biding while possessing the capacity of initiating or moving along the linking activity in another or others. In “Commissives,” a chapter in his most important book, John Austin explains the protocols (‘engage’ and ‘pledge’ are some of them) that are not binding – such as ‘promise’ – yet could still “commit you to doing something, but include also declarations or announcements of intentions.” A statement that commits the speaker to some future action simultaneously performs two functions: on the one hand, it prevents ‘omissions’ and negative acts, and on the other, engages the audience who are supposed to respond to the speaker in one way or another (Austin 1975: 152, 156–158). 19  A toast could be a still better example that would shed light on what I call an engaged act. It is not a matter of my right to expect anyone to respond, nor is it a matter of right of the person not to respond. It is, rather, a gage or a pledge that engages (burdens) another when I salute them with a toast, one I always feel as unease: I invite someone to do something they otherwise (perhaps) would not do and the unease since they might not respond in equal measure to my invitation. 20  For a social act to be an act there needs to be a chain process, not mimesis. Each next person, each person following an act by someone else confirms that the act is social. If my act engages another whose act in turn engages me or someone third – then my act is social. The sociality of an act is decided by each following act. Cf. Hua, 14, 2 (Husserl 1973b: 193). 18

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near another. “Much more than that, it is a matter of the way of being together, way to be in relation to another, mutually exchanging within living situations (wechselseitige Aufeinander-Bezogenheiten des strebenden Lebe), in acting, in reciprocal influence of one another, in relations that function reciprocally, and based on which the action of one penetrates into the action of the other” (Hua, 14, 2) (Husserl 1973b: 179). The final characteristic of social acts, as imagined and defined by Husserl, quite probably his greatest discovery, appears suddenly in January 1931, when Husserl names this other (one close to him, with whom he is exchanging acts) as ‘the third’ (dritte). It seems to me that formulated like this, ‘the third’ is the premise for the discovery of ‘We’, that is, of the institutional act. “My neighbor (one close to me), who I now perceive (ansehe), is now already the third (…) who helps in the continuous formation of the world from the initial world-state “for us two,” to a world for us three” (Hua, 15, 3) (Husserl 1973c: 134). This last moment that for Husserl determines the social act opens the question of the nature of reciprocity. If two persons “relate to each other reciprocally,” and if we have previously defined this situation as (their) engagement, does their developing and increasing interaction imply the appearance of the third or the group, and then the institution? Let us return once more to collegial engagement and the institution (the university). An interesting scene (a possible analogy) appears in the introduction of the recently published book by Francesco Guala, Understanding Institutions: If I look to the right, I see my colleague Antonio reviewing a paper for a scientific journal. On the left, a map of China hangs on the wall. In front of me, past the door of my office, two students are walking in the corridor of the Department of Economics. Out of the window, I can see the second floor of the Faculty of Social Science of the University of Milan. (…) Antonio, for example, is a colleague of mine because we are both employees of the same university, and the University of Milan is an institution. (Guala 2017: XII)

Gilbert Ryle describes a foreigner (that is what he calls him) visiting Oxford or Cambridge, hopelessly seeking the institution of the university. Finally, he asks, “But where is the University?” (Frank Hindriks also has a text, from 2012, with this same title). I am interested in Antonio, the colleague (“Antonio, for example, is a colleague of mine because we are both employees of the same University”) who is performing an institutional activity (“reviewing a paper for a scientific journal”). It only seems that Francesco Guala is merely describing Antonio (it does not look like they are really doing something together); the fact is that Antonio produces institutional or academic acts par excellence because, as an employee of the university, he is performing an action the university as a group agent has formulated as its goal.21 Since Antonio is certainly not only a member of this group-institution (Antonio has,  This too could be a basic paraphrasing of the “we-mode” of Raimo Toumela’s protocol. “An individual member derives the reasons from which she/he acts from the intentions that the group agent forms. (…) Given that members derive their participatory intentions from the intention of the group agent, the level of the group agent is in an important sense primary and prior to that of an individual member” (Hindriks 2017: 198).

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for example, a rather large family, renowned for its production of wine, meaning that Antonio holds shares, he goes bowling at a club called “Inter Sempre,” and in his free time is a serious poker player – in fact, he is the president of the Italian association; Milton Friedman insists that we must never forget that we are never members of only one group, which fact has various theoretical and practical consequences).22 And since Antonio is a very busy man, Antonio, for example, does not have time to be very engaged as the Vice Dean for International Cooperation of the University of Milan. Now, my problem, or our problem, begins with a certain Frederique who works at another university, who has not published a text in an academic publication in 30 years, is a few years from retirement, is late with her submission, neglects her lectures, has had some reported incidents with students, in fact she is currently under investigation for harassment, and has poor relations with her fellow colleagues (Bernhard Schmid named all these acts “bad acts” or “evil actions”).23 To make matters interesting, the recently elected president of the university, Etienne, a vainglorious jurist and ambitious administrator, has coauthored a paper with Frederique, the theme of which is harassment, and which has received positive feedback for publication. Before we attempt to classify some of these acts  – and of course there is always the question what is an act and whether some negative actions are actions at all – it seems important to me to insist right away that the institutional or collegial acts performed by Etienne (such as those towards or in relation to Frederique) are not necessarily the consequence of Etienne’s having an institutional mandate or the function of University President. Nor due to Frederique and Etienne’s simultaneous belonging to the same entity in which they share potential institutional responsibility. I will call these acts “engaging,” above all because they change the institution (alter it but simultaneously create it) by introducing new rules – even if it is sometimes very difficult to develop or differentiate an action or event, an engaged act is one that decidedly creates something new, such as a real event. Thus, a new institutional fact is that now Frederique is “reviewing a paper for a scientific journal.” Of course, this new situation could produce a certain form of obligation in all members of a group (and in those who have yet to become so; meaning, it is

 In a certain way, this “freedom of association” (Kimberley Brownlee) and simultaneous membership in multiple groups always implies disharmony and so-called “moral messiness.” Postponing the execution of an obligation undertaken by membership in a group in order to execute a task implied by membership in another group always manifests in “negative actions” or “negative social acts.” 23  Cf. “Where have all those negligent, sloppy, unfocused, forgetful and weak-willed people gone whom we know from real life, all those who for some reason or another fail to do (or even fail to intend to do) their part in their collective projects?” (Schmid 2009: 47) Although “the power of the negative is an important power, and our dissidents and our cultural subversives provide that power” (Annette Baier), we ought certainly to differentiate non-participation in a group and not performing certain tasks from negative activities that directly call into question the group or institution. There are other problems too. Tuomela employs the example of a car that has broken down, with one of those now having to push the vehicle to the side of the road an invalid. All this must not be conflated with so-called “non-cooperative game theory.” 22

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i­ mperative to engage all), that is, that they oblige the group as such (“group agent”) to form new kinds of obligation.24 To be engaged means to count on all others and work so as to produce a great stake or burden (gage, pledge)25 that ought to reiterate obligation and institutional responsibility even in those we have labeled hold-outs, subversive or simply ‘Frederique(s)’. Therefore, I insist on there being an entirely imprecise or uncertain number of different unclassified activities that have the capacity to: (a) not only encourage or activate another (or others) into identical or similar action or reciprocal reaction, but also to produce a pseudo-obligation that implies a joint, group action (“to do something as a group”), and (b) not only to, so to speak, obligate members of a group to do something together, but to exceed the borders of joint commitment of the group, a priori ‘obligating’ non-members or all potential and future participants towards joint and coordinated action. What are these actions like, then, the ones that engage others (all others) or that have the capacity to commit (to bring together, collect and bind even those who are not present in one place simultaneously)? Engaged action would then be one that is above all public or announced (for it cannot be a kind of negative social act or a secret, an undisclosed action performed in silence). Further, it is provocative in nature, really a call or message to all, to others (com-mittere can mean to send), a prompting of all to come closer, to join (not only members of a group, but also those outside and beyond the group), because “to commit” precisely means an action that encourages or obligates others to do something together by doing so as members of a future committee. However, engaged action is specific in that it supposes this type of great or grand work, adherence (“giving one’s all” “committed to the end”) and abandon (a kind of sacrifice for others or with other or towards others, or in their stead, sacrifice for the sake of bringing closer, but also as work that calls others to join, to repeat our action and thus construct future joint work) – all with the goal of bringing us closer to others.26 We advance towards or are brought closer to others,

 Likely, this is “une obligation librement consentie” [a freely-agreed obligation]. Von Jhering uses a potentially analogous term in 1886, die active Solidarobligation. 25  Or hostage (hostage). This is one of the most important meanings of the word pledge. More interesting still is the word toast that holds in itself both the call and response to call, as well as the community beyond all obligation. It seems to me that Sartre is wrong when he writes that the group or institution always changes with the introduction of a new member, just as there is no abstract member “without baggage” (sans baggage): “Si vous avez un bagage, vous pouvez vous engager parce que vous-même, vous négocierez (…) Mais si vous n’en avez pas, vous entrez inconditionnellement dans un groupe, donc pour vous engager il faut que vous acceptiez toutes ses théories.” (If you have baggage, you can still be engaged because you yourself negotiate… But if you have none, you join the group conditionally, that is to say, to be engaged, you must accept all its theories) (Astruc 1977: 46). 26  The word engager comes from the verb vado, with the German word wadi, Latin vas, vadis meaning “je m’avance vers quelqu’un,” “I am advancing towards another” (Kemp 1973: 16). Kemp fails to mention a much more interesting meaning of “engagement” that draws this protocol 24

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either when we become bound to them or bind them to us, when we “invest” or “place something” into or before others, when we “mettre en gage” / “pledge” or “donner en gage” / “give a pledge.” What does this mean? What does it mean to place a pledge or burden (guarantee, bail, hypothéque; “engager, c’est hypothéquer”) before another or before all (the whole community), and to what extent is that a form of modest violence and forcing others (or all) to choose whether they would join this specific action or not? What kind of action does not principally have to be strictly in direct relation with another (“if I am doing something, then you or he must do likewise”), but that certainly binds me to another (and the other to me) such that it jointly obligates us to conduct it (“if I act, then we all act,” “if you act, then all act”)? If my public activities involve collecting money for gravely ill children, organizing temporary shelter for war refugees from a neighboring state, or if I often visit slaughterhouses to protest against the (way of) killing animals, would not all these activities be called engaged (and “activist”)? Each could represent “personal commitment,” and at the same time, none could be performed individually, but would always require smaller or larger groups of people. However, this transformation of individual into group agency need not necessarily be the most significant characteristic of these actions. The beginning of the explanation of this transformation was long ago constructed by Kant, where he speaks of duties to oneself as such (Pflicht gegen sich selbst), of debt or obligation to oneself that always precedes and underpins any possible obligation to others (which he will call external duty). Far more complicated, but also perhaps more crucial, is the set of actions that could be located in that place in English where two complementary words or strategies overlap and at the same time diverge: engagement and commitment. Personal committed action (crucially perhaps in contradistinction to the French engagement) remains personal, such as me being engaged in my career or caring for the ill. Only a handful of people, in my more or less immediate circle, will recognize this commitment, and in recognizing it might feel that it is “a thing of public importance,” and thus an obligation to join in. Commitment or joint commitment, always in the plural, calls for a different kind of obligation. Namely, when I call a lunch meeting of our poker group, or what have you, to a nearby restaurant, and promise to attend the beginning of the meeting, then I am truly committed and all those who answer the meeting call will confirm my action, thus also becoming committed. But the engagement of our group occurs only when the actions of the group produce sufficient reason or some form of obligation for those who do not initially belong to our fatally close to the words institutere and instituo (institution). Instituetere (einsetzen) is continuation, the production of heir (Französisch Etymologisches Wörterbuch 1966: 724), while Gaffiot says this same thing by insisting on some uses in Cicero that refer to “se créer des amis,” and to “continuing” in the sense of “chain-linking” not “repetition” (“continue comme tu as commencée”) (Dictionnaire Gaffiot 1934: 833). If several Torino families band together of their own accord to remove trash (as a group), they are calling others to join them (‘friends’), to do as they do (‘repetition’ is really linking and creating a chain of institutional gestures), which further implies the possibility of creation of an alternative counter-institution whose many and diverse actions produce a cleaner city.

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group, or those who are still not at the scheduled meetings, to necessarily join. If our group truly acts together, if it is jointly engaged (such action always referring to the vital connections and relationships that hold the community or the group together), then it would seem I am obligated to join it, to become engaged (“if all act, then I act”). This new, so-called obligation is different from a non-perfect obligation, because the person that gives charity or uses polite protocols or helps the poor in no way produces the identical obligation in me. By contrast, engagement of a group could never leave me indifferent. These acts obligate and connect above all those who are not yet part of the group or institution, who have yet to become so, yet are nevertheless always present. This is decidedly not the same kind of obligation as exists within an agreement (a result of a promise, money-lending or various other kinds of transactions), nor the obligation of the actor in joint commitment. The cry “help,” paradoxically, ‘obligates’ those who are definitely not present, refers to anyone who hears it, even who has never heard it before. Nor is its imperative force and its “ad hominem capacity” certainly any weaker if it is an individual call or plea: ‘help me’. Joint commitment assumes above all an act that implies belonging to a group, such as those who could help (I act, therefore I am an agent, a part of a whole, of all together). Only if I do something publicly, potentially addressing everyone and affirming the existence of all, do I prove the existence of a large group and my belonging to it. This very act is institutional. Why? Because my help to a migrant or a small group of migrants actually represents a small committed act that necessarily implies a multiplicity of new (engaged) acts that could then further construct systemic institutional help to all migrants (and all future migrants). An institutional act is not necessarily normative27 – that I ‘have to’ help one who is endangered because I so confirm that I belong to an institution whose task it is to provide first aid to ones who need it. An institutional act is also an engaged act that calls for the engagement of all, for the sake of transforming occasional, one-off acts of help into consistent institutional actions, that is, institutional agency.

References Alexy, R. (2002). Theory of constitutional rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Astruc, A. (1977). Sartre. Paris: Gallimard. Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, H. S. (1960). Notes on the concept of commitment. The American Journal of Sociology, 66(1), 32–40. Becker, H. S. (2006). Notes sur le concept d’engagement (C. Debras and A. Perdoncin, Trans.). Tracés. Revue de Sciences humaines 11, 177–192. Berger, B. (2011). Attention, deficit, democracy. The paradox of civic engagement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

27  J. R. Cameron (1971, 1972) proves that ‘has to’ and not ‘ought to’ is substantial for institutional obligations.

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Betzler, M. (2007). Interpersonelle Beziehungen und gemeinsame Handlungen. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 55(3), 441–456. Betzler, M. (2008). Valuing the interpersonal. Relationships and acting together. In H. B. Schmid, K.  Schulte-Ostermann, & N.  Psarros (Eds.), Concepts of sharedness. Essays on collective intentionality (pp. 253–272). Ontos Verlag: Frankfurt. Bréhier, É. (1917). L’Acte symbolique. Revue Philosophique de la France et de L'étranger, 84, 345–361. Cameron, J. R. (1971). ‘Ought’ and institutional obligation. Philosophy, 46(178), 309–323. Cameron, J. R. (1972). The nature of institutional obligation. The Philosophical Quarterly, 22(89), 318–332. Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. (1966). Ed. Walther von Wartburg. Vol. II.  Basel: Zbinden Druck und Verlag AG. Gaffiot, F. (1934). Dictionnaire illustré latin-français. Paris: Hachette. Gilbert, M. (2003). Marcher ensemble. Essais sur les fondements des phénomènes collectifs (B. Auerbach et al., Trans.). Paris: PUF. Gilbert, M. (2013). Commitment. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of ethics (p. 899). London: Blackwell. Gilbert, M. (2014). Joint commitment. How we make the social world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilbert, M. (2018). Rights and demands: A foundation inquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guala, F. (2017). Understanding institutions. Boston: Harvard University Press. Hindriks, F. (2017). Group agents and social institutions. Beyond Tuomela’s Social Ontology. In G. Preyer & G. Peter (Eds.), Social ontology and collective intentionality. Critical essays on the philosophy of Raimo Tuomela with his responses (pp. 197–210). New York: Springer. Husserl, E. (1973a). In I. Kern (Ed.), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1905–1920. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1973b). In I. Kern (Ed.), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1921–1928. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1973c). In I. Kern (Ed.), Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität 1929–1935. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Johnson, M.  P. (1973). Commitment: A conceptual structure and empirical application. The Sociological Quarterly, 14(3), 395–406. Kemp, P. (1973). Théorie de l’engagement, Vol. 1 Pathétique de l’engagement. Paris: Seuil. Reinach, A. (1989a). Nichtsoziale und soziale Akte. In K. Schumann & B. Smith (Eds.), Sämtliche Werke (Vol. I, pp. 355–360). München: Philosophia Verlag. Reinach, A. (1989b). Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes. In K. Schumann & B. Smith (Eds.), Sämtliche Werke (Vol. I, pp. 141–278). München: Philosophia Verlag. Ryle, G. (1973). Negative ‘Actions’. Hermathena, 115, 81–93. Schmid, H. B. (2009). On not doing one’s part. Dissidence and the normativity of collective intention. In Plural action: Essays in philosophy and social science (pp. 47–58). Berlin: Springer. Tuomela, R. (2013). Social ontology. Collective intentionality and group agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Von Wright, G. H. (1962). On promises. Theoria, 28(3), 277–297.

Chapter 5

Play It by Trust: Social Trust, Political Institutions and Leisure Nebojša Zelič

Abstract  Social trust has recently become a focal topic of research in political and social sciences. It is also becoming increasingly relevant in political philosophy or political theory, due to the importance of trust in ensuring a stable, or at least a decent society. The purpose of this chapter is to explore connection between institutional arrangement and social trust. In the first part of the chapter I discuss why trust is important in a socio-political context. Apart from being important for democratic institutions, social trust is an indispensable element of institutions that secure our well-being – welfare state institutions. Secondly, I try to outline various aspects and understandings of trust, with particular emphasis on social trust. In the third part of this chapter, I will describe how institutions contribute to generating and sustaining social trust. Particular emphasis will be placed on the importance of welfare state institutions in ensuring social trust. Finally, I argue that there are good theoretical and empirical grounds to take into account various impacts of institutions on our leisure time and understand it as a catalyst of social inclusion which is also a precondition of social trust. Keywords  Social trust · Institutions · Welfare state · Leisure · Social inclusion

In 1966. Yoko Ono presented an artwork titled Play it by trust. The work is an interactive white chessboard – both its fields and its figures are fully white. Even though people are encouraged to play chess, the absence of coloured fields and figures forces them to memorize all of their moves, condemning any attempt to play the game successfully beyond certain number of moves to failure. The difficulty of remembering all of our moves compels us to hope that other player will not try to cheat us. As pieces move closer to each other, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate sides – players than either bring a game to an end or start to converse and collaborate using their creativity to come up with new strategies for successful N. Zelič (*) Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_5

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playing. Thus, game of chess – traditionally considered a war game – fundamentally alters the goals of its participants. Instead of working against each other as opponents in a battle, they have to work together and cooperate in order to keep the game afloat. This piece of art is not just profoundly moving, but also highly relevant to the topic of this chapter. To begin with, it teaches us that trust yields many benefits and that it is crucial for fruitful cooperation. In the first part of the chapter, I will explain why social trust is important in a socio-political context. I will argue that, apart from being important for democratic institutions, social trust is an indispensable element of institutions that secure our well-being – welfare state institutions. Secondly, this artwork illustrates the fact that trust includes uncertainty and depends on our expectations about the benevolence of others. In the second part of the chapter I will try to outline various aspects and understandings of trust, with particular emphasis on social trust. Third, the work demonstrates that trust is not self-sufficient – we can only achieve continuous cooperation by negotiating about rules. In the third part of the chapter, I will describe how institutions contribute to generating and sustaining social trust. Particular emphasis will be placed on the importance of welfare state institutions in ensuring social trust. Yoko Ono’s work finally teaches us that we don’t engage in a game of chess with another person because we need to, but because we want to. Thus, the final part of this article will show why institutions must promote leisure as a catalyst of social inclusion – a precondition of social trust.

5.1  Trust, Institutions and Social Inclusion Social trust has recently become a focal topic of research in political and social sciences. It is also becoming increasingly relevant in political philosophy or political theory, due to the importance of trust in ensuring a stable, or at least a decent society.1 Uslaner and Rothstein have tackled the issue by emphasizing that social trust correlates with a number of other variables that are normatively highly desirable (Rothstein and Uslaner 2005). They note that “cities, regions and countries with more trusting people are likely to have better working democratic institutions, to have more open economics, greater economic growth, and less crime and corruption” (Rothstein and Uslaner 2005, 42). Also, the prevalence of social trust is indicative of the way that citizens perceive their society, because “when people answer that they think most other people can be trusted, this can be interpreted as their assessment of the moral standard of their society” (Rothstein and Uslaner 2005, 42). Research about the social norm of trust inevitably unearths certain facts about the inner workings of social rules and institutions, particularly political institutions.

1  A decent society is not synonymous with a just society, as it can be decent without being completely just (see more in Margalit 1998).

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However, the connection between trust and political institutions is hotly debated – it may seem as if politics and the design of political institutions cast doubt onto the very conditions for trust. John Dunn clearly postulates this issue by saying that “in the extraordinarily complex division of labor on which modern social life necessarily depends no one could rationally dispute that human beings need, as far as they can, to economize on trust in persons and confide instead in well-designed political, social and economic institutions” (Dunn 1990, 38). Hardin makes an even stronger claim about trust in politics and emphasizes the blatant irrationality of trust in a political context, by arguing that “we generally should not want trust in government for the simple reason that typical citizens cannot be in the relevant relation to the government or to the overwhelming majority of government officials to be able to trust them except by mistaken inference” (Hardin 1999, 23–24). Given that cooperation presupposes our dependence on others, the main problem with trust in a political context seems to lie in our vulnerability. Dunn argues that this fact implies that it is better to focus on circumscribing what political agents can do (by focusing on principles, rights and duties) than on the questions of trust or the trustworthiness of political agents or institutions. If our well-being is in question, Hardin holds it is epistemologically irresponsible to trust political institutions without possessing sufficient information. But, even though the question of trust in political institutions is both important and unavoidable, it will not be the primary focus of this article. It can be described as a problem of vertical trust – the degree to which citizens trust their political institutions. Instead, I will be interested in an issue we could refer to as horizontal trust – that is, trust among citizens themselves. Even though the fact that the perception of political institutions heavily influences social horizontal trust makes it evident that vertical and horizontal trust are necessarily interconnected, this article will aim to stress the primary importance of horizontal trust. I will discuss the ways institutions can encourage trust at the horizontal level, implicitly presupposing that citizens are capable of correctly perceiving the institutions’ performance. Social trust, understood at the horizontal level as trust among citizens, is important because of the same reasons which are habitually used to encourage caution in trusting political agents. We need social trust because of the complexity of social cooperation and the vulnerability of citizens caused by their interdependence on each other in democratic arrangements. In fact, there are reasons to hold that certain kinds of social bonds are necessary in order to prevent the possible evils of reducing a ‘society’ to a state. Tony Judt warns us that “we should never forget that it was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolshevik and Nazis: if there is nothing that binds us together as a community or a society, than we are utterly dependent upon the state” (Judt 2010, 75). Thus portrayed, trust seems to be a fundamental social attitude, as other cooperative attitudes such as solidarity, tolerance and reciprocity can be imprudent and hard to obtain without prior familiarity with the norm of social trust. Solidaristic behavior which, for example, subjects the individual to certain economic costs, can be irrational if she doubts that others will fairly share those costs (for example, if a sufficient number of others does not pay taxes); tolerance towards those who are in any way different can be decreased if she does not trust

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them enough to believe that they will not harm her; it can also be irrational to fulfill her part of a cooperation without believing that others will reciprocate. We can say that trust enables and facilitates the coordination of action over large domains of space and time, which in turn allows for more complex, differentiated, and diverse societies. In short, it allows for all the benefits already mentioned in Uslaner and Rothstein’s account of desirable societal variables. As previously said, the way institutions are designed can either contribute to or hinder the social norm of trust in a society. It is evident in, for example, institutional procedures of reaching political decisions in a democratic way. One possible way of reaching democratic political decisions can be through direct legislation, such as the usage of referendums. However, this kind of legislation is problematic because it urges citizens to participate in the ballot with a simple “Yes” or “No” decision and encourages both sides to urgently mobilize more voters than other side – this kind of decision-making does not require the reasonable debate or deliberation constitutive of a democratic institution. On the contrary, as Graham Smith points out, “the structure of direct legislation tends to generate a form of public debate that undermines reasonableness and empathy towards those with different viewpoints…The incentives embedded in direct legislation tend to undermine mutual respect and understanding and thus it is poor mode of ratification” (Smith 2009, 129). Such institutions thus undermine tolerance and mutual understanding by raising concerns about possibly repressive outcomes or abuses of majority rule (Smith 2009, 117–118). It is easy to infer how undermining tolerance and mutual understanding can lead to diminished trust in others. Bringing to mind the aforementioned vulnerability and interdependence inherent to contemporary societies, this example shows that institutions can be arranged in a way that increases our vulnerability without enabling us to rectify it through political participation. We will sometimes simply find ourselves in the minority that can be easily over-voted. However, institutions can be also designed in a manner that increases deliberation and democratic exchanges of reasons  – procedures which, at the very least, provide us with the opportunity to defend our proposals on equal terms with others, simultaneously allowing them to reasonably respond to our claims. Such institutions can advance social trust, thus mitigating our worries about the political intentions of others. Social norms can be explained by the manner in which political institutions structure the decision-making situation faced by actors and influence trust. Many political decisions will not be reached by consensus but by inevitable compromise or majority voting. In such situations, as Peter Johnson notes, “what provides basis for trust here is not that we agree necessarily with decisions taken on our behalf, but that we follow the process of moral thinking by which they are reached. We trust the rules of the game and so distrust is not our automatic response if we regard any particular outcome as undesirable” (cited in Festenstein 2005, 143). Another reason for caring about social trust can be found in political philosophy. Namely, if we think of society as a form of cooperation, then the norm of trust remains important despite our possible disagreement about the ideal principle of justice best suited to be the foundation of our cooperation. Cooperation can not be sustained merely by mechanisms of monitoring and control. In every relation

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described as cooperation, there must be a certain level of trust. We do not need to have a clear ideal theory in front of us to see the obstacles of cooperation in the real world – problems such as asymmetrical status relations, alienation and exclusive self interest. Trust seems to be particularly important if we are interested in maintaining stable social cooperation over longer periods of time. We can discern between imposed and inherent stability (Weithman 2010, 44–45). Imposed stability always presupposes some agency external to cooperation that is meant to correct deviations. John Rawls considered this kind of stability to be present in Hobbes: “One way of interpreting the Hobbesian sovereign is an agency added to an unstable system of cooperation in such a way that it is no longer to anyone’s advantage not to do his part given that others will do theirs” (Rawls 2000, 104). In imposed stability there is no need to rely on trust – all we have to do is to believe that the sovereign will be able to know who is deviating from cooperation, and will then proceed to punish them. On the other hand, inherent stability means that there are forces within the system that can correct deviations from cooperation. Certainly, the philosophical aim is to describe inherently stable cooperation rather than imposed stability. Should we choose to abstain from exclusive reliance on monitoring and control, then the norm of trust between the participants of cooperation, understood as citizens, will become an important force within the system of inherently stable cooperation. Such understanding of cooperation can also be seen in Bernard Williams’ account of cooperation: “Two agents cooperate when they engage in a joint venture for the outcome of which the actions of each are necessary, and where a necessary action by at least one of them is not under the immediate control of the other” (Williams 1988, 7). As we will see below, dependence on the behavior of others which is not under one’s control is a constitutive element of trust. Democratic institutions necessary for reaching collective political decisions are an important part of inherently stable cooperation, meaning that their design heavily influences the prevalence of social trust  – which, as we have seen, underscores cooperation. However, we can also redirect our discussion from focusing on trust in and through decision-making procedures and institutions. Democratic institutions are not the sole means of generating social trust. There are other political institutions which can influence civic interpersonal trust – institutions closer  to the notion of well-being than the notion of political participation.2 Since most people consider political agency a relatively minor part of their life, issues like income, social integration, public services and goods influence everyday life and, thus, the well-being of citizens, to a larger extent then procedures for political decision-making. Focusing on these institutions and their influence on generating trust is sufficiently important to possibly have priority over investigations of democracy as a generator of trust. Of course, it ought to be repeated that these issues are connected – political decision making, as we have previously seen, can heavily influence mutual trust and respect among citizens. Nevertheless, it makes sense to focus on the political institutions of the welfare state by perceiving them as equally important as the political institutions

 This is what Ronald Inglehart points to, see Inglehart 1999.

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of democratic decision-making, as loci of civic trust. I will aim to do so in the remainder of this article. By focusing on social trust through the aspect of individual well-being, I will approach it from the perspective of recent debates on egalitarianism. Also, by focusing on the influence of institutions on social trust, I will attempt to outline a desirable institutional arrangement based on the norm of social equality. In other words, I will focus on those arrangements of the welfare state that are particularly designed to foster the social norm of trust. Thus, I will start by explaining the concept of relational egalitarianism. As mainstream egalitarianism was based on the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of economic cooperation, it has usually limited its understanding of the goods that should be distributed to material goods, such as income and wealth. It has mainly focused on the distributive paradigm of egalitarianism. As an alternative or a complement to the distributive paradigm, relational egalitarians have proposed a relational understanding of equality – defined as the absence of social relations of hierarchy, domination and misrecognition among citizens.3 It seems to me that some problems emphasized by relational egalitarians can be described by the notion of trust. Certainly, it must be noted that distributional egalitarians were occupied by a notion of fair share which usually perceived ‘fair’ as connected with personal responsibility. Thus, if a person was considered to be responsible for a bad outcome, then it simply does not seem to be fair for him to receive the same goods as someone who was more prudent or cautious. Insistence on this kind of egalitarianism seems very similar to the ongoing crusade against the “undeserving poor”. And the concept of the undeserving poor roughly translates into the issue of distrusting their willingness to achieve economic independency through work. Relational egalitarians stressed the fact that insisting on responsibility can raise certain injustices which are antithetic to the value of equality. I will mention two such examples, found in the works of Jonathan Wolff. First is what Wolff calls shameful revelation. It refers to a problem inherent to selective welfare states – the testing of means devised to investigate whether a person is fit for certain benefits often requires them to disclose certain private information that can rationally be expected to reduce their respect-­ standing (Wolff 1998, 109). For example, they have to persuade the administration that they cannot find a job because of their lack of marketable talents, an uncomfortable fact that one is unlikely to even admit to themselves. I believe that these policies  – even though they do not aim to intentionally deprive people of their self-respect  – are rooted in deep distrust in the possibility that the recipients of welfare are not free-riders. As Wolff writes: “Although it is important not to exaggerate, being called to account for one’s actions or claims – or at least being called too often, or in circumstances when others are not, or when the depth of investigation seems out of proportion – gives the impression that one is not trusted, that one is object of suspicion and hence is not being respected” (Wolff 1998, 108). The second example derived from Wolff is the concept of benefit cheats. It refers to

 See for example, Anderson 1999; Fraser 1995; Scheffler 2003; Wolff 1998; and Fourie et al. 2015.

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people who are unable to find a job and reluctantly claim state benefits, but the received benefits prove to be insufficient for anything other than a basic level of subsistence. Thus, in order to provide themselves with necessities, many people on benefits engage in minor acts of criminality, thus exposing themselves to the risks of being caught and penalized (Wolff 2015, 222). These minor acts of criminality are not stealing or something that harms anyone but, for example, working for cash. The scarcity of state benefits can partly be explained by the ubiquitous lack of trust in the impoverished – it is held that the ability to lead a dignified existence based on benefits alone would render them unwilling to engage in economically productive labor. Another trust-related issue important for relational egalitarians is the problem of the social exclusion/inclusion of marginalized groups, understood as displays of trust. Lack of social trust or widespread distrust is prevalent between marginalized groups and wider society and institutions. Social exclusion and marginalization lead to behavior and attitudes that then give rise and reinforce further social fragmentation. Mutual distrust and distrust in social and political institutions are very often reported as examples of such attitudes. These attitudes can not be rectified by merely wishing for change; trust heavily depends on the history of relations, and particularly on institutional information about who is deserving of trust. Thus, policies directed towards strengthening social trust must also be directed towards social inclusion. In other words, working on social inclusion means working on social trust. I have shown that there is evident egalitarian concern with trust. The norm of trust is stronger in societies with smaller economic inequalities. In addition, researchers report that high social trust can be found among people who are highly educated and have relatively high incomes  – “society’s “winners” are the people who exhibit a high degree of trust in other people, while the “losers” are the opposite” (Newton 2001, 204). One possible explanation is that” people who enjoy large financial assets are more likely to be able to survive instances of treacherous behavior by people or institutions they initially trusted” (Rothstein 2005, 94). Also, all potential explanations ought to consider the quality of leisure meaning social networks outside of work, which is, as I will proceed to show, determined by social status. Thus, policies directed towards strengthening the norm of trust are also directed towards lowering economic inequalities, and vice versa. But, as already said, trust is not only connected to economic and material equality. It is not only through economic policies and the distribution of material goods that we can enhance social trust. Equal importance lies in social or relational equality, marked by the attitudes that institutions express towards their citizens, and, consequently, individuals between themselves. Trust is thus just as important for ensuring social or relational equality, which can not be reduced to distributive terms.

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5.2  Trust and Social Trust I have thus far simply discussed trust as if its definition was self-evident. However, it is necessary to further discuss what is implied by the notion of trust. Trust is certainly a variable and complex concept. One influential definition of trust is that “it is a form of judgment, which may be tacit or habitual, on the part of an agent to grant another discretionary power over some good for that agent” (Warren 1999, 1). Piotr Sztompka offers a simpler definition of trust, describing it as a “bet on the future contingent actions of others” (Sztompka 1998, 19). The significance that these definitions ascribe to discretional power and contingent actions implies that trust always includes imperfect information about others and excludes the notion of blind faith. It means that it is more than mere prediction, and less than full assurance. There is clearly a distinction between trust and assurance.4 Unlike trust, assurance presupposes strong informal and formal sanctions which we can be sure will influence the behavior of others. This is why monitoring and controlling others’ behavior, as well as the testing mentioned in the aforementioned cases of the “undeserving poor”, imply that we do not trust others, and that we want assurance that they will not deviate from rules or norms. Assurance can not be applied to situations where there is no such mechanism of providing regulative incentives. On the contrary, trust is the generalized expectation of human benevolence. In fact, acting on trust means having the disposition to act without thinking about the potentially negative consequences of trusting others. As a certain psychologists point out, it is kind of a heuristic in thinking about our behavior.5 However, as I have previously mentioned, it is not reducible to blind faith in others – in order to develop a trusting disposition, we must have some previous information, even if imperfect, on the basis of which we can develop such a heuristic. If trust is connected with imperfect information about others, and lacks the incentive mechanisms of assurance, then we can conclude that trust is connected with unavoidable social uncertainty. Bicchieri et al. offer the following account of social uncertainty: “A believes that B has an incentive to act in a way that imposes costs (or harm) on her and she does not have enough information to predict if the partner will in fact act in such way” (Bicchieri et al. 2011, 172). Social uncertainty develops where there is no formal contract, no clear affecting reputation, and no clear rewards or punishment. The inevitability of social uncertainty allows us to speak about the fragility of trust. Trust is a fragile plant and that is an important justification for encouraging institutions to support and strengthen it through their societal agency. While I will address this issue in the following section, I will first attempt to briefly present the notion of trust as a social norm. Christina Bicchieri (Bicchieri 2006, 2010) made a very useful distinction between private and social norms. Private norms depend on one’s personal values – as such, its existence only requires one to remain true to their own values, regardless of what  This is discussed in Yamagishi 2001.  For example, Messick and Kramer 2001.

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others may be doing. For example, if a person holds that she has the duty to help the poor, then she will give her money to a poor person even if nobody else does it. In contrast to personal norms, for a social norm to exist there must be a collective belief that a behavior that the norm demands ought to be widespread, as well as a shared belief that one is expected to engage in such behavior. To return to our example of helping the poor – if a person does not consider helping the poor a personal value, but still does it because she believes that others do it and expect her to contribute to the behavior, then she is acting on a social norm. This can also be illustrated by the problem of paying taxes. Even though a person can believe that she should pay taxes, if others avoid paying taxes and if there is no informal sanction for breaching the agreement, then it can be considered irrational to continue doing it (other than for the reason of avoiding formal sanctions) – particularly knowing that others must pay their taxes in order for it to fulfill its function. Of course, while social and private norms are often congruent, social norms typically pertain to situations where there is an inherent conflict between individual and collective interests or values. According to Bicchieri (Bicchieri 2010, 298), a social norm is a conditional preference that depends on two kinds of expectations: empirical and normative. Empirical expectation is the belief that enough other people in a similar situation obey the norm. The normative part is that a sufficient number of others holds that we ought to obey the norm in that situation, and may even be willing to sanction us in a positive or a negative way. Applying this to trust, we could say that the personal norm of trust depends on our upbringing, personal experience and our own moral code. Our personal norm of trust is also profoundly influenced by the surrounding associations that may share our values. The notion of the personal norm of trust can sometimes be articulated as particularized trust. On the other hand, the social norm of trust will depend on our expectations of what other are doing and what they are expecting of us. By speaking of others, I am referring to people whom we do not personally know, but are still members of our society – we participate in the same common social institutions. This kind of trust is also called generalized trust. Institutions are crucial for generating social trust, thus I turn now to this issue.

5.3  Institutional Arrangements and Social Trust It is important to note that the institutional approach to the social norm of trust, or generalized trust, is among the most influential current approaches, such as the rational choice approach, the social capital approach and the cultural approach. Since I have been talking about the moralized notion of trust, I will simply skip the rational choice approach in order to directly address the most influential one – the social capital approach.6 I will proceed to show why we ought to shift our focus to

6  As far as I know best account of trust based on rational choice theory is by Russell Hardin who defines trust as encapsulated self-interest in Hardin 2006.

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the institutional approach. According to the social capital approach, social trust is based on vibrant civil society and a network of voluntary associations. As Robert Putnam (Putnam 2000, 2003) claims, there is continuity between personal and generalized trust: those who are embedded in a thick network of trusting relationships and experience the trustworthiness of people around them will have a propensity to extend that trust to strangers. Much can be learned from the works of Robert Putnam and, as I will soon explain, part of the solution surely lies in widespread social networks.7 However, there are certain problems inherent to focusing on civil society as a basis of trust that has prior and independent grounds from socio-political institutions. Firstly, there is the problem of the “dark side of civil society”,8 which refers to the situation where neo-liberal politics use the potential of civil society to provide the goods and services usually provided by the welfare state. Recipients of such benefits then do not claim rights to these goods, but rather expect charity. Secondly, in contrast to Putnam’s claims, there is notable evidence of discontinuity between personal and generalized trust – in countries with widespread corruption impersonal trust is a scarce good, whereas personal or particularized trust may flourish.9 The third problem is that historically, civil societies haven’t always played a positive role – for example, the Nazis’ rise to power was considerably eased by an extensive system of voluntary associations in Germany at that time (Rothstein 2005, 101). The last problem is of a methodological nature – it explains what a society with a strong norm of social trust may look like, but offers no account about how social trust emerges. Some political scientists, such as Bo Rothstein and Kenneth Newton, claim that the causal connection does not translate from the sociological level (individuals and networks) to the political (the state and its institutions), but rather the reverse (Rothstein 2005, 55–56 and Newton 2001). Different approach from social capital one is cultural approach to social trust which focuses on emerging on social trust. An approach is cultural if it claims that the social norm of trust is simply a part of wider culture. For example, it is well documented that, historically, Catholic countries tend to display low levels of interpersonal trust, while Protestant and Confucian countries traditionally show much higher standing. Ronald Inglehart offers a possible explanation of this disproportion: The Roman Catholic church is the very prototype of a hierarchical, centrally controlled institution; Protestant churches were smaller, relatively decentralized and more open to local control. Though these factors may not count for much today, historically the respective churches played immensely influential roles in shaping their societies. The contrast between local control and domination by a remote hierarchy seems to have important long-­ term consequences for interpersonal trust (Inglehart 1999, 92–93).

There is also another possible explanation of this phenomenon. As I will proceed to elaborate, egalitarian welfare state institutions are crucial for the development of

7  I was very influenced by Putnam’s Bowling Alone, but contrary to him I was persuaded that first we have to take into account institutional design of society and then move to social networks. 8  I heard this term first in Wolfgang Merkel’s lecture delievered in University of Rijeka. 9  See Ensminger 2001 and Newton 2001.

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the social norm of trust. These institutions were precisely the ones that the Catholic church historically opposed in the countries were it was most prevalent. As Jason Jordan explains: Whereas in Scandinavia, Lutheran state churches removed the religious cleavage from politics by significantly weakening the role of the church, in Southern Europe the strong position of Catholic church and the subsequent weakness of the left posed a significant obstacle to state intrusion into the social policy realm, contributing to the development of a highly segmented welfare state with limited capacity to reduce income inequalities (Jordan 2016, 40).10

As we can see, the cultural approach takes into account the role of institutional design and political influence in developing social trust. Depending on how deep we choose to dig, we will finally arrive at those cultural and religious institutions which used to play the role – nowadays overtaken by political institutions – of the generators of social trust, allowing us to understand their influence on the development of contemporary political institutions. Institutional approach holds that the crucial determinant of the norm of social trust is the arrangement of political institutions, with particular emphasis on the effective implementation of policies.11 Here it is crucial to see the difference between representational democratic institutions and welfare state institutions. Persons can lose trust in democratic institutions – such as the parliament – because of political crises or cases of corruption, while continuing to trust those administrative institutions that provide public services and goods. There are three important features of these institutions – (i) they express attitudes towards individuals, (ii) they affect the social incentives for regulating behavior and (iii) they convey information about other individuals (Rothstein 2005, 39–41). Let’s see how these three aspects influence social trust. Clearly, expressing a specific attitude towards someone influences the subsequent level of trust, and social trust functions in a comparable manner. The social norm of trust demands that institutions subject everyone to equal treatment – if institutions are society’s common project, in which we all participate, then unequal treatment by institutions is certain to cause distrust among participants. The perception of a certain group as privileged easily becomes a source of distrust regarding their motivations for preserving existing institutions. Self-perception is of equal importance – the way we are treated by institutions influences the way we imagine how others interpret our behavior. We thus construct a picture of our place within the society. Being denied trust influences our self-respect and often urges us to retreat from wider society, clustering us into narrower groups where we feel respected. The inevitable lack of knowledge about the members of wider society and their intentions  – amplified by the impossibility of maintaining such a large number of relationships – heightens our suspicion of being subject to unequal treat Of course, he is aware of the differences among Protestant countries: „The powerful cultural and political influences of Reform Protestantism and free church movements across most of the English speaking countries produced an environment highly resistant to large and redistributive welfare state programs, resulting in a Liberal welfare state model that does little to alleviate poverty or income inequality” (Jordan 2016, 40). 11  This account of institutional approach heavily relies on Rothstein 2005. 10

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ment, thus disrupting our sense of trust and willingness to cooperate with others. Recalling the second point, institutions give us clear information about what kind of behavior is expected from us and what kind of behavior we ought to avoid. Institutions give us various kinds of incentives to choose priorities and rank our obligations and preferences. In example of benefit cheats in the first part of article we saw that institutions can give incentives for criminal acts. They also give us incentives for trade offs between certain goods. Such a trade off can be the choice between social status and income. For example, institutions can convey the notion that certain benefits necessary for fulfilling our material needs can only be acquired by accepting demeaning procedures that are not expected from others. This kind of situation is described in the aforementioned example of shameful revelation, as well as in many other cases of disgraceful means tests. Another vivid illustration is the testimony of a Yugoslav man who worked in Germany in the 1960s.12 In that period, most guest workers arrived from rural parts of Yugoslavia which rarely offered proper dental care – unsurprisingly, widespread poor dental hygiene often caused the workers to lose their teeth. Austrian border control officers thus developed the habit of asking the arriving workers to smile and laughing at their missing teeth. When asked if such treatment made him feel humiliated, the man answered that it was the only possible way to earn a sufficient amount of money. Institutions that incite such demeaning trade offs will surely cause the harmed parties to distrust them and to feel wary of wider society. Also, the problem of incentives can be seen in problem with people who are “time poor”, these are people who manage to avoid being ‘money poor’ only by working terribly long hours often in multiple jobs.13 This also involves incentive for trade off between time and decent living. Thirdly, institutions convey information about what others are likely to do and about their attitudes. Whereas in the first aspect institutions had informed us about our place in society, they now influence our perception of others. We can say that institutions create a spiral of knowledge. The spiral of knowledge, as presented in this article, is a mechanism opposed to the well-known spiral of silence. According to the spiral of silence theory, individuals fear being isolated from society because of having opinions which deviate from the majority. In fact, this mechanism works even if the individual is mistaken about what others are thinking. While many others can have the same opinion, all of them will remain silent as long as they believe that nobody shares their stance.14 Institutions can have the opposite effect by giving us information about others and their behavior, thus revealing what others are thinking and how they are choosing to act. From the perspective of trust, they inform us about who is and who is not deserving of trust. In simpler terms – given that cooperation depends on trust, institutions define the terms of free riding in a society and reveal the free riders. Therefore, we can say that institutions help us perceive how our own  Private conversation.  For more on this see Goodin et al. 2008. 14  Elster illustrates this problem with H.C. Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, in which no one sees the clothes but is afraid of admitting it (except a little child) not only because they fear the emperor, but because they fear of ostracism in Elster 2009, 40. 12 13

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good is sustained by the efforts and the contributions of our fellow citizens. This perception can encourage us to oppose the temptations of self-interest, which otherwise may incite individuals either to deviate from the established terms of cooperation – if they think they can get away with it – or to try to renegotiate the terms of cooperation in order to make them more subjectively beneficial, but less just. Both of these aspects  – the perceptional and the motivational one  – are crucial for social trust. There are good reasons to conclude that the institutional order best suited for generating a strong norm of social trust is the order of a social democratic welfare state – in contrast to liberal or corporatist welfare states; also known as a universal welfare state – in contrast to selective welfare state. I will from now on use the term universal welfare state (UWS). It is clear that the liberal welfare state, being a very selective welfare state, has the aforementioned detrimental impact on social trust. However, it remains unclear why we ought to focus on the social democratic welfare state rather than on the corporatist welfare state. As the corporatist welfare state actually emphasizes social cohesion as one of its grounding norms, we could say that it is explicitly committed to social trust. Nevertheless, such institutional design promotes social cohesion through traditional customs which cause gender inequality and implement policies that perpetuate existing hierarchies. Such arrangements ascribe central importance to traditional gender roles, describing men as breadwinners and women as mothers and homemakers. They employ public policies that reinforce these roles, thus underwriting social cohesion through a traditional way of life.15 Also, they render welfare benefits dependent on personal earnings – giving back to people in benefits what they took from them in taxes – with the precise aim of making them status preserving.16 I believe that the foundation of sustainable social trust ought to include policies that cater to relational equality or social equality, the grounding norm of the social democratic universal welfare state. There are sufficient grounds to believe that the universal character of welfare states has strong implications for social trust. First, people who receive support from the government cannot be portrayed as “the others”. If policies are universal, then everyone is treated equally and unlikely to perceive them selves as mistreated by common institutions. Universal policies imply that everyone is given equal access to public services and public goods irrespectively of economic inequalities – in other words, there is no deliberate focus on the “truly needy” or the “undeserving poor.” There is a broad range of social services and benefits that cover the entire population. As they require no selection process, they thus evade the problems of shameful revelation and shameful treatment – no one inspects you and there is no need to convince anyone about your inability to find job or support yourself. Second, universal programs are less likely to give rise to the suspicion that people may be cheating the system. Such institutions neither provide us with incentives for cheating the system nor introduce disgraceful trade offs between important goods as the

15 16

 For more, see Goodin et al. 2008, ch. 10.  For more, see Kersbergen 1995.

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prerequisites of a decent life. Because of its universal nature, there is no need to cheat the system. Quality of its benefits, services and goods implies that there are less benefit cheats and that trade off between time and money is not so hard. People in UWS have more free time to use as they please.17 Third, UWS creates lower economic inequality, which is a strong predictor of high levels of social trust.18 Lastly, social trust is clearly related to dispositions such as an optimistic view of the future and the sense of having control over one’s life. Having control over one’s life is not only desirable from an abstract philosophical point of view, but also desired by most people in the real world – it makes you happier and more satisfied with life; it also makes you less depressed and physically healthier.19 People wary of the future are certainly less likely to be optimistic and trust others. Trust itself is an attitude of optimism – the optimism of trust means that the person who trusts tends to adopt a stance of positivity, thus becoming more likely to approach the object of trust in a favorable manner. There seems to be sufficient evidence to conclude that institutional arrangements heavily contribute to generating the social norm of trust. In addition, it seems that the model best suited for encouraging such norms can be found in the universal welfare state. It is (i) grounded on the norm of social equality and (ii) communicates information that caters to the development of social trust. However, as previously mentioned, trust is fragile plant that can easily be disrupted. Thus, we first need to define the kind of universal policies that a UWS must develop in order to sustain social trust. We will then tackle the second problem of defining the kind of behavior which can be considered free riding – and, as such, a violation of trust – within such institutional arrangements. This is important because institutions must to provide us with information and interpret the behavior of others.

5.4  Institutions, Leisure and Social Inclusion In answering these questions, I will begin by focusing on socially and economically marginalized groups, as well as on disadvantaged individuals. Discussions about welfare state institutions should not remain limited to policies for redistributing goods, but ought to address the issues of relational equality. Such equality is realized by institutional policies which ensure that none are dominated, marginalised or oppressed, and those that express respect for their citizens by providing them with high-quality benefits, goods and services as the foundations of equality. Policies that support the inclusion of individuals from marginalized groups into social coop As Goodin et al. write: “Averaging across regime types, social democrats have on average over 5 h a week more ‘post-government discretionarytime’ than corporatists or liberals“(Goodin et al. 2008, 136). For more defined numbers see Goodin et al. 2008, ch. 9. 18  How economic redistribution is achieved in UWS with no progressivity in the tax system and with no targeting of benefits and services on the truly needy see Rothstein 1998, ch. 6. 19  On this findings see Marmot 2004. 17

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eration, characterized by the norm of mutual trust, should not be reduced to mere cash transfers such as the universal basic income (UBI). It ought to be said that there are strong and good arguments in favor of UBI – it is not biased to any theoretical conception of good; it empowers individuals to make individual and autonomous choices about putting resources to good use; it gives individuals real freedom in choosing their occupation, etc. However, this proposal is not without its shortcomings. From the perspective of the economy, UBI would probably delegate many services currently provided by state institutions to the market, given that the state would probably lack the funding needed for simultaneously maintaining UBI and high-quality services. This could lead to a situation where these services would become so expensive that the people who receive UBI could no longer afford them.20 Returning to the focal issue of this article, UBI alone would probably prove insufficient for ensuring wider social inclusion and mutual trust. Should those individuals who are working and being taxed notice that a certain number of people refuses to work and instead lives on UBI alone, choosing to spend their resources on possibly unnecessary luxuries such as cosmetic salons, alcohol, jewelry and tattoos, this could result in widespread social distrust. The problem is heightened if the unemployed group is already marginalized and considered to be untrustworthy. We must address the additional possibility that these “unnecessary luxuries” may raise their status within their surrounding social group, particularly given that UBI offers them no incentives for stepping out of their current environment. For example, in some countries, (such as certain rural parts of Croatia, where I am acquainted with situation) Roma people receive cash benefits in form of social welfare and child allowance. While it can hardly be considered UBI, it raises the same kind of problem. These cash transfers do not give them the incentive to work (according to their way of life) as they continuously engage in other profitable activities that the majority of the population does not perceive as “proper jobs” (for example, they collect iron and copper and sell it as secondary resource). As a result, they spend their money on things commonly perceived as “unnecessary luxuries” inappropriate for people on benefits (jewelry, expensive clothes, weddings). More importantly, these cash transfers do not encourage Roma people to engage in the life of their surrounding wider community. This group consequently becomes subject to further isolation, causing stronger prejudices, stereotypes and mutual distrust between Roma people and the non-Roma majority. We can even say that this is a situation in which a marginalized group trusts the institutions from which it regularly receives benefits without being subject to scrutiny, but distrusts outsiders exempt from their group. Institutional arrangements based solely on UBI can thus inform one group (working people) that the expected behavior of others (people who live on UBI) is unworthy of trust. Even though this is a universal policy which fosters equal treatment (everyone gets the same amount of money and there is no targeting of needy) it can obviously cause distrust. As we have previously proven, trust is fragile because it necessarily involves social uncertainty – the resulting, though possibly misguided,

20

 On this problem see Bergman 2004.

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perceptions of injustice can be disruptive of trust. There is no evidence that mere redistributions of income could transform people’s chances in life. This is because the effects of living in poverty on someone’s prospects are mediated through a range of important behavioral factors. It is unlikely that redistributing financial resources could change the behavioral mechanisms through which economic deprivation and social marginalization affects the outcomes of one’s life. From the perspective of ensuring social inclusion through social trust, it is crucial for the implemented policies to imbue individuals with those social skills or competences that could help them cooperate with people positioned outside of their social group. This set of skills certainly includes what Toshio Yamagishi refers to as social intelligence (Yamagishi 2001).21 According to Yamagishi, social intelligence is the ability to detect and interpret those signals from the people one encounters that tell us whether they can be trusted. He explains that low social trust and lack of social intelligence constitute a vicious circle in individual personality development. Low social trust is a barrier that keeps individuals from entering into social interactions, especially those that involve taking a risk, but can also be very fruitful. This consequently undermines their social intelligence because they are deprived of the opportunity to hone their skills at interpreting the signals that tell them who they can trust. This compels them into a situation where they are disinclined to enter social relationships with others outside of their particular trusted group, or in other words, they are less likely to seek out productive cooperation with people from other groups. If they initiate relationships, their lack of social intelligence leads to frequent disappointment, which ratchets up their mistrust of other people. If they isolate themselves, their ability to learn to differentiate between people who can be trusted and people who cannot be trusted declines, reducing their chances for positive transactions with others. Now, it is not hard to infer how this situation may impact other important social skills, such as self-understanding, managing feelings, showing optimism, skillfully communicating and displaying empathy. This implies that, if we want policies that will invest in social trust and widespread social cooperation, then we need policies that would encourage individuals to frequently interact with those who are not from their social group or local environment. Society should give individuals powerful incentives to step outside of their ingrained social patterns to seek new opportunities in new social networks. Such an approach ought to support policies such as integrated schools, housing, cultural and sport facilities. In short, institutions must create a shared public life. Brian Barry illustrates this through the example of public transport: (P)ublic transport is more than just a device for moving people around: it also throws people from different social classes and areas of the country together and creates a common interest in the efficient running of the system…The socialist case against the car in city centers is not just that it creates mutual frustration but also that it makes people worse. Across the board – education and medical care are two other obvious examples – collective provision on the universal basis fosters attitudes of cooperation and concern while private provision is divisive and conducive to selfishness cited in Edyvane 2013, 113).

21

 See also Rothstein 2005, 97–100.

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It is crucial to understand that, in order for people to truly perceive others and their behavior, this kind of social integration must be present on the informal level – the level of civil society. Institutions must provide incentives and opportunities for people of various social backgrounds to develop their talents and interests together. They need to provide external social resources for individuals to develop their internal resources and social skills. Beside empirical grounds for these claims, there are also strong normative philosophical grounds.22 The principle I have in mind is what John Rawls calls Aristotelian principle: “(O)ther things being equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater the complexity” (Rawls 1999, 374). If social institutions fail to adequately adopt this principle, then “human beings will find their culture and form of life dull and empty. Their vitality and zest will fail as their life becomes a dull routine” (Rawls 1999, 377). While this principle can be understood as the mere demand that institutions provide everyone with equal opportunities for finding meaningful work, I think its application can also be found outside of the sphere of economic production. As articulated by Rawls, resources for education “are not to be allotted solely or necessarily mainly according to their return as estimated in productive trained abilities, but also according to their worth in enriching the personal and social life of citizens” (Rawls 1999, 107). Thus, institutions oriented towards Aristotelian principle are not only oriented towards our productive trained abilities. Also, Aristotelian principle can be understood as principle of excellence (which in part certainly is) but I do not think excellence exhausts its meaning. As Rawls writes, this principle includes „a greater variety of experience“; „pleasure in novelty and surprises“; „ingenuity and invention provided by activities“; „multiplicity of spontaneous activities“; „things enjoyed simply for their own sake“; activities we do „without the incentive of evident reward“ as „engaging in them can itself act often as reward for doing other things “(Rawls 1999, 379). I take it that referring to novelty, surprise, multiplicity and such things implies that this principles covers trials and errors, starting something we like doing or have interest in it and having opportunity to start some other activity if we do not find this one fulfilling, interesting enough or that we are not do good in it. It seems that we could say that an institutional arrangement oriented towards this principle fosters optimistic individual outlooks important for developing social trust. Being given the opportunity to realize one’s talents and interests without making great sacrifices (as in the cases of trade offs) gives one more control over her life. As education and working conditions are crucial for and individual’s well-being, the implementation of the Aristotelian principle ought to be focused on these areas. However, I will continue by focusing on the sphere of social life external to economic production and formal education as a possible basis of social trust. I am referring to the social sphere usually considered ‘free time’ or simply ‘leisure time’. It is evident that, if institutions oriented towards the Aristotelian principle strive to

22

 For some empirical findings see Driver et al. 1991.

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encourage the realization of one’s interests and abilities, then they ought to be equally concerned with the sphere of leisure. While leisure is largely a domain of free self-expression, environmental and social influences can significantly constrain or shape one’s leisure time.23 Leisure is also important for self-socialization because it involves intrinsic interest in interacting with others – it invites social influence. My understanding of leisure is most akin to Robert Stebbins’ concept of serious leisure – the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity which participants find so interesting that they are motivated to acquire and express its special skills, knowledge and experience (Kleiber et al. 2011, 117). As leisure is characterized by being a vehicle for socialization, we can speak of socialization through leisure. It is through leisure that one person sees others performing an activity that they both enjoy. In this way, leisure is important for building a sense of community. Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the benefits of leisure for the community is the example of volunteer work. Working for the local soup kitchen or food bank, cleaning up the neighborhood, participating in landscape development and various other activities can develop personal skills and foster identification with the community. However, this notion also extends to hobbies and amateurism. Of course, we must remain aware that socialization through leisure must primarily involve those who are already socially excluded or marginalized. People who do not have easy entrance to those activities or are not aware of them. Socialization through leisure must involve certain kind of environment where people from various social backgrounds will spend their time together and enjoy doing same activities. So, we must inquire how political institutions can promote socialization through leisure. It seems that there are three kinds of policies. First, institutional arrangement must be such to distribute “discretionary time.”24 Discretionary time is time beyond that necessary for attending to basic functions, available for people to use as they please. It is different than “free time” because, for example, people with a long history of unemployment know that having lots of free time is useless if one lacks many of the other resources required for making good use of it. Discretionary time is time we can devote to our own choices without making trade offs with other goods necessary for sustaining our lives. Secondly, activities must become available to those who are not currently using them. Barriers can only be broken down where fees and charges are reduced or eliminated, existing customers aren’t given preferential treatment, diversity is sought in both staffing and clientele, and services become need-driven rather than demand-driven.25 Thirdly, social leisure activities can be directly ­promoted by institutions. Bo Rothstein reports that Sweden has introduced the so-­ called “study circles” – small groups of adults who usually meet once a week to educate themselves about a special subject, ranging from studying foreign languages and cooking, to learning about EU policies or acquiring computer knowl On this see Kleiber et al. 2011, ch. 9.  For the notion of discretionary time in contrast to free time or spare time see Goodin et al. 2008, ch. 2. 25  Of course, disability and gender creates problems we should also be aware off, but I do not tackle these issues here, see more on this in Kleiber et al. 2011, ch. 9. 23 24

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edge. His study shows that 75 percent of the adult population has attended a study circle at some point of their lives (Rothstein 2005, 73–74). Further analysis of his account reveals two important points – (i) study circles maintain a civic network across all social borders and (ii) study circles are backed by strong governmental economic support. Thus, I believe that institutions oriented towards social skills such as social intelligence and towards the Aristotelian principle are likely to produce friendly environment for serious leisure. In order to do this, they must provide incentives and spaces for people from different social and economic backgrounds to develop their interests and talents together. Of course, I am not saying that this is the only sphere capable of producing such outcomes – socialization can also be realized through education and work. I am simply suggesting that this sphere is equally important and should not be neglected. The last remaining problem lies in providing a definition of free-riders congruent with the aforementioned views. In other words, what kind of behavior should be interpreted as untrustworthy? It is important to have a stable concept of free-riding because the trustworthiness of institutions depends on their ability to detect and, if not penalize, then at least publicly expose free riders. Should we approach cooperation from the economic perspective, where reciprocity is based on everyone’s willingness to produce certain material goods that are to be distributed, then free-riders are individuals who could be producers, but refuse it while continuing to enjoy benefits. Recalling the example of UBI – on one hand, no one is free-riding or cheating the institution because every individual is unconditionally entitled to basic income, but, on the other hand, individuals who are able-bodied to work and have marketable talents, yet refuse to work, are free-riding on those individuals whose tax money contributes to the amount of money meant to be distributed. Such information can diminish the productive citizens’ trust in institutions. However, what about those institutions that apply policies of wider social inclusion and perceive social trust as an important part of cooperation? It seems that the good to which individuals contribute in this kind of cooperation differs from material goods like money – goods that are to be distributed through division. In a way, the good of social trust is an indivisible good. Not contributing in economic terms does not mean that a person is not contributing at all. A person who devotes her time to “serious leisure” activities with people from other social groups should not be considered a free-rider, but treated as a fully cooperative member of society. The success of such an approach largely depends on the kind of information communicated by institutions. As we have previously seen, while socialization through leisure positively affects social trust, we must first ensure socialization into leisure. For example, leisure can be regarded as an enemy of productivity, defined as idleness or self-indulgence – in such a climate, no person will want to be perceived as someone who enjoys leisure. If we are obsessed with mythical figures from contemporary political philosophy literature like lazy couch potatoes, Malibu surfers, people who only drink beer and watch mud wrestling, of course, leisure will always present problem. However, institutions that care about socialization into leisure will be more likely to convey information that at least certain kind of activities (serious

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leisure activities with individuals from other social groups) are praiseworthy and important. Such agency promotes socialization through leisure and generates stronger norms of social trust.

5.5  Conclusion In conclusion, interpreting behavior as cooperative is particularly important given that the norm of social trust necessarily requires certain normative expectations – others must believe that certain behaviors are either praiseworthy or blameworthy. Perhaps this calls for a more skeptical approach to the social norm of trust. While it may seem that trust is not a social norm as there are no informal sanctions for people who do not trust others, we do sanction those who are not trustworthy or who do not reciprocate trustful behavior (Bicchieri et al. 2011). Therefore, it may seem that, instead of trust, trustworthiness should be considered a social norm. But what comes first – the hen or the egg? Differently put, persons can only manifest their (un)trustworthiness if they had previously experienced (dis)trust. If we hold that trustworthiness is praiseworthy, then we should also think that trust is praiseworthy. Should the conclusion of this chapter be accepted as plausible, we can strive towards an institutional arrangement that does not manifest trust towards its members as morally flawed. Opportunities for demonstrating one’s trustworthiness should not be limited to certain kinds of cooperation – instead, they should provide people with freedom to choose how they desire to cooperate. As this would surely depend on the design of our political institutions, we should strive to influence this design and choose the norms that they ought to generate. We cannot intentionally pursue social trust in the same way as we cannot fight insomnia by thinking about sleeping. However, I believe that we can encourage social trust by demanding institutional design grounded on the norm of social equality and by keeping in mind that people most readily interact with others in activities that they find interesting and enriching. Like playing a game of chess on Yoko Ono’s famous white table.26

References Anderson, E. (1999). What is the point of equality? Ethics, 109, 287–337. Bergman, B. (2004). A Swedish-style welfare state or basic income: Which should have priority? Politics and Society, 32, 107–118. Bicchieri, C. (2006). The grammar of society: The nature and dynamics of social norms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Bicchieri, C. (2010). Norms, preferences and conditional behavior. Politics Philosophy Economics, 9, 297–313.  Work on this chapter was funded by Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) in a project: Wellbeing, affiliation and social justice, grant: UIP-2017-05-3462.

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Bicchieri, C., Xiao, E., & Muldoon, R. (2011). Trustworthiness is a social norm, but trusting is not. Politics Philosophy Economics, 10, 170–187. Driver, B. L., Brown, P. J., & Peterson, G. L. (Eds.). (1991). Benefits of leisure. State College: Venture Publishing. Dunn, J. (1990). Interpreting political responsibility: Essays 1981–1989. Polity: Cambridge. Edyvane, D. (2013). Civic virtue and Sovereignity of evil. London: Routledge. Elster, J. (2009). Alexis de Tocqueville, the first social scientist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ensminger, J. (2001). Reputations, trust, and the principal-egent problem. In K. S. Cook (Ed.), Trust in society (pp. 185–201). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Festenstein, M. (2005). Negotiating diversity: Culture, deliberation, trust. London: Polity. Fourie, C., Schuppert, F., & Wallimann – Helmer, I. (Eds.). (2015). Social equality: On what it means to be equals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, N. (1995). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in ‘postsocialist’ age. New Left Review, 212, 68–93. Goodin, R. E., Rice, J. M., Parpo, A., & Eriksson, L. (2008). Discretionary time: A new measure of freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardin, R. (1999). Do we want trust in government? In M. E. Warren (Ed.), Democracy and trust (pp. 22–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardin, R. (2006). Trust. New York: Wiley. Inglehart, R. (1999). Trust, well-being and democracy. In M. Warren (Ed.), Democracy and trust (pp. 88–120). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, J. (2016). Religion and inequality: The lasting impact of religious traditions and institutions on welfare state development. European Political Science Review, 8, 25–48. Judt, T. (2010). Ill Fares the land. New York: The Penguin Press. Kersbergen, K. v. (1995). Social capitalism: A study of Christian democracy and welfare state. London: Routledge. Kleiber, D.  A., Walker, G.  J., & Mannell, R.  C. (2011). A social psychology of leisure. State College: Venture Publishing. Margalit, A. (1998). The decent society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marmot, M. (2004). The status syndrome: How social standing affects our health and longevity. New York: Henry Holt. Messick, D. M., & Kramer, R. M. (2001). Trust as a form of shallow morality. In K. S. Cook (Ed.), Trust in society (pp. 89–118). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Newton, K. (2001). Trust, social capital, civil society, and democracy. International Political Science Review, 22, 201–214. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R. (2003). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice (Revised ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (2000). The sense of justice. In S.  Freeman (Ed.), Collected papers (pp.  96–116). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rothstein, B. (1998). Just institutions matter: The moral and political logic of universal welfare state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rothstein, B. (2005). Social traps and problem of trust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rothstein, B., & Uslaner, E. (2005). All for all: Equality, corruption, and social trust. World Politics, 58, 41–72. Scheffler, S. (2003). What is egalitarianism? Philosophy and Public Affairs, 31, 5–39. Smith, G. (2009). Democratic innovations: Designing institutions for citizen participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sztompka, P. (1998). Trust, distrust and two paradoxes of democracy. European Journal of Social Theory, 1, 19–32.

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Warren, M.  E. (1999). Introduction. In M.  E. Warrenn (Ed.), Democracy and trust (pp.  1–21). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weithman, P. (2010). Why political liberalism? On John Rawls’s political turn. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Williams, B. (1988). Formal structures and social reality. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations (pp. 3–13). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wolff, J. (1998). Fairness, respect and the egalitarian ethos. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 27, 97–122. Wolff, Jonathan. 2015. Social equality and social inequality. Social equality: On what it means to be equals, ed. Fourie Carina, Schuppert Fabian, and Wallimann  – Helmer, Ivo, 209–226. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yamagishi, T. (2001). Trust as a form of social intelligence. In K. S. Cook (Ed.), Trust in society (pp. 121–148). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Chapter 6

Individual Morality and the Morality of Institutions Thomas M. Scanlon

Abstract  This paper discusses the relationship between moral philosophy and political philosophy. It holds that political philosophy in one way is part of moral philosophy since it deals with the content of moral standards governing the relations between individuals and institutions. This is the “morality of institutions”. But this also leads to conclusions about  individual morality, which deals with standards applicable to individuals. On the basis of a contractualist conception of individual morality and a conception of the morality of institutions that closely follows John Rawls’ theory of justice, the paper addresses the question of the foundations of the obligation to comply with institution-defined standards that are directed towards individuals. At the end, it focuses in particular on the difficulty of rationalizing that obligation in the case of unjust institutions. Keywords  Moral philosophy · Political philosophy · Institutions · Theory of justice · John Rawls · Duty of compliance

6.1  Introduction My topic is the relation between moral philosophy and political philosophy – that is to say, the relation between the subject matter of these two enterprises. Is political philosophy simply a subfield of moral philosophy? I believe that in an important respect it is, but that it is nonetheless marked off as distinct. As my title indicates, I will take the first fundamental distinction here to be that political philosophy is concerned with institutions in a way that the rest of moral philosophy – what I will call individual morality – is not.

T. M. Scanlon (*) Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_6

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By individual morality I mean the moral standards that apply to individuals. Primarily, this means standards that determining the permissibility, impermissibility, and blameworthiness individual actions, but it can also include conclusions about values – about the best way to live – that are also commonly called moral. Many moral standards apply to us whether or not others are generally complying with them. For example, the prohibition against the use of deadly force has exceptions – we are permitted to use deadly force when we are attacked, and this is necessary to preserve our lives. But this prohibition (with exceptions) holds whether or not it is being generally observed. It would still be wrong for us to attack someone who presented no threat to us even if many, or even most people were not observing this constraint. But other conclusions about the permissibility of individuals’ actions depend on the principles that others are in fact following. Suppose, for example, that the general use of products containing a certain chemical poses a threat to the health of all of us, and that there is no ambiguity about the appropriate remedy, which is simply to stop using such products. (I assume that the burden involved in doing this is the same for everyone, and I will neglect for the moment effects on the lives of those who work in the industry that produces these chemicals and sells products containing them.) If, recognizing this fact, most people have adopted a policy of not using these chemicals, then, I believe, it would be wrong for me to go on using them. (To put the matter in the terms of my own contractualist moral view, a principle permitting people to exempt themselves from this established practice is one that could reasonably be rejected).1 The practice of abstaining from the use of products containing this harmful chemical is what I am going to call an institution. An institution exists when people are generally not merely conforming to certain standards but see these as standards that they should comply with, in part because they believe that many others are doing likewise. This is a very abstract conception of an institution, but I am going to assume that states, legal systems, universities and other things we normally call institutions are institutions in this abstract sense, even though they are much more complex than the simple institution in my example. The conclusion I just stated, about the wrongfulness of using products involving the harmful chemical when others are abstaining from such use out of recognition of the harms involved, depends on the existence of an institution in a way that the prohibition on the use of deadly force does not. But it is still a conclusion within individual morality. Political philosophy, as I am going to understand it, is concerned with moral standards for appraising institutions themselves – for example, as just or unjust.2 The conclusions it reaches may have implications for what individuals may or should do, but these conclusions are not on their face conclusions of this kind. They are, rather, conclusions about institutions.

 As presented in Scanlon (1998).  These are what John Simmons calls questions about the justification of institutions. See Simmons (1999). 1 2

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Conclusions arrived at in both of these subjects seem to be moral judgments in some broad sense. But what sense is this? This is the first question I want to address about the relation between the two subjects: in what sense are the questions they both deal with moral questions? My second question concerns the relation between these two subjects: what implications conclusions about the morality of institutions have for the permissibility or impermissibility of individual conduct, and whether the content of conclusions about the morality of institutions is exhausted by these implications.

6.2  D  iverse Understandings of Morality (A Slight Digression) I believe that the term ‘moral’ is widely used without a clear, shared understanding of its content.3 This is true not only in public discourse but also in academic discussions. It is generally agreed, I believe, that morality claims to be something important – that moral standards are supposed to be ones that everyone has good reasons to take seriously as (normally overriding) guides to conduct. But even people who believe that moral standards have this kind of authority are often quite unclear about what reasons we have to follow these standards. And people who are clearer about this often have different reasons in mind. One way to identify the reasons that one takes to support moral requirements is to focus on the kind of distress one feels, and takes to be appropriate, when one realizes that one has fallen short of the requirements of morality in a given case. This is what I call the remorse test. The character of this remorse indicates the nature of the reasons one takes to support the standards one has violated. Identifying what one takes these reasons to be is, of course only first step in the reflective process. One then needs to ask whether they are, in fact, good reasons or whether, as Nietzsche would say, they are not good reasons, and susceptibility to them is a sickness one should try to transcend. I believe that this process of reflection uncovers two kinds of diversity. First, different people take morality as they understand it to be backed by different reasons (in some cases good reasons, in other cases not.) But, second, in my own case, the remorse test seems to me to indicate that I take the term ‘moral’ to apply to standards backed by quite different reasons, and by different good reasons. I conjecture that this is true of other people as well, and I want to explore briefly this second form of diversity. The central component of individual morality as I understand it – what I call the morality of what we owe to each other – is something we have reason to care about because we have reason to care about our relations with others in which justifiability of this kind plays an important role. There is, I believe a corresponding version of  I discuss this diversity of views more fully in Scanlon (2011).

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the morality of institutions, consisting of standards that institutions must meet if they are to be justifiable to those to whom they claim to apply. Much depends, of course, on the particular form of justification that is involved. Roughly put, I take it to be justification in terms of the interests of those who are affected. In what follows I will concentrate on this form of individual morality and of the morality of institutions, and it is in this sense that I regard them as both forms of morality. Moral wrongs of the kind I have in mind are identified by a particular form of remorse: the feeling of alienation from others that comes with the realization that one has treated them in a way that could not be justified to them, or that one is participating with them in an institution that could not be justified to them (and one is even depending on their participation in this institution.) But failures of this kind are not the only kind of thing that is commonly called morally wrong. Various kinds of personal fault, such as failure to work hard, or to strive for what is valuable, for example, are also plausibly called moral faults even when they do not involve failures in what one owes to others. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy describes Levin, returning from a day of mowing in the fields with his peasants, as feeling morally superior to his brother, who has been lazing at home, reading. When we read this, it makes sense to us. But what idea of morality is involved? It might be that Levin feels less alienated from his peasants because he has been (at least in a token way) sharing their labor. This would be to invoke morality in the narrow sense I have described. But when we read the passage, we might instead be thinking just that it is somehow better to be engaged in good, honest physical labor than to be stretched out on the sofa all day with a cigarette and a novel. The latter idea is a matter of what Bernard Williams, called ethics – a matter of how best to live – as opposed to morality, which is concerned just with our obligations to others. (Williams: 1985) Until Williams wrote, the terms, ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ were, at least in most academic circles, used more or less interchangeably. The fact that a philosophy course was called “Ethics” or “Moral Philosophy” would not indicate any expected difference in content. And one thing about this content is that it is unlikely to have anything to with sex. That is to say, although some forms of conduct involving sex, such as rape, would be morally wrong in the sense dealt with in such a course, this would only be because they were instances of more generic wrongs, such as the use of force, violence or deception. Sex itself  – the number of individuals involved, whether they were men or women, the parts of the body used, and so on would be of no moral consequence, in the sense of ‘moral’ that would be discussed. Out in the world, of course, things are quite different. If you read in the newspaper that there is a question about some politician’s morals, you know right away that it has to do with sex. And if it is ethics that is mentioned, then it probably has to do with money. It seems to me, however, that this popular way of understanding the distinction between ethics and morality has things importantly backwards. If there is a difference, as Williams suggested, and as I think there is, between questions of obligation and broader questions of value about how to live; and if there are moral issues having to do with sex that go beyond what we owe to others, as I believe there

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are, then these issues are matters of ethics rather than morality. They have to do with what is worth valuing and how rather than with what is permitted or forbidden. This may sound like pedantic terminological housekeeping, but it is of genuine importance. It sounds melodramatic to say that many lives are spoiled by the widespread confusion on this point, but I believe that that is in fact the case. But that is a topic for another lecture.4 I have mentioned sex and hard work as two subjects of moral concern in a sense of ‘moral’ that goes beyond what we owe to others. Another is loyalty to a cause or institution. Such loyalty, which is plausibly called a moral virtue, is not something required by principles specifying what one owes to others. It is rather a matter of steadfastness in one’s commitment to a cause or institution that is worth caring about. A person who turns out to be disloyal is open to criticism, by others who are committed to this cause or institution, not only, or mainly, for failure in what he owes to them, but also for insufficient commitment to the cause or institution in question. And this is a moral failing only insofar as the cause is worthy of this kind of commitment. My point in this discussion of the diversity of understandings of the term ‘moral’ is not only that different people seem to use this term with different things in mind but also, as I have said, that each of us uses it to refer to what I suggest we should see on reflection as a diverse collection of values. When we recognize this diversity the question we should address is not “which conception captures what morality really is?” Rather, the questions we should ask are: “what are these values, which of them are really worth caring about, and how to they fit together?” Corresponding to this diversity in ways of understanding individual morality, there is diversity in moral criticisms of institutions. As I have said, the institutional morality that I will mainly discuss focuses on the justifiability of institutions to individuals, based on their individual claims. But just as there can be criticism of individuals, plausibly called moral, based on their responsiveness to particular values other than their obligations to others, so also institutions might be criticized on the basis of the valuable ends they promote, the kind of individuals they tend to produce, or the kind of lives they encourage these individuals to lead. Rawls puts forward what I am here calling an individualist version of the morality of institutions when he says at the outset of A Theory of Justice that he is viewing a society as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage” (Rawls 1999: 4–5) designed to advance the good of the individuals with disparate aims and purposes who are taking part in it. A conception of justice, as Rawls understands it, is a set of standards for assessing the claims that such individuals may make against a system of cooperation, understood in this way. Such a conception establishes what he refers to as the “bonds of civic friendship” limiting individuals’ pursuit of their disparate aims. This way of understanding justice – and what I am calling the morality of

4  The title might be, “From a Moral and Ethical Point of View, Sex Is Like Work”. I leave it as a homework problem to figure out why this is so.

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institutions  – differs sharply from the one that would be appropriate for society conceived as a set of individuals united in the pursuit of some shared goal or value. Institutions of the latter kind include universities, political parties and action groups, as well as some businesses. We are invited to rely on and support in these institutions various ways insofar as they are guided by important values. What does it mean for an institution to be guided by values? I take it to mean this. Institutions are comprised of individuals to whom they assign various roles and responsibilities. To say that an institution is guided by certain values is to say that it is so organized that it will be responsive to these values if the individuals who are assigned these roles do their assigned parts. Whether this happens or not depends on the way in which the institution is organized, and on what might be called its internal “economy of influence” – that is to say, on the pattern of motivations that the individuals who take part in it are responsive to.5 So, for example, an airline is guided by the value of passenger safety if it is so organized that information about weather conditions and the mechanical condition of planes gets to the individuals who make decisions about flights, and the individuals who have this role are motivated to make the appropriate decisions about whether to fly or not, based on this information. When I decide to fly, I trust the airline to be guided by this value. Similarly, Harvard University purports to be guided by the value of producing high-level scholarship and high-quality education. It invites people to trust it by sending their children to study there and by placing confidence in the research that Harvard produces. It also invites loyalty, that is to say, invites donors to see that it is worth supporting, and those of us to work there see that it is worth working hard and sacrificing other commitments to do our jobs well. Corruption of an institution occurs when the internal economy of influence of an institution is such that it does not operate in the way required to be responsive to the values that are supposed to give others reason to care about it. So understood, corruption, trust, and loyalty are normative notions. That is to say, they have to do with what reasons people have to behave in certain ways and hold certain attitudes. These notions also sound moral. But in what sense are they moral? One moral element is that of honesty – whether institutions are really doing what they purport to be doing and invite people to rely on their doing, or whether they are engaging in a form of deception that is ruled out by moral standards. This is not, however, the whole of the story. If I were to withdraw my trust and loyalty from an institution – whether it is an airline, Harvard, or the FDA – I might believe that it had been dishonest, by sailing under false colors, but my main underlying reason would be not that it had been misleading me but that it was not really responsive to the values in question. This matters to me not only because I object to being misled but also because I care about these values. So the main normative force of notions of trust, loyalty and corruption in this context derives from the particular

 See Lessig (2009).

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values that are in question, whether this is personal safety, intellectual quality, or some other value. This is parallel to what I said a few moments ago about disloyalty as an individual failing. If one person who is committed to some cause criticizes another for being insufficiently loyal to it, this may involve a charge of “letting the rest of us down” by this lack of commitment. But this is not the main thing. The loyalty that is expected (and in this case held to be lacking) is not in the first instance a sense of obligation to the rest of us, who are fellow devotees of the goal. Loyalty in this case is in the first instance a matter of being motivated by commitment to the goal itself. So the normative force of the relation that exists where there is loyalty and trust toward an institution, and lost when this is undermined by corruption is, so to speak, vertical. It is a relation between an individual and an institution, deriving from some value to which that institution is presumed to be responsive. This is in contrast to the horizontal moral ties between individuals who are cooperating members.

6.3  A  Preliminary Question About the Morality of Institutions and its Relation to Individual Morality I have so far been concerned with the question, “In what sense of ‘moral’ are individual morality and the morality of institutions both about morality?” I have identified one understanding of “morality” in which this is so. My second question about the relation between individual morality and the morality of institutions is how moral conclusions of this kind about institutions lead to moral conclusions about what individuals ought or ought not to do, and whether these conclusions about individual morality exhaust the normative content of conclusions about the morality of institutions. I will address these questions within the framework of Rawls’s theory, because it offers a fully worked-out account of the relevant notions: of justice as the central notion of institutional morality and of the relation between the justice of institutions and the duties of individuals. In doing this I do not mean to be arguing from authority, presuming the correctness of Rawls’ view. It may be that once we see what conclusions Rawls’ account leads us to we will be led to question its basic assumptions and look for an alternative. Principles of justice, according to Rawls, are standards for assessing individuals’ claims against their institutions, in particular against what he calls the Basic Structure of their society. The role of these principles is to determine the validity of demands that those institutions be changed. In what Rawls calls a well-ordered society its members share what he calls a sense of justice. This means that they agree on principles of justice, and are motivated by them. Further, if the society is well-ordered, the citizens believe correctly that their institutions satisfy these principles. In the first instance, we can think of being motivated by their sense of justice as having a settled tendency to comply with institutions one believes to be just, to

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demand change when one believes institutions are unjust, and to acquiesce in such changes when they are demanded by others. This fits with Rawls’s remark about a shared sense of justice as an “equilibrating device”. (Rawls 1999: 458) Even just institutions, he says, are likely to become unjust as conditions change. When this happens, the sense of justice that the citizens of a well-ordered society share ­motivates them to demand, work for, and accept changes that are required to bring their institutions back to justice. Our sense of justice is what leads us to feel distress of the kind I described in Sect. 6.2 when we consider the way our unjust institutions treat others, who must comply with these institutions in order for them to function and to meet our own needs. In Rawls’s words, mentioned above, institutions that are not fully just strain the “bonds of civic friendship”, and the distress I described is an awareness of this strain. Distress of this kind is an all too familiar feature of moral and institutional life. But what is the practical significance of this distress? Rawls says that it motivates us to do what is needed to make our institutions more just: taking standards of justice seriously means taking them as action guiding in the voting booth, and on other occasions on which one can have an effect on institutional arrangements. The sad fact, however, is that we generally find ourselves living under, and depending on, institutions that do not meet standards of justice in ways that we ourselves cannot do much, if anything, to change. We are trapped, via the institutions within which we live, in a morally unacceptable relationship with others who are involved in or affected by those institutions. It is worth pausing to note the essential role of institutions in this kind of distress. If I hear that someone far away is abusing someone else, I may feel outrage. But what I am outraged about does not involve me. On the other hand, if I learn that an institution on which I rely operates by exploiting people somewhere, this does involve me, and occasions the kind of distress I am describing, even if I had no role in creating this institution and could not do anything to change it. Similar distress may also arise at the level of individual morality. Utilitarianism is often criticized as unacceptably demanding. But, taking into account the plight of all the people in the world who are in desperate need, and whom we could help, it seems likely that any plausible account of individual morality will involve standards of individual conduct that we are not in fact meeting, and that we are not likely to meet given our concerns for ourselves and those close to us. If so, then both individual morality and the morality of institutions have their painful side. These may not, however, be separate problems. The requirements of individual morality that we are most likely to fall short of in this way – such as duties to help the distant, or not so distant, needy – are problems that really require institutional solutions. So the pain of realizing that one is falling short in these ways is really a case of the first kind of distress that I mentioned (of participating in institutions that do not meet standards of justice.) The examples I just referred to involved our relation to poorer people in other parts of the world. But the points I have made apply domestically. We rely on the

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poor people in the U.S. who pick our fruit just as much as on the poor elsewhere who pick our coffee. So the same problems arise. Some might say that, insofar as injustice of this kind is something we have no way to avoid, distress about it is idle utopian hand-wringing. But it seems heartless to dismiss it. I read the moving final paragraph of A Theory of Justice as expressing a longing for a condition in which such distress could in good conscience be avoided. However eloquent one finds that passage, however, one may still wonder whether justice, in the ideal sense with which Rawls in concerned, has anything to tell us about how to think about what to do in the conditions under which we actually live.

6.4  Justice and Duties to Comply with Institutions So far, these are claims only about the motivational role of a sense of justice. Nothing has been said about individual morality – about duty or obligation. I will now turn to the question of how conclusions about justice or injustice lead to conclusions about what individuals ought to do – to the link between the morality of institutions and individual morality. In Rawls’ work, this link is forged by what he calls the Natural Duty of Justice. This duty, he says, “requires us to support and to comply with just institutions that exist and apply to us” and also “constrains us to further just arrangements not yet established, at least when this can be done without too much cost to ourselves” (Rawls 1999: 99). I will discuss the two parts of this duty in turn, beginning with the duty to comply. The rationale for this duty might be briefly put by saying that if an institution is just, then individuals have no valid reason to object to it or to demand changes. It would seem to follow that they have no justification for failing to do what the institution requires of them. (This may seem too quick, but I will explain later why I believe it is not.) What Rawls says is that we have a duty to comply with institutions that exist, that are just, and that apply to us. In order to understand what is involved in these three conditions, and the relation between them, it will be helpful to return to my example of the harmful chemical. I said earlier that if most people have adopted a policy of not using these chemicals then, I believe, it would be wrong for me to go on using them. This conclusion lies within individual morality – it is a conclusion about what it is morally permissible for an individual to do. But it depends on a conclusion within what I am calling the morality of institutions, since it depends on the fact that the practice in question not only exists but also is just. But we should pause for a minute to consider what this means. It is natural at first to conceive of the justice of an institution in purely distributive terms. So, for example, the practice in this example would be unjust if (without some further justification) it required only some people to abstain from the use of products containing the chemical while allowing others to continue doing so. More generally, we might say that a practice is just if it distributes benefits and burdens in an equitable manner. This might be correct if “benefits”, “burdens” and “equitable” are understood in a sufficiently broad manner. But putting the matter

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this way may direct our attention away from the question of whether the benefits that the practice brings, however evenly they are distributed, are sufficiently important to justify the requirements it imposes, even if these are the same for everyone.6 I chose the example of the harmful chemical because I took it to be a case in which this requirement of sufficient importance was fulfilled. A clearer, or at least more dramatic example would be a system of cooperation for maintaining the dikes that keep the sea from washing us all away. A contrasting case would be Robert Nozick’s example of the neighborhood public address system. (Nozick: 1999: 90–95) Suppose, he says, that there is a system of loudspeakers in your neighborhood and some or your neighbors get the idea that it would be a nice thing to make use of it for regular programming, provided by neighbors who can choose what to do  – to report news, play music, read poetry or something else. They post a list assigning every member a time at which he or she is supposed to do this. After a few weeks have gone by, your assigned time arrives. You find that you have enjoyed the institution very much. Even so, Nozick says, you have no obligation to take your turn if you do not wish to do so. Insofar as this is so, I believe, it is so because the benefits that the institution provides are not sufficiently important to justify, as it were, conscripting all the neighbors to participate. A just institution of this kind would have to be voluntary. That is, it would have to allow neighbors to opt out if they so choose. Nozick suggests that the practice he describes is just, having in mind, I suppose, that it treats all the neighbors equally. But the practice is not just if it imposes unjustifiable obligations, and this is what his argument calls our attention to. This brings us to the third condition Rawls states: that the institution applies to one. What is it for an institution to apply to someone in the relevant sense? Given the prior condition, that the institution is just, I believe we can take this to mean simply that the institution claims to apply to one. The question then is to whom can an institution justly claim to apply? The answer, I believe, is that a just institution can claim to apply only to those whose participation is needed in order to provide the benefits in question, and it can claim this only if these benefits are sufficiently important to justify the constraint that it involves. This solidifies what I earlier said might have seemed too quick a move from the fact that an institution was just – that no one had a valid complaint against it – to the conclusion that people were obligated to comply with it. This is a sound move because, as we have just seen, one complaint individuals might have against an institution is that it could not justly claim to apply to them. This explanation may seem to make the move valid by trivializing it, or, rather, by simply pushing the

6  In what follows, I will assume that the benefits in question are benefits to individuals, specifically to those participating in the process, although the latter assumption will not be crucial. This makes the duty in question a matter of what I called above horizontal obligation. It is an interesting question whether and when institutions can be justified in the way I am presently considering by the fact that they are needed to promote some impersonal value. The idea that coercive institutions, at least, cannot be justified in this way would, I suppose, be a generalized form of Mill’s Harm Principle.

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question one step back, to the question of what an institution must be like in order to be just. Nonetheless, reflection on the difference between the case of the harmful chemical and Nozick’s public address system seems to me to indicate that this is where the question belongs.

6.5  Unjust Institutions We seem to have reached the conclusion that the justice of an existing institution is a sufficient condition for there to be a duty to comply with it.7 Is it also a necessary condition? Is there no duty to comply with unjust institutions? This seemed to be so in the example of the neighborhood public address system. But that was a special case, for two reasons: because the injustice in question just lay in the absence of an “opt out” provision, and because the benefit at stake was not very weighty. Things would, I think, be different in the case of an unjust scheme for maintaining the dikes. Justice does not seem always to completely undermine a duty to comply. Few if any existing large scale social institutions (what Rawls calls “basic structures”) are fully just, but it does not seem to follow that people have no obligation at all to comply with their requirements. So if we say that an institution is legitimate if those living under it have a duty to comply with its requirements then justice seems to set a higher standard than mere legitimacy. But legitimacy, understood as an all or nothing affair, is too blunt a concept to handle the range of cases we should be interested in. For one thing, duties to comply vary, depending on an individual’s position in an institution. If an established practice for curbing the use of products containing a harmful chemical were unjust, it would not follow that those who were the beneficiaries of this injustice had no duty to comply with the practice. Second, even if the injustice of a practice changes the moral situation of those who are victims of this injustice, it may not do so simply by removing any duty to comply with the requirements of the practice. This is even clearer in the case of the victims of injustice in actual societies. Consider, for example, one of the worst off groups in our society, people who are born and live in urban black ghettos.8 These people grow up in conditions that present them with very limited opportunities for economic advancement, with severely limited political power, and with educational opportunities so poor as to make it unlikely that they will overcome these conditions. Institutions that avoidably put people in such conditions are seriously unjust, but this injustice does not simply undermine the duty of these people to obey the law. Its effects are more complex. We need, then, to look more closely at the ways in which the fact that an institution is unjust affects the moral situation of those to whom it applies. I will approach 7  In the terms of John Simmons’ paper, cited above, this amounts to the claim that an answer to the question of justification also settles the question of legitimacy. 8  What I say about in the following paragraphs is greatly indebted to Tommie Shelby’s much fuller discussion in Shelby (2007).

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this question using two strategies more or less simultaneously. The first is to consider what the second part of Rawls’ Natural Duty of Justice might have to say about such cases. The second, which will be in the background, is to ask, as a contractualist, what principles governing the conduct of people in unjust institutions would be ones that no one could reasonably reject. The second part of Rawls’ Natural Duty of Justice “constrains us to further just arrangements not yet established, at least when this can be done without too much cost to ourselves”. This principle resolves what otherwise might have seemed to be a paradox in regard to “institutions not yet established”. Consider again the case of the hazardous chemical.9 If a just practice of abstaining from the use of products containing this chemical is established, then it is wrong for individuals to fail to comply with it. But if the great majority of people continue to use these products, despite the known effects, then this practice does not exist. Is it still wrong for any one individual to use these products? If giving up the products involves some cost, and any single individual’s use of the produces does not make a significant difference to the health hazard, then there may seem to be a paradox. On the one hand, it seems pointless for one individual to give up the products for no significant benefit. On the other hand, their general use violates a principle that no one could reasonably reject, and is causing serious harms. It therefore seems clearly incorrect to say that no one is doing anything wrong by continuing this use. So is the principle forbidding such use conditional on its being generally complied with, or not? Call this the non-compliance dilemma. The appearance of a dilemma here depends on considering only two alternatives: compliance and non-compliance. The third alternative is that when there is general non-compliance, what non-rejectable principles require is that we make known to others our willingness to go along with a principle forbidding the use of these products, and urge upon them the importance of doing likewise. This may involve abstaining from the use of the products ourselves, to provide an example to others and as a sign of good faith. If a person has done this, and general non-compliance persists, then it might not be wrong for this person not to comply, if complying has significant personal cost. This alternative is expressed by the relevant clause of Rawls’ Natural Duty of Justice. Turning now to the case of institutions that exist but are unjust, recall that principles of justice, as Rawls understands them, are standards for assessing basic structures, and in particular for assessing demands for change. Rawls describes a shared sense of justice as an “equilibrating” source of motivation. We are now considering principles of justice as a source of justification, rather than a sense as (merely) a source of motivation. Consider first the position of the participants of an unjust institution who benefit from the fact that it is unjust. Since the demands for change from those whom the institution treats unjustly are valid, it would be wrong for the beneficiaries of the

9  The institution involved in this example is not a basic structure in Rawls’s sense. I will return later to the difference this makes.

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injustice to resist the changes demanded. Rawls’ Natural Duty goes farther, and requires that they work to promote such changes “when this can be done without too much cost” to themselves. This requirement seemed correct in the case of institutions “not yet established”, and it seems just as correct in this case. But there is a question how the “costs to oneself” are to be measured. In particular, does the loss of unjustly acquired benefits count among these costs? The answer that seems correct, and seems to follow from Rawls’s account, is that they do not. Insofar as the demand that such benefits not be given is valid (which follows from the fact that they are unjust,) how can there be a valid objection to giving them up? Turn now to the position of those who, like the ghetto poor discussed in Shelby’s paper, are the victims of unjust institutions. These people are, as we have said, entitled to demand changes in the institution, to make it more just. But these demands will be idle, and have no “equilibrating effect”, without some means for making them effective. In the case of an isolated practice of the kind I was imagining in my hazardous chemical example, the only possible means may be just public expression, backed perhaps by threats to withhold compliance. If these expressions are unavailing, then actual withdrawal of compliance could be justified as the only effective means of bringing change, and it would seem that those who benefit from the injustice of the scheme could not complain of the loss of benefits. That is, they could not complain about no longer getting the benefits of the institution without bearing their share of the costs. But if the number of those treated unjustly is large enough that their withdrawal undermines the effectiveness of the institution as a protection against the relevant harm, the unjust beneficiaries will not be the only ones who suffer. (Or, as in the dike-maintenance case, they might suffer greater harm than is justified by the degree of injustice.) There is a question, then, of how far non-compliance is justified when it has these costs. I do not have a systematic answer to this question. (I doubt that there is one.) The point is just that the importance of the benefit an institution provides, and hence the cost of losing this benefit, is one factor that needs to be taken into account in determining whether non-­ compliance is justified, just as it must be taken into account in determining whether individuals must be given the right to opt out. Things are different in the case of what Rawls calls a basic structure, which includes mechanisms for its own alteration: political procedures for making and changing laws and legal institutions for challenging them. In order to be just, such institutions must include mechanisms through which demands for change can be made effective (mechanisms through which the “equilibrating function” of a shared sense of justice can be realized).10 Where such mechanisms exist, the case that I have just sketched for withholding compliance is undermined. But such mechanisms do not exist in the case of the ghetto poor in the U.S. As Shelby emphasizes, they are politically as well as economically isolated. It is unjust that they lack adequate representation, but also that they are stigmatized in a way

 As Charles Beitz argues, one requirement of political equality is that citizens have effective political means for protecting themselves against injustice. See Beitz (1990).

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that makes the larger society not inclined to take their complaints seriously. Their situation is one of what I will call persistent injustice: serious economic injustice coupled with an (unjust) absence of effective political means for demanding change. The question is how far victims of persistent injustice are released from any duties to comply with an unjust institution. One argument for the permissibility of non-compliance in such a case is the argument for civil disobedience as a means for expressing demands of justice. As in the case of an unjust practice for avoiding the effects of a hazardous chemical, but for different reasons, non-compliance is justified as a means of protesting persistent injustice because there are no alternative legal means for expressing demands for change. The classic case for civil disobedience sees it as operating by appeal to the sense of justice of those in positions of power, in particular to their reluctance to punish violators of what they recognize as an unjust law. For the reason mentioned above regarding the political isolation of the ghetto poor, this appeal may be less effective in the case of economic injustice than against general denial of civil rights. If the majority regards ghetto citizens as lazy and immoral, then civil disobedience in support of a demand for greater equality of opportunity may be ineffective, because it fails to appeal to the sense of justice of the majority. This brings us to the question of whether what I have called persistent injustice undermines the obligation of disadvantaged citizens to comply with its laws (quite apart from whether non-compliance is an effective means to promote change toward greater justice.) The analogy with a system of co-operation like the one in the hazardous waste example suggests that this might be so. If an institution is persistently unjust, and non-compliance by those treated unjustly would not involve unacceptable costs, then the majority could hardly claim that citizens who are the victims of persistent injustice would be violating relations of reciprocity by failing to comply with its laws. These relations were already being systematically violated by the majority. But we need to look more closely at the question of what laws might justifiably be violated and why. Even if ghetto residents had no obligation to comply with every law as such, they would still have natural duties to others. It would, for example, still be wrong for them to do things that cause pain, injury or death to other individuals. Many instances of theft may also belong in this category. Even if institutions of property are unjust, it is wrong to steal people’s food, or their means of livelihood, such as the car they need to get to work. But many laws do not merely forbid things of this kind. I have in mind laws such as such as zoning regulations, drug laws, laws against prostitution, and some forms of financial regulation. It is not implausible I believe, to say that victims of extreme injustice might be justified in violating some laws of this kind (by selling drugs, for example, or defaulting on their credit cards if they are charged an unjustifiable rate of interest) when this is necessary to get by and to support themselves and their families (Shelby 2007: 152). It is not clear that in violating such laws they would be violating duties of reciprocity owed to the rest of us. The plausibility of this claim (at least I find it plausible) rests on several factors that need to be made explicit. First, there is an appeal to necessity: to the fact that

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these forms of crime may be the only way for ghetto residents to survive economically. This factor is present also the familiar example of whether a parent could be justified in stealing a drug, needed to save a child’s life, from a pharmacist who refused to sell it, or refused to do so at a reasonable price. Second, as the word ‘reasonable’ here suggests, there is the question of whether crime deprives others of things that they have a just claim to. Some of the crimes mentioned are “victimless crimes”. The wrongfulness of violating laws proscribing such things (and the permissibility of enforcing them) seems to me seriously undermined if the political process through which they are enacted is seriously unjust. Even where violating laws involves costs to others, if the benefits that would be lost are benefits that are gained only in virtue of the unjust nature of the practice, then, as I remarked earlier, it seems to follow that the person cannot complain of losing them. Duties of justice do, however, limit non-compliance in a different way. The Natural Duty to promote the existence of just institutions, does, I believe, require even victims of injustice not to act in ways that can be foreseen to worsen the prospects for improving unjust institutions. So, in Shelby’s words, this duty requires them “to not take courses of action that would clearly exacerbate the injustice of the system or that would increase the burdens of injustice on those in ghetto circumstances or others similarly situated, at least not when these negative consequences can be avoided without too much self-sacrifice” (Shelby 2007: 154). Finally, going beyond the question of obedience to law, and the permissibility of enforcement, there is another range of obligations that can be affected by injustice, which is the obligations of those treated unjustly to be willing to work on the terms made available to them. If they do not owe it to us to be willing to cooperate on these terms, then it is unjust to withhold other forms of public benefit, such as public assistance, medical care and other benefits from the poor on the ground that they are refusing to do their share. Returning to our own perspective, rather than that of the disadvantaged, this puts a slightly different light on the feeling of being trapped in institutions that treat others unjustly. This feeling arose from the observation that it is beyond our power to do much to make our institutions fully just. This seems true. But if what I have said is correct, then standards of justice have implications for things that we can do: for example, for the position we should take on welfare policy, drug laws, and general issues of law enforcement and incarceration. These might at first seem matters of social policy rather than distributive justice. But if what I have been saying is correct then justice has something important to say about them.

6.6  Conclusion I have been investigating the relation between the morality of institutions and the morality of individual action. In the last part of my paper I have been considering whether the justice of an institution is a necessary condition for there being a duty to comply with it. If, following Rawls, we think of the basic institutions of a society

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as “schemes of cooperation for mutual benefit”, and if we see the duty to comply with such an institution as a duty of reciprocity owed to one’s fellow citizens, then it may seem that if a basic structure is unjust, at least if it is persistently unjust, then individuals have no duty (at least not a duty of reciprocity owed to their fellow citizens) to comply with its laws. This seems too stark a conclusion. But I have tried to show that the situation is more complicated than this picture would suggest. I have tried to explore some of these complexities in the relation between conclusions about justice – conclusions in the morality of institutions – and conclusions about the morality of individual action.

References Beitz, C. (1990). Political equality: An essay in democratic theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lessig, Lawrence. (2009). Memorandum of October 9, 2009. https://ethics.harvard.edu/event/ setting-framework-question-institutional-corruption. Last seen 26 Feb 2019. Nozick, R. (1999). Anarchy, state and utopia. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice (revised ed.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scanlon, T. M. (2011). What is morality? In J. M. Shephard, S. M. Koslyn, & E. M. Hammonds (Eds.), The Harvard sampler (pp. 243–266). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shelby, T. (2007). Justice, deviance and the dark ghetto. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 35(2), 126–160. Simmons, J. (1999). Justification and legitimacy. Ethics, 109(4), 739–771. Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the limits of philosophy. London: Fontana.

Chapter 7

States and Transgenerational Actions Tiziana Andina

Abstract  There is a class of actions that, from a metaphysical point of view, has as its necessary condition some form of cooperation between different generations. This article aims to analyse the metaphysical structure of this class of actions and to show that they are a necessary condition for the existence of social reality. Keywords  Transgenerational actions · States · Institutions

What are actions? The extensive literature on the topic has mainly tried (a) to define the concept of action,1 (b) to distinguish it from the similar concept of event and, (c) lastly, to organize a taxonomy of actions that explains what and how many types of actions there are (Danto 1973; Moya 1990). Keeping this framework in mind, I would like to suggest that, in order to understand the structure of social reality, it is not enough to consider it as a complex architecture with a certain structure at a time t1. In fact, it is also important to analyse its basic elements, paying particular attention to its components that undergo changes over time. I will therefore argue that the common taxonomy of actions should include a particular type of action that I will define as “transgenerational”. Social reality needs this type of actions in order to exist and perdure. In other words, there can be no social reality, organized as we know it, without transgenerational actions. Furthermore, I will show that the specific structure of these actions presupposes and requires the existence of particular actors of the social world.

 Many pioneering studies have been published on this topic: see (1965, 1973).

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T. Andina (*) Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_7

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7.1  Basic Transgenerationality I will first define the concept of transgenerationality and then the concept of transgenerational actions. I will defend the thesis that transgenerationality is a primitive and, as such, shapes our identity as social individuals.Humans, as social and political animals, are naturally prone to creating relationships, often medium or long term ones. In most cases, these relationships involve individuals who are related neither by blood nor by kinship. These relationships are defined weak. The transgenerational relationship – like any other relationship – is mainly a constraint and, in this sense, it implies rights and duties. There are two types of transgenerational relationship. The former is widely considered within social reality and is protected by the law: the relationship between different generations of the same family. The transmission of the father’s surname – sometimes the mother’s or, more rarely, both– is one of the elements that typically identify the generational change. The last name is thus considered an external and characteristic sign that proves to preserve “something” in the transition from father to son. This “something”, in its minimal form, usually coincides with the biological makeup. In this kind of situations, which are the easiest to identify and define, the living beings’ biological and therefore constitutive structure is believed to be transmitted. An important emotional connection makes this transfer possible: if one considers the situation where x is the father/mother of y, who is therefore the son/daughter of x, the transmission of the biological makeup corresponds to the transmission of part of x’s being to y (at least the part linked to her biological makeup), so that x will maintain a special link with y in the name of natural continuity. The transgenerational biological relationship assumes that something physical and therefore clearly identifiable and definable is transmitted from one generation to another. Given this context, the resulting idea is that the transmission of part of the genetic makeup implies a somehow analogous transmission of the material goods available to the subject. The parental relationship, therefore, implies the transmission of some of the biological makeup as well as of some material goods. Now, this type of transgenerationality, which I call “basic transgenerationality”, is generally recognized in every culture and is well protected by the law. For example, those systems (such as the Italian one) that protect the transfer of goods from father to son regardless of the parent’s will are particularly interesting. If, for example, the parent decides to disinherit the son, what is technically called “reserved share” protects and ensures basic transgenerationality. Therefore, the idea that the continuity between x and y is an objective factor that must be protected, even by the law and regardless of the concerned individuals’ will, is generally recognized by common sense. The paternity acknowledgment  – paternity denial must generally comply very severe constraints – and the material protection of the child’s rights are some of the tools for the law to protect this kind of transgenerationality. Basic transgenerationality therefore amounts to a well-defined relationship that can be, and in fact is, well-protected. Thus, basic transgenerationality is essentially a state, a way of being.

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However, the second type of transgenerationality, which I call “secondary transgenerationality”, is theoretically more interesting. I will try to show that the secondary transgenerationality is a condition of possibility for the existence of a social reality with a certain degree of complexity and articulation, with the property of perduring in time. I will now explain what I mean by secondary transgenerationality and then show why I believe it should be considered a necessary condition for the existence of social reality.

7.2  Secondary Transgenerationality Secondary transgenerationality is a transgenerational relationship whose condition of possibility is neither parenthood nor kinship. Therefore, secondary transgenerationality does not need either of these conditions in order to exist. Given this framework, I will focus on the following questions: what features does secondary transgenerationality have? How can one support its existence? And why am I introducing a new relationship – the relationship of secondary transgenerationality – as one of the conditions of possibility of social reality? To answer these questions, I will try to summarize the issue as Immanuel Kant foreshadowed it. In his political writings, Kant introduced the idea that the relationship between different generations (not necessarily blood-related) does not only exist, but is also characterized by a particular structure. We shall see this in detail. In Idea for a Universal History in a Cosmopolitan Intent, Kant argues for the following theses. First thesis: “all natural predispositions of a creature are determined sometime to develop themselves completely and purposively”. Second proposition: “In the human being (as the only rational creature on earth) those predispositions whose goal is the use of his reason were to develop completely only in the species, but not in the individual”. In the first thesis, Kant emphasizes two elements in particular. First, the living creatures’ natural capacities and predispositions develop– that is, become complete – only over time. That is to say, it takes time for a human being to completely develop her rational capacities and become fully able to shape and order her energies. Furthermore, and with specific regards to human beings, all natural predispositions whose goal is the use of reason will not develop completely in the individual, but rather in the species. In this regard, Kant wants to point out that the relationships within the species are evidently organized with efficiency and completeness only over time and, particularly, over an indefinitely long period of time. Temporality is thus a central element: the passing of time, embodied in the individuals’ lives, is what allows reason to fully develop. Reason in a creature is a faculty of extending the rules and aims of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct, and it knows no boundaries to its projects. But reason itself does not operate instinctively, but rather needs attempts, practice and instruction in order gradually to progress from one stage of insight to another. Hence, every human being would have to live exceedingly long in order to learn how he is to make a complete use of all his natural

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Notoriously, the basic idea is that human nature is deeply flawed: a crooked timber that, as Kant writes in the sixth thesis, can never be straightened completely. Human beings are in fact governed by two opposing predispositions: the former leads them to gather together and the latter leads them to isolate themselves. Human beings are practically torn between the tendency to work together and the tendency to egoistically and authoritatively impose their will. Kant seems nevertheless convinced of the existence of a relationship between generations that has a constitutive function for social life. However, he also seems convinced that this relationship is positive and augmentative – that is, it increases the overall amount of both tangible and intangible goods. Basically, the idea is that however imperfect human nature may be, the relationship between generations is intrinsically positive and creates a virtuous circle in which the work of each generation will somehow benefit the following one. But it appears to have been no aim at all to nature that he should live well; but only that he should labor and work himself up so far that he might make himself worthy of well-being through his conduct of life. Yet here it remains strange that the older generations appear to carry on their toilsome concerns only for the sake of the later ones, namely so as to prepare the steps on which the latter may bring up higher the edifice which was nature’s aim, and that only the latest should have the good fortune to dwell in the building on which a long series of their ancestors (to be sure, without this being their aim) had labored, without being able to partake of the good fortune which they prepared. (In Kant’s idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan aim by Amélie OksenbergRorty, Cambridge Critical Guides, 2012, p. 12).

Prescinding from Kant’s teleological idea – which clearly reflects a cultural conditioning – of an ​​ anthropomorphic nature committed to accomplishing through the species what could never be achieved by the individual, the basic argument remains interesting: each generation seems to act so as to favour the next generations or at least, each generation seems driven by nature’s plan (obscure as it may be obscure) to reach goals that often remain unknown to humans but that, together, reveal their meaning as a whole. Each generation builds something that only the next generation will completely and fully enjoy. What is interesting here is not so much Kant’s thesis – he was being optimistic, as one could easily show that the transgenerational legacy is not necessarily positive – but rather the fact that Kant considers secondary transgenerationality an obvious fact. Kant therefore believed that, since nature follows a grand design and makes human history worthwhile, a secondary transgenerationality must exists. Otherwise, men would remain crooked timbers. For this reason, Kant’s transgenerationality – which is fundamentally augmentative – exists regardless of the individuals’ will. It is somehow part of a supra-historical dimension in which human beings are acted upon and act a little bit against their will and, in any case, beyond their awareness. Kant therefore deduces the existence of secondary transgenerationality from what he thinks is nature’s general work. Progress

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exists in human history because nature’s goals transcend the individuals and are brought about through the dynamics of secondary transgenerationality. At this point, provided that Kant’s teleological model can be legitimately questioned, one should ask oneself if the concept of secondary transgenerationality falls with it or if the existence of a secondary transgenerationality can rest on different foundations.In the following pages, I will try to show that this concept is related to some actions that constitute social life and are carried out mainly by states, which also represent their condition of possibility. These actions are those that indeed identify secondary transgenerationality.

7.3  States Typically, political philosophy answers the question “what is the state?” by subordinating the metaphysical analysis to the functional one. Essentially, the question “what is it?” is replaced with “what is it for?” Thomas Hobbes, for example, followed this strategy when he laid the basis for the philosophical reflection on the modern nation-state. Hobbes’ answer is quite simple and direct. The state’s function is to defend human beings, whoby nature want to be absolutely free and to prevail over others. Since this is their nature, one cannot expect them – unlike other animals that naturally live in a society without coercive forms of power – to be able to live socially without conflicts and fights, unless they are forced to do so (Hobbes and Shapiro 2010: chap. XVII). In short, the animals that live a social life agree naturally. Humans, on the contrary, build societies as a result of a conventional agreement derived from a common determination due, mostly, to fear: “Therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required (besides covenants) to make their Agreement constant and lasting; which is a Common Power, to keep them in awe and to direct their actions to the Common Benefit”. If this is true – that is, if anthropology shows that human nature is characterized by a conflict or, more simply, competition with others – then one has to acknowledge that human societies cannot exist without an agent that regulates them by force. Abraham Lincoln rightly noted that it is impossible to govern someone without their consent. Starting from this same concept, Hobbes bases his definition of the State on the social contract and the people’s willingness to make such an agreement. However, this concept is rather paradoxical: people must voluntarily agree to give up their right to use force to a third subject. They must therefore submit themselves voluntarily to this condition, permanently delegating their right to self-defence to one or more individuals who, presumably, will make better use of it. Such a delegation is so radical that whoever is in charge of the alienated rights must be recognized as acting on behalf of all those who gave up their right to self-defence. This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man and with every man, in such a manner, as if every man should say to every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition: that thou give up thy right to him, and

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Human beings are weak and therefore need to make agreements that allow them to avoid a permanent state of war. However, in order to do so they must agree once and for all to give up their right to self-defence. This is the pars destruens of Hobbes’ model. I will now analyse the pars construens, which is even more interesting for the purpose of this text because it defines the nature of the state. In this context, what is a state for Hobbes? “It is a real unity of them all in one and the same person”. Therefore, this is a veritable new metaphysical entity: a person, or at least something whose characteristics resemble those of a concrete person and yet is oddly made up by the totality of wills – and perhaps consciences – of those who agreed to found the State. This object reveals rather singular characteristics. Of course, to argue that the state is roughly like a person has the advantage, from Hobbes’ point of view, of emphasizing the synthesis of wills. In fact, this exact synthesis – embodied in the sovereign or in the assemblies that represent the people – is entrusted with the exercise of power. Hobbes’ model, however, has some fairly obvious weaknesses. On the one hand, it is based on the idea that the majority gives a third subject both the authority and the delegated power to defence. On the other hand, however, this subject’s features are far from trivial. What does Hobbes mean when he says that the set of wills gives birth to a new person or subject? The idea that the state is a person – that is, what in literature was defined as “organicist paradigm” and spread during the eighteenth century2  – involves the State’s strict dependence on the citizens who enable it by willingly delegating some of their rights. It is not difficult to realise what this means on a concretely ontological level. For example, let’s consider one of the many features that usually identify people, that is, the fact that each individual is marked by individuality. Typically, one is intuitively led to consider an organism as an individual, that is, as a being with precise spatial and temporal characteristics. In biology, some extensive and controversial researches have explored the concept of biological individual (Wilson 1999). However, it is debatable whether a determination of this type can also be attributed to the State in a non-metaphorical sense. If, for example, it is intuitively true that a biological organism can generally bear a limited number of changes on its body parts, one’s intuitions are different in the case of the state. Locke (Locke and Phemister 2008: ch. XXVII) thought that memory was a good element of continuity to determine an individual’s identity through time. Where there is continuity of memory, there is also identity, that is, there is an organism and, in some cases, an individual. On the other hand, to transfer an individual’s soul – devoid of any memory and psychological trait – to another individual’s body would not make the latter identical to the former. This means that, without consciousness and memory, the identity of the thinking matter is not enough to make a person’s identity. In the case of the state, there seem

 For a discussion on this, cf. (Mannheim 1953, pp. 165–182.)

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to be a wider tolerance toward the changes of its parts. Also, it is much more difficult to say what parts the state is made up of. For example, it is quite clear that the individual, as such, is not the necessary condition for the existence of the state: individuals are born and die. This means that they enter and leave the state community without modifying the identity of the state. Furthermore, this also means that the citizens who founded the State cannot be considered a necessary condition for its existence, as it persists in time long after their death. The state is indeed an entity that persists over time, that is, it lasts for a considerable period of time also because some of its elements are replaced. On closer inspection, the relative ease with which the individuals start and stop being part of a social and political community is what actually creates the states. The relatively easy adhesion and distancing from a social and political community, combined with the fact that people perform actions that last considerably (as regards both the duration of the action and the consequences implemented by them), presuppose a subject guaranteeing the consequences that this metaphysical structure entails. The state, therefore, exists; it is not a mere concept and it is not only  – as the theoretical hypothesis posits – a guardian of people’s security, but also a guarantor of the individuals’ actions (I will dwell more on this later). In other words, a significant and important part of social actions would not be possible or normatively justifiable without the state.

7.3.1  Ontology of the State From an ontological perspective, I think it is theoretically appropriate to reject the hypothesis that the State is a fictional entity, a mere concept, and to opt for a Hegelian realism. However, compared to Hegel’s model (1991: § 269), which creates an analogy between the biological organism and the state, I propose to consider the State as an object that depends on and emerges from the subjects’ wills – which, as we have seen, vary constantly. In other words, the state is not a conventional term, as some theorists have proposed,3 but an entity that exists and persists in time, while its existence in space could even be optional. In these terms, the state is an entity that can be included in our ontologies with full rights. In order to exist in time, States must fit a precise ontological structure that basically implies two conditions. (1) First, the individuals’ will, characterized by intentionality; this will has led to the creation of the state-object at a certain time (the state would not exist without a clear expression of some individuals’ will; it is therefore a necessary condition for its coming into being). (2) Secondly, it implies “something” that redefines and preserves the structure of the will that led to the formation of the state. Since the components of this will keep changing, it is clear that both its constitution and its expression must be constantly redefined over time

 For a deeper analysis, cf. (Abrams 1988).

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as well. Therefore, the will implies what I define a “vehicle of the institutional structure”  – that is, one or more relationships that, whenever the individuals’ wills change, guarantee to verify that both the general will and the mechanisms allowing the will to express itself are still valid. Between these two conditions, the latter concerns how the state persists over time (de facto and de iure). Therefore, I will develop my analysis on two levels concerning the state’s need to preserve itself over time. The former concerns factual arguments (how can the State concretely preserve itself over time?). The latter is a matter of law (what rights allow it to preserve itself over time?). 7.3.1.1  How States Can Preserve Themselves over Time: Matters of Fact Edward Robinson (2014) rightly observed that in order to understand how an object so peculiar as the state manages to preserve itself over time, one must first observe its document structure.4 Robinson’s thesis is widely based on the theory of documentality and defines the states as objects that are “almost abstract” – that is, they have a temporal, rather than spatial, connotation and their sovereignty is established, maintained and managed by different kinds of documents (Robinson 2014: 461 et seq.). It is therefore a document – theoretically, a constitution – that brings a State into being: that document is both the origin of the State and one of the tools, perhaps the main one, that preserve it over time. Certain documents, for example, are the archives of the wills that brought a State into being, contain some elements of validation (other elements are likely to be provided by the context and the information offered by history), and entail the occurrence of some facts – some of these facts are regulatory and institutional, others simply involve the formation and preservation of collective memory. From this, one can also infer that states cannot be reduced to documents neither from the point of view of the constitutive elements (documents exist because they must convey contents that do not necessarily derive from other documents), nor, as we shall see, from the point of view of the actions they perform. In some circumstances, therefore, both normative and non-descriptive documents produce actions. Some of these actions – and this is the most interesting theoretical point – are only possible because the states exist. In his metaphysical analysis, Robinson quite rightly points out the importance of temporality. Unlike most political philosophers, he considers time much more important than space.5 As we have seen, time and action are directly connected: states perform enduring and persisting actions either directly or through elements that make their agency possible (documents, people, institutions). Some of these actions have a particular structure. I have identified them as actions of secondary transgenerationality. Let’s now look at their characteristics.

 The philosophers theoretically grounded documentality are (Ferraris 2013) and (Smith 2012).  Cf., for example, (Schmitt et al. 2015) e (Schmitt 2007)

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7.3.1.2  How States Can Preserve Themselves Over Time: Matters of Law States thus exists because of a normative bureaucracy in which people also play a role. Now that I have explained how the state can exist, I shall address the second question: why does it exist? The answer is that the state has to exist because it is the only entity that can perform certain kinds of actions that otherwise would be neither possible nor justifiable: transgenerational actions. Therefore, it is important to firstly outline a taxonomy of collective actions and, secondly, to identify the features of the transgenerational actions performed by States. Collective Actions: A Taxonomy Clearly, not all actions are individual – that is, concerning a single person. In fact, there is another type of actions, performed by two or more people. The most frequent hypothesis is that they have a different structure compared to individual actions and are typical of social reality. Thus, when creating a taxonomy of actions, it is necessary to distinguish individual actions from collective actions. At the metaphysical level, instead, it is useful to focus on the features of a collective action. The precondition for a collective action is, quite naturally, the fact that two or more people somehow act together, which roughly means that they share something – the purpose of the action. This can be shared in two different ways: 1. in one case, two or more subjects can share the same goal in a way that is, so to speak, accidental (when, hypothetically speaking, a fire breaks out in a movie theatre and the people inside all act pretty much the same way, with the implicitly shared purpose to escape); 2. or, and this is a different case, they can explicitly share the same goal: a fire breaks out and a team of fire-fighters acts so as to maximize their efforts and extinguish it. The latter case, for the purposes of this essay, is the most interesting and better identifies collective action. Let’s start with this case then. The basic question is: how can two or more people act so as to accomplish the most appropriate set of actions to achieve their goal (to extinguish the fire)? The social ontologies that have tried to answer these questions have mainly resorted to the notion of “collective intentionality”. This allows one, at least according to the theorists who support it,6 to suppose a sort of marked predisposition toward collective action. Searle’s version is probably the most challenging, as the American philosopher understands collective intentionality as a primitive that, as such, is prior to the human beings’ disposition to perform individual actions. To be clear, the disposition to act collectively would not only be innate, but also prior (Searle 1995: 23 ff.) to the disposition to act individually. This means that, according to Searle, people are not only disposed to act collectively but they even share intentional states such as beliefs, desires and intentions.

6  Cf. in particular, (Searle 1995, 2010) For a weaker version of collective intentionality, which I will refer to repeatedly throughout the article, (Tuomela 2002)

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Collective intentions must therefore be added to individual intentions. According to Searle, a good example is that of those actions in which a person is doing something as part of an action that has wider boundaries: think of the players of a football team. Everyone performs their action, which certainly has a specific meaning (the goalkeeper defends his goal), but whose full meaning is entirely given only in connection with the totality of the actions that make up the game from beginning to end. The important fact in Searle’s thesis is that collective intentionality can neither be reduced to individual intentionality nor be simply described as individual intentionality with some additional properties. Rather – this is Searle’s thesis – it is an entirely different thing. I will define this the strong variant of the theory of collective intentionality. On the contrary, the Finnish philosopher Raimo Tuomela (2002: 19) supports a weak variant. According to Tuomela, human beings obviously act by including other human beings in their plans of action. This means that they somehow take them and their responses into account. Tuomela’s position is more complex and therefore better captures some facts of reality. It distinguishes between three different notions of collective intentionality that have a specific relationship with their goals: 1 . Objectives shared accidentally; 2. Objectives shared intentionally; 3. The objective of a collective. The first one is obviously the weakest. This is the case, for example, of people at the movie theater when a fire breaks out. Everyone will predictably try to reach the exit as fast as possible. Therefore, everyone shares a goal in that precise moment. However, they do not share it by choice, but rather as a result of a series of things that determine their behaviour. In addition to sharing a specific goal (to do whatever it takes to exit as fast as possible), the people involved in the fire situation are also aware that to escape is, indeed, a shared goal. That is, they know that everyone who is in that situation – unless they have individual and specific reasons – will be willing to quickly run away; they know that others will do the same and thus organize their choices accordingly. The second option is more challenging. It implies that those who share a certain goal do so intentionally, but it also means that they have not shared a plan to achieve the common objective. It is as if, once the objective is shared, the subjects had not shared a plan to achieve it. The idea is that the goal is shared, but the actions and plans of action designed to achieve such a goal are not shared because people could not or did not want to. In this situation, the commitment toward the common goal is, clearly, quite weak. There is only the subjects’ intention, expressed or suspected, but there is no commitment as to how to realize this intention. This creates a significant degree of uncertainty regarding the possibility to realistically achieve the common goal. I think it is reasonable to ask whether this kind of intentional collective action involves any degree of commitment, as Tuomela suggested (2002: 20). Indeed, a commitment concerning the intentions already implies collective intentionality. And

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this is true even if no action is performed in order to finalize the goal. I will return to this later. Lastly, Tuomela’s third form of collective action concerns those actions that do not only imply the identification of a shared objective, but also the identification of the actions necessary to achieve it. In this specific type of action, people work closely together in order to achieve the goal that they jointly established. This type of collective action can obviously be structured in many different ways. For example, the goal can be shared by few or many people, by people who are only gathered because of the objective or, vice versa, by people who share other and more important goals, and so on. These actions are clear and distinctive because they imply both the subjects’ voluntary stance and the embodiment of this stance in a number of specific actions. The theoretical precondition that allows Tuomela to speak in all three cases of basic taxonomy of collective actions, as I have already mentioned, is the idea that: (a) people do not only have beliefs; but (b) usually tend to share them and choose the most advantageous option. If I am in the midst of a fire and decide to exit as fast as I can, I expect whoever is in the same situation: (i) to have beliefs about the fire and how to save herself; (ii) to plan actions and solutions similar to mine and, lastly, (iii) to choose to implement these solutions. Now, in this example, some obvious external reasons suggest that, indeed, things could go this way and that all subjects would potentially act predictably, at least when choosing the objective (to save themselves). As we know, living beings base their choices on the survival instinct, that is, a primary biological instinct. These choices are therefore usually easy to predict. This presupposition is confirmed by reality as long as there are practical or normative constraints external to the subject that are quite strong and difficult to overcome. When this does not happen and the situation is like 1 or 2, it is not infrequent that the shared objectives remain unfulfilled, causing one to even doubt the fact that this was a collective action based on a collective intention. In other words, the interesting cases to test the idea of a collective or plural intentionality are those where the outside world does not “force” the subjects to cooperate by applying constraints of some kind  – be they biological, normative or cultural. Obviously, these cases exist and have been studied. The biologist Garrett Hardin (1968) proposed one of the most interesting ones. • Collective Actions and Commons In seventeenth century England, “open” fields – i.e. fields available to public and shared management – were widespread. Peasants, who lived on the edge of the poverty line, had at least the opportunity to work the land, thus gaining sustenance for themselves and their families. Overall, the situation was far from prosperous, because the overall wealth was very little. Survival was probably guaranteed, but there was not much else to hope for. Between 1700 and 1810, the British Parliament emanated a series of ‘enclosure acts’ that forced to enclose open fields and common lands. This generated two main consequences: it determined a concentration of land in the hands of the richest owners, namely those who could afford to bear the costs

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of the enclosures, and an increase in productivity. Interpretations of this dramatic change have often been contrasting: on the one hand, those in favor of enclosures claimed that this was the only way to increase the overall productivity of the state and, therefore, to increase the wealth of the country. Conversely, detractors have argued that enclosures marked the beginning of the institution of private property and liberal policies. In The Tragedy of The Commons Hardin engages with an issue that touches only briefly on commons, and that is rather related to the problem of overpopulation of the planet. Is there a way, a technical solution – Hardin wonders – so that overpopulation will not lead to the collapse of the earth? The answer is “no”, in the sense that any solution we might imagine will be nothing more than a temporary solution. Producing more food will result in an increase in population that will in turn oblige us to produce more food, in an unstoppable crescendo. To support his thesis, Hardin uses a number of targeted examples, all of which have an underlying leitmotif: it is utopian to hope that common property will be managed, by those who use them, with the same caution with which they would manage their own private property. But what are commons and how do they work? Hardin does not provide a definition, but he explains it through many examples, extensively analyzing “small” commons. Consider, for example, an unfenced field, or a stretch of sea where fishing is free. Experience shows that the field or stretch of sea will be exploited until total depletion, which is dangerously irreversible. This is precisely what Hardin, with an effective formula, christens ‘the tragedy of the commons’: it occurs when individuals, who act in independent and rational ways, squander a shared resource, despite knowing that such behavior will go against their own interest. The reason for this is simple: the fear felt by those who make this kind of seemingly counter-intuitive choice, is that by doing otherwise they may suffer a double loss. If they acted differently, they might gain less than all the others, who are likely to use the field recklessly. In such situations, therefore, people do not seem to be able to coordinate in order to achieve a collective goal and benefit. Now, whether they are unable to find the salient and rational option or whether, despite having identified it, they decide to act regardless of it, what matters is the result (Hardin 1968: 1246–1247): the pastures are depleted, the seas plundered of their fish, and the same fate awaits water and oil resources. The moral of the story is very clear: while the individuals are really inadequate to act in a cooperative way to preserve the richness of a common, the only hope to this aim is that an entity including all parts involved in the actions concerning the commons, without reducing to them, may be the actor having the power of taking the necessary decisions for a proper management of the common. That described by Hardin is a typical case of a transgenerational action. We have individuals, who act in an independent and rational way, exploiting a shared resource. In the framework proposed by Tuomela, these individuals are supposed to share an intention (namely, a we-intention), which allows all people who share a certain situation to take the right decisions in order to exploit the common at best. Exactly as in the fire example, the people involved in the exploitation of – say – a portion of the sea, are sharing the situation (all of them have access to the ­exploitation

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of the resource), the objectives (to fish as much as is necessary to have a good life), and the technical instruments to do so. Nevertheless, even though all the conditions listed by Tuomela seem to be present in our imaginary case, very often people are not collaborative and cooperative – at least, this is often the case in the real life. This means that, even though the goals and the intentionality are often collective, the actions in most of the cases remain largely based on individual choices. My view is that the commons testify the main weakness of the hypothesis of a collective intention driving collective actions: there is no reason why rational objectives and shared intentions should necessarily entail that people engage in common and cooperative actions. Rather, the opposite is true. Common actions are just a possible choice between many others. It is now the time to add a third example. In the example we are imagining, people involved in actions have achieved a good level of cooperation, after sharing common activities. The third example is a classical one. People playing something – say, a game or a piece of music – are sharing an objective (indeed, to play a game or a piece of music) and are doing the proper actions in order to achieve those objectives (to win the match or to play a beautiful sonata). What are the differences between these three cases? Or, to put it in other words, why is it that in one case people are supposed to act jointly, while in the other case (that of the commons), they are supposed to act individually? Let us pay attention to the differences. • The differences are in the details. It is now the time to ask ourselves why, even ifthe three cases are so similar, they actually differ. To this aim, I would suggest two steps. Firstly, I would add another case, very similar to the third example: another case of exploitation of a common. Secondly, I would propose a comparison, trying to clarify the reasons why most examples show cases in which the collective intention fails to obtain its objectives. I will call this last case the good management of the commons. In Norway, as is well known, oil is one of the most important national resources. The “Government Petroleum Fund” is a sovereign fund set up by the Norwegian government in 1990. The purpose of the fund was to invest part of the profit coming from the extraction of oil. In 2006 it changed its name and status, becoming the “Government Pension Fund Global.” It consists of a deposit in Norwegian kroner run by the Bank of Norway on behalf of the Ministry of Finance, with the aim of ensuring that “a reasonable portion of the country’s petroleum wealth benefits future generations.”7 The reasoning behind this operation is very simple: the fund aims to be a sort of piggy bank in which to set aside the surplus proceeds from the sale of oil. The bank, in the intention of the legislature, maintains and produces new financial resources that the state is committed to providing for future generations. Oil, unlike pastures or fishing resources, is bound to run out. For this reason the state has decided to

7  In Ethical Guidelines for the Government Pension Fund-Global, 22 December 2005, on www. regjeringen.no.

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make part of the wealth produced by the exploitation of that common good renewable, and thus accessible to future generations that will no longer have oil. This is an exemplary case that seems to confirm Hardin’s thesis: the public institution not only regulates the management of the common good, but it also finely programs a way to reconstitute its value, although in a different form. We are now facing a very simple question: why is it that Hardin’s example ends up in disaster while Norway’s case is, in a way, a wonderful paradox? The case of people facing a fire seems to show that, in a very particular way, people are able to act establishing a kind of cooperation. This seems also true in the case of people playing a game. So the point is: why do people seem able to act together when playing a game or escaping a fire, but apparently fail to exploit a common resource? My view is that in all the positive cases the context is rather peculiar: first of all, there is a very strong constraint, external to the will of the subjects (think of the fire and Norway’s government). Moreover, in both good cases, there isa power (natural or normative) that is external to the subjects and makes the difference. This means that collective intentionality, supposing it really exists, in most cases has no real influence on the choices of the subjects acting in a certain way. Subjects surely have both the disposition and the ability to be cooperative, when needed. However, the point is that this disposition is contrary and equivalent to the disposition to act individually. It is a matter of choice (and often of advantage) to choose to be individualists or not. At the end of the day, in fact, the only way to win a football match is to think of oneself as a part of a team, which means thinking of a strategy involving all players, rather than acting as a single player. The role of the others – as co-players and as opponents – is impossible to bypass especially if one aims to win the game. The question at this point is the following: are we sure that, in the case described by Hardin, people are sharing a collective intention which is concretized in a collective aim? If this is the case, what is the aim that is shared? It is impossible to affirm that it is the will to exploit the common natural resourcesin a sustainable way. However, this is precisely a case in which cooperation is needed in order to find a good balance between private and public interest. But people, at least in most circumstances, do not have the intention of exploiting the commons for public advantage. The case of the Norway’s oil shows a different end precisely because the public good is managed not by individuals but by an institution, Norway’s government and, in the long run, the State. Those institutions may choose public over private advantage, considering the fact that their decisions as well as their acts will be judged in the light of the chain of consequences they have over time. At this point of the argument one may conclude as follows: it is a matter of fact that people have the disposition to act and think together, but it is another matter of fact that people, generally speaking, have the disposition to get a certain advantage from the situation in which they find themselves. This means that, in most cases, they simply do not intend to be involved in cooperative actions. This is why normativity, declined in different forms, is not a choice, but the real precondition of every large social community that aims to live together for a long time.

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• A final remark about the State Concerned by the fate of future generations in the face of the vital challenges of the next millennium, conscious that […] the very existence of human kind and his environment are threatened, […] Determined to […] hand on a better world to future generations […] whose fate depends to a great extent on decisions and actions taken today […] Convinced that there is a moral obligation [whose fate ] depends to a great extent on decision and actors taken today […] Convinced that there is a moral obligation to formulate behavioural guidelines for the present generations [so that] … the needs and interests of […] future generations are fully safeguarded […] Each generation inheriting the Earth temporarily should [have the responsibility to bequeath it to future generations], take care to use natural resources reasonably and ensure that life is not prejudiced by harmful modifications of the ecosystems […] and should preserve […] the quality and integrity of the environment.

This is a Declaration on the Responsibility of the Present Generation towards Future Generations adopted by UNESCO in 1997. This declaration is particularly important because it shows very well how institutions address the problem of the relationship between generations. At this stage I would like to make some final remarks on the rule and function of the State as regards transgenerational actions. My view is that every complex society, whose members aim at living together for a long time, must reflection on this point. The case discussed by Hardin shows how the kind of actions requiring cooperation between people involved may not be guided exclusively by the intentions of the people involved. This is why there is no guarantee that people asked to act will decide for the best option, that is, for public utility. A provisional analysis of transgenerational actions includes at least two main types: 1. Those actions that cannot be completely accomplished by people who chose them, but require other people, belonging to different generations, to be completed; 2. Those actions implying a regular and substantial diminution or alteration of a common, that is, of a good whose propriety rests upon a society for a long period of time.8 The actions of type 1 and 2 exhibit similar properties. They both have a long duration over the time, and both involve a number of different agents performing the action or a part of it, at some point in time. These two types of actions imply transgenerationality in two different ways. Type 1 requires transgenerationality because these actions imply the trust that people who never decided for them will carry them out them anyway, assuming that the decision is the right one. This trust is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the existence of these actions. It is interesting to note that this trust is based upon a prevision; namely, the prevision of a certain behaviour on the part of people that do not yet exist. If the prevision does not have a good possibility to be realized, the actions depending on that prevision would never possible, or would never have a 8  Commons were firstly conceived as a tertium genius between public and private property. It is very interesting to look at the definition of commons proposed by the an Italian commission, the Rodotà Commission, which received in 2008 the task of reshaping the discipline of the public goods as stated by the Italian Civil Code, which dated back to 1942. The definition is the following: “Commons produce utility that is functional to the exercise of fundamental rights and the free development of individuals. Therefore, the law must guarantee in all cases that they are enjoyed collectively, directly and by all, including future generations”.

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positive conclusion. As for the second type of actions (2), that requiring a regular and substantial exploitation of the commons, transgenerationality is not a necessary condition for the accomplishment of the action, but it is a criterion of the normativity accompanying these actions. The case made by Hardin paradigmatically describes this group of actions. To sum up: while in the first case (1) transgenerationality is a “condition” for the action, in the second case (2), transgenerationality must be considered as the reference for the normativity accompanying some actions, as has been gradually recognised by the laws and constitutions of many states. In Germany, for example, with the revision of the Federal Court in 1994, it was added that “the state, also in its responsibility for future generations, protects natural resources” (article, 20 a).9 One can also note that, in the first case, transgenerationality goes together with the trust of people in the fact that transgenerationality itself will be effective over the time. This point makes a great difference, which is very remarkable in the perspective of metaphysics as well as in that of practical consequences. As for the metaphysical implications, one should consider the subjects of transgenerational actions. What is a generation? How can it be past, present and future? Who belongs to a given generation? Each of these questions constitutes a compelling metaphysical problem, which is ever more compelling in the perspective of law. In the juridical framework, in fact, only where there is a subject is there a right. But what kind of subject is a generation? Namely, if it is possible to define in some way what a generation is and how it is composed, it is very clear that the adjective “future” makes things quite complicated. How it is possible that a non-existing object can be the subject of something, for example, of rights?10 My take is that it is the action itself, that is, this particular type of action that brings into life a new subject: the future generation. This is also a new type of entity, whose nature needs to be investigated. In a few words, the subject – that is, the “future generation” – is something constructed by people and institutions referring to it through their practices. The most evident implication is that concerning the institutions’ ability to not preserve transgenerationality as well as the set of rights connected to it. Most of the present forms of protection of transgenerationality are based on the idea that the attention for the future generation is a form of  – we may say  – over-generosity toward still non-existing people. This is the reason why most of the references to transgenerationality produce negative definitions. In fact, these definitions focus on needs rather than aspirations, projects and wishes. They essentiallylimit themselves to the notion that one should avoid dangerous excess that would significantly affect the actions of future generations. However, quite evidently, this is just a half of the story. The other half concerns the fact that, in our very complex societies, the present generations imply the fact that the future generations will carry on some of its

 For an overview of the international laws regarding this matter cf. (Bailey et al. 2013).  A preliminary reflection on this can be found in M. Spanò, Who is the subject for future generations? An essay in genealogy, (Bailey et al. 2013, 45–59.).

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actions; this means that for some of our actions we take the will of future generations for granted. As far as I can see, the conclusion follows necessarily: if we assume that transgenerationality is a necessary condition to define some of the actions performed by individuals, institutions and states, then we have to conclude that states, and institutions in general, must be necessarily guarantee that the consequences of transgenerationality (at least the foreseeable ones) must be carefully considered along with the rights of future generations.

References Abrams, P. (1988). Notes on the difficulty of studying the state (1977). Journal of Historical Sociology, 1(1), 58–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.1988.tb00004.x. Bailey, S., Farrell, G., & Mattei, U. (Eds.). (2013). Protecting future generations trought commons (Trends in social coesion) (Vol. 26). Paris: Council of Europe. Danto, A. C. (1965). Basic actions. American Philosophical Quarterly, 2(2), 141–148. Danto, A. C. (1973). Analytical philosophy of action. Cambridge: University Press. Ferraris, M. (2013). Documentality: Why it is necessary to leave traces. New  York: Fordham University Press. Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. Hegel, G.  W. F., Wood, A.  W., & Nisbet, H.  B. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, T., & Shapiro, I. (2010). Leviathan, or, the matter, forme, & power of a common-wealth ecclesiasticall and civill. New Haven: Yale University press. Locke, J., & Phemister, P. (2008). An essay concerning human understanding. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Mannheim, K. (1953). Essays on sociology and social psychology. London: Routledge & Paul. Moya, C. J. (1990). The philosophy of action: An introduction. Oxford: Polity Press. Robinson, E. H. (2014). A documentary theory of states and their existence as quasi-abstract entities. Geopolitics, 19(3), 461–489. Schmitt, C. (2007). The concept of the political. Expanded edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C., Russell, A. B., & Garrett Zeitlin, S. (2015). Land and sea: A world-historical meditation. Candor: Telos Press Publishing. Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press. Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the social world: The structure of human civilization. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, B. (2012). How to do things with documents. Rivista di Estetica, 52(2), 179–198. Tuomela, R. (2002). The philosophy of social practices: A collective acceptance view. Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, J. (1999). Biological individuality. The identity and persistence of living entities, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 8

From Capital to Documediality Maurizio Ferraris

Abstract  In this paper, I try to highlight what I call the “documedia revolution” i.e. the outcome of the changes we are witnessing in our times. Documediality indicates the allegiance between the constitutive power of documents and the mobilizing power of media (and new media, in particular). I propose to outline this great transformation, showing how we moved from capital to documediality, passing through mediality. These are three fundamental phases we passed through as human kind, with different features and manifestations. I aim at showing that our times commodities are documents and that labour we do is a kind of mobilization. This kind of changes ask for a different point of view able to focus on recognition (instead of sustenance), self-affirmation (instead of alienation), and atomization (instead of classification). Keywords  Documents · Web · Capital Analysing the social reality of his time, Karl Marx liked to use the example of the production and sale of fabric; unfortunately, we still use his categories now that the fabric is that of the Internet. In other words, we still have not understood what is, indeed, a veritable revolution – the third, after the industrial one and the media one – which I call “documedia revolution”. Documediality indicates the allegiance between the constitutive power of documents i.e. documentality (Ferraris 2012), and the mobilizing power of media. I propose to outline these three great transformations as follows (Table 8.1). Capitalism in the strict sense corresponds to the economic era of production, and to the political era of liberalism. Here recording (capital, as we will see) surrounded the process, being at its beginning, as a premise, and at the end, as the profit obtained through the production of goods. Populism, where communication has the upper hand over production, corresponds instead to the phase of mediality, where memory was short and ephemeral like the words at the radio before streaming became

M. Ferraris (*) University of Turin, Turin, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_8

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108 Table 8.1  The three great transformations

M. Ferraris Liberalism Populism Post-truthism

Capital (production) Mediality (communication) Documediality (recording)

available: in short, it was the system of the 15 min of fame. Finally, documediality ­corresponds to a third phase, characterised by recording: that is, by the use of a huge apparatus, namely the Web, which has the essential feature of keeping track of any interaction. Each category subsumes the previous ones at a more general level: communication sheds light on the mysteries of commodities (the fact that they constitute the solidification of social relationships and are essentially social objects); recording, in turn, manifests in its structure and functioning the formula “Object = Recorded Act”, which is the constitutive law of social acts. The social object (commodity, news, fake news, symbolic poem, title, etc.) is the result of a social act (involving at least two people: a worker and an employer, a buyer and a seller, an author and a reader, and so on) characterised by the fact of being recorded on some medium, including the mind of the two social actors. Let’s briefly examine the three categories, before analysing them in depth. Production  Marx, the heir of a Faustian (and Fichtean) age that has little in common with ours, was fascinated by a fundamental force: work as a process that takes place between human being and nature. The centrality of production corresponds to the Homo faber and the Homo oeconomicus, determining a selective representation of the social world in which there is no space for phenomena (now highlighted by documediality) like unproductive waste. The latter is not an exotic or futuristic idea, described by excentric sociologists or anthropologists, but the current social praxis: is there any greater waste than the careless words daily thrown around on the Web? In this sense, the law of commodity exchange would only be a variation of the constitutive law of social objects in which a society made up of at least two people produces objects which may (but not necessarily have to) be commodities and may (but not necessarily have to) produce profit for the one and sustenance for the other. The only irreplaceable features of this law are the fact that the act must take place between at least two people (or between a person and a delegated machine, such as when purchasing a ticket online) and that it must be recorded, for the object to acquire ontological consistency. Communication  If the predominant activity of manufacturing was the production of artifacts, the predominant activity of mediality was communication; production survived, but in a subordinate form. The new phase did not eliminate the previous ones, but made them less important: a TV channel can produce shows, but is still a TV channel even if it merely broadcasts content produced elsewhere. In the communication phase, work was no longer a source of coordination and formation of behaviours and classes. This change occurred in the West roughly in the 1930s (in the sense of a prevalent character: if the First World War was a war of materials, the second, in which more material was used, was mainly a war of ideology and communication). This turn was understood, albeit with some delay, in the second half of

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the twentieth century, and the new situation was often interpreted with categories borrowed from the previous phase, conceiving it as a superstructure with respect to a production mechanism. This gave rise to two diverging interpretations. The first, classically Marxist, saw the structure as reality and the superstructure as appearance; the second, postmodern, considered the appearance as the authentic (social and, in some cases, natural) reality. In both interpretations, however, the fundamental trait of communication, namely unidirectionality, was understood correctly: the message, generally centralized, went from the holder of the means of production or communication to the worker (who alienated his or her workforce) or to the consumer (who alienated his or her free time). Recording  This situation changed with the documedia revolution: reception and transmission are now identified with social media, and do not generate artifacts in relation to nature, nor communicate messages that leave no trace, but produce documents, that is, social objects, bringing to light the structures that were implicit in the previous phases. In the third book of Capital, moving on from the analysis of work, Marx had already focused on the examination of credit and accounting mechanisms, proposing a theory of document capital: commercial capital and trade precede the capitalist mode of production, and money is a sui generis commodity (in fact, through the lenses of the documedia revolution, money and commodities are both documents). However, Marx saw money as a supplement to nature: it is based on international trade, just as the exchange value overlaps with an original and natural use value. In the documedia perspective, however, it is the supplement (document, money, recording) that constitutes the foundation of society, with a process coextensive with the birth of writing, religion, and society. If, in agreement with Marx, the use value of borrowed money is its ability to act as capital, then capital is revealed as recording, and documentality appears to be previous both to commercial exchange and to industrial production.

8.1  Documents, Not Commodities This documentality becomes easier to read over time. The analysis of capital offered less than twenty years ago by economist Hernando De Soto (2000) suggests that the necessary condition for its constitution is the presence of documents, which set values and make it possible to transfer assets that are otherwise related to their here-­ and-­now (in plain words, without documents, it is impossible to prove the ownership of a house, and therefore to sell it or mortgage it by turning it into capital). So, if according to the Marxist view the public debt is what gives money the ability to “procreate” (or to become “Faustian”, as Oswald Spengler would say), by laying the foundations for the development of capital, this is because both debt and money (and capital) are subordinate variables of documentality. Piketty’s work on the prevalence of capital performance over economic growth (Piketty 2014), along with his equivalence between capital and wealth, confirms the priority of documentality over

110 Table 8.2  The three phases and their objects

M. Ferraris Manufacture (production) Commodity Mediality (communication) Spectacle Documediality (recording) Social object

work. And it could be added that social interaction is not reduced to accounting books and asset registries, but includes the Code Napoléon, the Bible, the Koran, and the Library of Babel called the Web (Max Weber had already seen Protestantism as the origin of capitalism but had failed to consider that the origin of that religion was precisely the privatization of consciousness generated by the spread of the printed Bible). The mysterious nature of the commodity as something sensibly suprasensible is thus revealed in the succession that from the goods and its phantasmagoria leads to spectacle, and hence – with a generalization that manifests its conceptual essence – to social objects (Table 8.2). Commodity  In the great narrative of factories and exploitation unfolding in the first book of Capital, industrial capital is presented by Marx in the terms in which Sigmund Freud addresses adult sexuality: namely as the foundation against which any other sexuality is either anticipation or degeneration. So much so that – although Marx acknowledges that commercial capital and interest-bearing capital come before industrial capital – the standard should be sought in the latter and not in the former. As we have seen, only in the third book does Marx acknowledge that there is a function superordinate to land ownership and to commercial or usurer’s capital: the document and the recording of which the document is a manifestation. There is no commodity before recording, because the commodity results from an exchange, and the exchange presupposes debts and credits, and therefore recordings (at least in the minds of the actors of the transaction). Spectacle  In manufacture people act, in front of the television they stare and – as we will see – in front of the computer screen they act again, in a way that completes and perfects both the manufacturing phase (activity) and the media phase (relationship with the world mediated by technical interfaces). In this sense, interpreting spectacle as alienation, as many readings of the media society have done, seems to be simply (and unreasonably) nostalgic of the world of production. Seeing television as a form of brutalization means forgetting the descriptions of the illiteracy and degradation of the English working class that can be found in Capital. Conversely, it is worth remembering that the spectacle as a social object reveals the mysterious nature of the commodity, defining itself – writes Guy Debord by curiously focusing on the image, almost as if music or literature were not a spectacle – as a “social relationship between people mediated by images” (Debord 1994: § 4). Social Object  So each category subsumes the previous to a more general level, and we have seen how this works with commodities. From the documedia viewpoint, the latter (and, even more obviously, spectacles) are indeed (to borrow Marx’s famous words) “sensibly suprasensible things,” that is, social things. The ­relationship

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between things is but the social relationship between people, and things manifest themselves as documents. Now, the metamorphosis of the commodity described by Marx is the passage from a natural object (use value) to a social object (exchange value), which he interprets essentially as “X counts as Y in C” – a formula made familiar by contemporary social ontologies (Searle 1995), where a physical object X, for example a piece of paper, counts as a social object Y, for example a banknote, in a given context). Instead, it should be interpreted more accurately as “Object = Recorded Act”: a formula that explains why the growth of recording, caused by documediality, has generated a social revolution like the one we are witnessing.

8.2  Mobilization, Not Labour Consider the ruthless mobilization of humanity described with much pathos in the nineteenth century; or the hours of idleness and passivity of the media age, as well as the numbening of consciences (at least so it has been called, with an inappropriate and moralistic analysis) in front of the television screen described – with equal albeit less motivated pathos  – ever since the 1950s. All these things have been replaced by a singular phenomenon in the age of documediality: a mobilization that is even more extreme than that dreamed of by nineteenth century capitalists. Night shifts and child labour are now the norm, not an exception, and there is no legal or humanitarian procedure trying to change this. And yet this mobilization does not entail a financial compensation for the voluntary mobilized, who pay themselves for the means of production in a process where self-valorization coincides with self-­ exploitation (if such a thing is even possible) (Table 8.3). Labour  The free worker for Marx was the indispensable tool for transforming money into capital. This however contradicts what he claimed about the document-­ like nature of the latter – by which recording is enough to generate money, the loan and eventually capital – and did not allow him to conceive of a non-working society. But that is exactly what we are witnessing today, for better or worse. Labour, of course, is still there, just like exploitation, but it is now a secondary phenomenon compared to a situation that would have been inconceivable in Marx’s age: the difference between work time and life time, between alienation and reproduction of workforce, is now unrecognizable. On the one hand, there seems to be a total mobilization by which the worker’s life is wholly alienated, with a colonization that appears to have realized – albeit softly – the dream of a 24/7 work time (it is virtually possible to receive a work e-mail at any moment of the day or night). On the other hand, though, in a visibly contradictory way, there seems to be no trace of Table 8.3  The three phases and their kind of work

Manufacture (production) Labour Mediality (communication) Consumerism Documediality (recording) Mobilization

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alienation, because the variety of tasks and the lack of a rigid schedule turns the worker (a name we still use for lack of better alternatives) into the full  – albeit ironic – realization of labour in the communist society. The same person that might be called to answer to an e-mail in the middle of the night might write a Wikipedia page or – which is more likely – update her status on a social network during the day. This can only be compared to the finally liberated world described in The German Ideology: one where (mutatis mutandis) today you update your status and tomorrow answer an email, travel low cost in the morning and write a critical essay in the afternoon, while in the evening you post the picture of the hamburger you are eating. And yet one shouldn’t forget that, after referring to this multitasking life as the perfection of man, Marx disapproved of the fact that the steam machine was invented by a watchmaker, the car frame by a barber and the steamboat by a goldsmith! Had he known that Alexander Bell wanted to create a radio and invented the phone, whereas Guglielmo Marconi wanted to improve the phone and invented the radio, he would have been outraged. Now, Marx was mistaken in many of his predictions: he predicted the advent of the dictatorship of the proletariat, said that work would eventually destroy humankind, and posited that exploitation would have reduced humans to dwarves. But his most erroneous prediction, in my opinion, was indeed the desirability of a multitasking life (which, incidentally, Marx conceives of as exclusively for males, as female multitasking already existed – but for him, it seems, involved no intellectual activity). Consumerism  Before the documedia worker there was the consumer, a figure typical of the media age. This period, located between that of the capital and that of documediality, is one where commodities are seen not from the standpoint of production but from that of consumption. Communication is largely destined to a function that in the manufacture age was very marginal: namely the promotion of consumption, or shopping tips. As soon as this evolution became apparent (and workers had access to the goods), people engaged in a criticism of consumption equal or superior, by force and indignation, to the much more motivated criticism of exploitation that had preceded it. If we reflect on the role of social objects and artifacts we understand how absurd and moralistic it is to criticise consumerism. Today this attitude is thankfully disappearing, only surviving in unlikely utopias like that of happy degrowth (which, to be consistent, should also advocate the decline of average life expectancy). However, this view has tormented my generation: it was as if you could only be human by giving up objects, whereas objects are what makes us human, and spiritual. In its strong and immature moralism, the criticism of consumerism postulates the perfection of the human in the absence of objects, but the truth is that without objects, technologies and documents the human would cease to be such. Mobilization  I have mentioned the characteristics of the documedia workers – that is, the mobilized  – when describing the inapplicability of the Marxist notion of “labour” to today’s society. Now, it does not make sense to blame Marx for this. However, it does not make sense either to keep on taking the spectre of Capital as

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the cause of all evils, whereas what is actually happening is the global spread of the traits that Marx attributed to Communism. As I mentioned earlier, the division of labour is disappearing, and so is the State (replaced by documedia instances operating on the Internet). Classes are disappearing too (do the bourgeoisie and the proletariat still exist? It is far from obvious), internationalism is being realized in the form of globalization, and the dictatorship of the proletariat has taken the form of populism. Are we happy now? Probably not, but this is not the point. One could say that the communist dream has come true in a way that wasn’t the one expected or hoped for, but the gap between ideal and real is inevitable in the realization of any utopia, revealing its limits and clarifying its borders (even the most hyperbolic utopia, that of eternal life in Heaven, would pose very serious problems, starting with the boredom and depression that would likely come with it).

8.3  Recognition, Not Sustenance This process seems to dispel the myth of the Homo oeconomicus and of the primarily economic motive of social interaction. Squander, which is usually interpreted as an exception or as a failure of economic strategies, is in fact ubiquitous in the documedia world, primarily in the sense of a waste of time. However, one should make two clarifications in this regard. First of all, what is now coming to light is part of a deep and unanalysed layer of social reality, which was there long before the documedia revolution. After all, even in the capitalist age, in 1914, masses of people went to war full of enthusiasm. On the other hand, this is not simply a phenomenon linked to the introduction of negativity in the logic of profit. The fundamental motive of mobilization is not negation but self-affirmation, self-expression in public. Negativity, if it is there, turns out to be simply functional to this objective, which appears as recognition (à la Hegel). The struggle for recognition (which is often imaginary, as it mainly takes place with no antagonists in an echo chamber), once again, has no economic goals, or if it has any, they are secondary: people want to be famous and then rich in that order, and no mobilized person would be happy to be wealthy but secretly so (Table 8.4). Sustenance  Marx makes the same mistake that he attributes to capitalists when he isolates the reproduction of workforce as a kind of foundation or bare life, and this mistake, excusable then, is not forgivable today. Even in the age of manufacture there was probably more than such a robinsonnade, for example the worker pride that Primo Levi describes in The Wrench. The book describes a very differ-

Table 8.4  The three phases and their reasons for action

Manufacture (production) Sustenance Mediality (communication) Compensation Documediality (recording) Recognition

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ent situation from that of If This Is A Man, although Martin Heidegger, in his timid condemnation of the Shoah, has compared the extermination camps to mechanized agriculture and, to be sure, to the atomic bomb. To think that sustenance is the sole end of the worker does not explain the fact that, once solved the sustenance problem, one can still continue to work in unpaid form, as is the case in documedia mobilization. In fact, today there is unpaid and unrecognized work whose evident counterpart is public recognition, whereas its hidden counterpart is the accumulation of data. Of course, Marx’s descriptions of poverty do not correspond to anything that we know in the documedia world. They rather remind one of migrants, who represent a direct form of mobilization generated by war and need rather than documediality. But then who are the mobilized of documediality? In terms of lifestyle, they are rather “comfortable”, but they take the place of workers. They are not a class, but a function. Anyone can occasionally be mobilized, and the ontological persistence of classes has disappeared along with the persistence of activity or belonging. And what is the motive of the documedia worker, if not profit? Being intrinsically normative, documediality has a responsibilizing function, generating intentionality and moral anxiety: we are called to answer to, under the action of an appeal that is addressed to us individually and that is recorded (that is, it is addressed to us and cannot be ignored). However, responding passively is the source of answering for, responding in an active way, as bearers of morality and freedom: insofar as man is educated to the structure of answering-to he can later formulate the derived structure of answering-for (that is, being morally responsible). Obviously, those who transmit education can also do so intentionally (think of educators) or simply give the example without being aware of practicing a pedagogical function. What matters is that the intentionality and responsibility of those who receive education or witness the example are not a primitive, but a derivative, something that takes place a posteriori. Postulating a Kantian apriori responsibility, an answering for prior to the concrete experience of answering to means – once again – adopting the Pentecostal perspective, which is resolved in the assumption of a ghost limb called “intention”, “understanding,” “will”. Hence a fact I wish to underline. Contrary to a broadly shared view, the modernity or postmodernity in which the documedia revolution takes place is, therefore, no more “liquid” and de-­ responsibilizing than the ages preceding it. On the contrary, it is the most granitic era of history, even when granite takes the apparently lighter form of silicon. In the documedia universe our intentions become as solid as trees or chairs: there is nothing more real than the Web, and this is where it derives its power from. Modernity has never been so solid. This means that, far from dissolving the structures of social reality, the documedia revolution has revealed them with unprecedented clarity and efficaciousness. Compensation  In any case, in the stage after capitalism – that of mediality – there was already a huge gap. The thing at stake was no longer bare life, but what bare life is not: life as a human being. As with consumerism, it is absurd to consider this second stage as a worsening or even just a continuation of the previous condition: instead, it was a radical change from it and a decided step forward in the realization

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of the essence of human life. The latter, in fact, finds its raison d’etre not in bare life, but in its supplements: from technology to culture, to culture as technology. From this point of view, the treatment undergone at the time by – say – the viewer of trash television is paradoxical: he was stigmatised as brain-dead, as a subcultural lumpen, and he was denied any form of the compassion abundantly given to the exploited worker. And yet there might very well be a same person who, after being exploited from 9 to 5, sits in front of the TV. Also, those who watch the worst reality shows still seem closer to human dignity than those working in an assembly chain: the latter just do what they are told, whereas the former at least exercise the modest freedom offered by the remote. Recognition  This trend became stronger in the documedia age. The worker’s annihilation mentioned by Marx was replaced by valorization and recognition, and the exploitation now takes place over the human capital embodied by the consumer (beauty, fashion, posts, cooking, mass vacations: of course one wonders if this can still be called exploitation). The main objective does not seem to be the economy, but rather the hope of recognition. Tolstoy noted that history is made by generals because they are the ones who write it, whereas if farmers wrote it the narrative would be very different. Well, this consideration also holds for society, which has been interpreted and described mainly by economists for the past three centuries. This, of course, cannot be taken as coincidental or arbitrary; however, choosing the economy as the ultimate element guiding every aspect of social reality leaves history full of holes and exceptions, like the ones listed by Bataille in his description of dépense: luxuries, mourning, wars, cults, monuments, games, shows, arts, non-­ reproductive sex. That these are no exception is proved by the fact that today they are mass phenomena (sex and reproduction are completely separate, for example, and art has turned out to be economically charged). This shows, on the other hand, that these are not situations that only belong to the past or to some foreign land, like human sacrifices or the gift of rivalry. If these things seems so exotic, it is only because we haven’t thought enough about our world: in a way, the voluntary mobilized is not too different from the enthusiastic sacrificial victim in Aztec cults.

8.4  Self-Affirmation, Not Alienation The hypothesis of recognition is the best one to account for the documedia mobilization. It may therefore be useful to break it down and highlight its constitutive elements. The old repetitive and alienating labour is replaced with a varied and revelational work. As I recalled above, the mobilized person is equal to the one described in German Ideology: a whole man who does everything. Sure, he is not happy, but that’s different story. Those who flock to the beaches or malls may be similar to the Fordist workers, but they want to do what they are doing with their whole heart, and they are better, they can be happy or dream of being so, whatever one means by the obscure term of “happiness”. It would be an unforgivable mistake,

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and an injustice to their human dignity, to ignore this state of mind, and to bring it back to a form of false consciousness. The process is more complicated than that: neither productive alienation nor communicative distraction are purely and simply such, but they both reveal a will of self-affirmation. The latter, clearly shown by the documedia revolution, forces us to completely revise the category of “alienation”. Indeed, alienation rests on a questionable (but dogmatic for its supporters) scale of values that follow a precise descending hierarchy: being, having, appearing. And “being”, as in Heidegger, designates the lost, and purely imagined, homeland of authenticity. Against this naturalistic or metaphysical idealization, postmodernists would praise appearance, which presents itself as the simple overturning of the hierarchy (what they call “overturning of Platonism”, following Friedrich Nietzsche). But this is not the point. The point is rather to reject the Pentecostal perspective with an emergentist perspective, considering being as something that is revealed thanks to technology, having, and appearing. In this sense, being is something that lies before us, not behind us (at the epistemological level). In the social world there is no being in-itself independent of appearing and having; an event that no one has heard of is not simply unknown and therefore neither true nor false (as happens in the natural world): it rather does not exist. Alienation is considered an aberration (a clinical term dear to Marx and so many social critics), which obviously presupposes an otherwise positive compliance with the law of nature – something that is difficult not only to be found, but also to be conceived and hoped for. Do we really have so much nostalgia for a past that was machistic, unjust and – what’s worse – boring? One should give up the myth of a natural humankind or of a humanity in itself, which only triggers nostalgic, catastrophistic, and recriminatory analyses that, most importantly, offer a pharisaic consolation. However, it is not clear why the transformations brought by capital and its successors  – provided there have been any  – should be interpreted as regression rather than as progress, and above all – this, I repeat, is the decisive aspect – as alienation rather than revelation (Table 8.5). Alienation  “It is now no longer the labourer that employs the means of production, but the means of production that employ the labourer” – Marx emphatically wrote in Capital (the italics are his). This leads one to believe that there can be a non-­ alienated relationship between the human and technology, one where man is in control. And yet, any kind of relationship with technology always entails a form of submission, which therefore depends on the nature of man and technology, not on capitalism. Now, every time you make a Nespresso you have to serve the machine as much as it serves you, without this being labour. But craftsmanship is also condi-

Table 8.5  The three phases and their product

Manufacture (production) Alienation Mediality (communication) Distraction Documediality (recording) Self-affirmation

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tioned by (and finds its purpose in) the tool, and this also holds for intellectual performances: Euler said that his theories lied on the tip of his pen and Proust claimed he had no freedom with his books. Once more, Marx cultivated the illusion of a free craftsman who is alienated by a cruel world. But if Proust and Euler were not free, then who is? Now, I do not mean to compare young Werther to an English miner (Goethe was well aware of the differences, and so are we), but it seems to me that the relationship between human and technology should be interpreted as an essential form of revelation. Distraction  Marx stigmatized the worker’s alienation; Debord stigmatized the viewer’s alienation in front of the observed thing. If – as I am trying to argue – the alienation of the former is problematic, then the latter is even more so. What’s wrong with enjoying the spectacle? Is it not the contemplative state promoted by the Vedas and by Schopenhauer? Rather than alienation, it is distraction: you want to distract yourself from your thoughts and forget yourself. Once again, one wonders why self-oblivion produced by asceticism or action should be better than that produced by television. Indeed, Debord hates the society of spectacle almost as if it killed children as nineteenth century capitalism did. This is a recurring attitude towards the media, which seem to have inherited (and deviated) the hatred one should reserve to more dangerous things, such as “mass destruction weapons”. On the one hand, a show is less gruesome than a battle – unless the show is by Hermann Nitsch. On the other hand, one wonders: distraction of whom, and from what? Consider those who are distracted – say – by a soap opera: would they otherwise be engaged with issues of infinitesimal calculus? They would be much more likely to join a pro-war demonstration, so they might as well be distracted. Self-Affirmation  From Plutarch to Hegel, thinkers have always been aware of the importance of recognition for human beings. But in the last few centuries humans have defined themselves in ways that were much too flattering, describing themselves as very – indeed, too – rational. Hence the myth of Homo oeconomicus and of instrumental rationality, which have filled up libraries and fuelled learned debates. The documedia revelation disrupts these myths, manifesting the extremely uneconomic nature of our lives. Our goal is highly spiritual: self-affirmation in order to be recognised by the other. Why would anyone ever work for free, posting documedia content generating wealth only for the providers, buying one’s own means of production (smartphone, laptop, etc.)? Well, more than half the world does this, it seems: all those who use social networks. I personally do not, but that makes me no exception: I am still writing books and papers to affirm myself in the hope of being recognized by others. But the fact that professors are self-absorbed was well known  – it wasn’t known that everybody else was, too. From this point of view, nothing is more wrong (and, as often happens, moralistic) than interpreting selfies as a narcissistic act. Narcissus looked at himself and was content. Selfie-takers, instead, want to publish their pictures and do so not for their own pleasure but to be recognized by as many people as possible. The need for recognition is, at the same time, responsibility and mobilization, which is a source of normativity.

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8.5  Atomization, Not Classification I have not forgotten to mention post-truth. What I described so far is the technical and ideological framework that makes post-truth possible. Documents take the place of commodities or, more accurately, the mysterious nature of commodities lies in their intimate document-like nature; the needs of sustenance have diminished for much of the West, leaving more space to leisure time and therefore to the need for recognition (which is also there during work time). Even more radically, the distinction between work and free time has become very thin, meaning one should give up the notion of alienation and focus on those of objective revelation and subjective self-affirmation. These transformations explain why truth (and mainly its subproducts and sophistications) has become the greatest production of the documedia age. “Moi, la Vérité, je parle”, to quote a post-truthist avant la lettre like Jacques Lacan, who rightly attributed the need of self-affirmation to what today we call “post-truth”. Self-affirmation becomes even more urgent now that the social fabric seems made up of monads: lots of individuals or micro-communities that constitute atomic wills to power. They represent themselves online neither by producing artifacts (as in the industrial economy) nor through the use of social objects (as in media society), but through the production of social objects (self-­ representations, statuses, selfies, contacts, emails....). Classes, as well as professional and social categories, are disappearing (Sennett 1998), socially mirroring the phenomenon by which various activities like the production (and sale) of radios, televisions, telephones, calculators, computers, clocks, barometers etc. are summed up in the production and sale of smartphones. The monads have exclusive values shared in small groups, which in turn can communicate with other groups, but always horizontally, without the verticality (from an authority to the recipients) that characterised the industrial and media ages. Beliefs are atomized and privatized, defining one’s identity: “I, Truth, post”. This adaptation of Lacan’s saying expresses the fundamental state of mind underlying post-truth. Let’s have a closer look at the phenomenon of monadization (Table 8.6). Classes  Classes play a very important role in Marx – especially with the related notions of “class struggle” and “class consciousness” (which are close relatives of the equally problematic notion of collective intentionality). However, the world wars, in which state apparatus and national affiliation were stronger than classes, showed how problematic this concept is. There is no such thing as collective intentionality, nor has there ever been. To win the war, Stalin had to reintroduce military grades and speak of a “great patriotic war”. In short, where is the collective inten-

Table 8.6  The three phases and their human kind

Manufacture (production) Classes Mediality (communication) Users Documediality (recording) Monads

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tionality that should makes us act as one and be the foundation of social reality? We share documents, and when these multiply, society is atomized. The emblem of this condition would be Mark Zuckerberg in a room where everyone is wearing Oculus, the virtual reality viewer. On the one hand, Zuckerberg here recalls Plato’s philosopher, the one who is out of the cave while the others, chained, contemplate the simulations projected inside. On the other hand, however, there are three significant differences. First, the captives here have voluntarily put on the mask, indeed, they bought it. Secondly, unlike Homer, he does not have to produce the contents of the show: the very people in chains are those who produce it by exchanging their own deeds on Facebook. Thirdly and most importantly, he himself only has a privileged standpoint, some sort of class awareness that has nothing to do with that of Thomas Buddenbrook or even Felix Krull. If we do not consider this and continue to read the current situation with the lens of Marxist classes, our analyses are inevitably going to fail. Users  As classes disappear, the only form of unity is found in the common taste of users in a mass society, in the world of hit parades and best sellers. Except that, for some obscure reason, those that value class consciousness deplore the formation of something similar to a shared taste. Reading Debord (or, for that matter, and on the same basis, Adorno), one wonders what the desirable alternative to the society of the spectacle would be. A society without spectacles? A society of pedagogical spectacles? A society where spectacles are austere and only accessible to an elite like the Neue Musik proposed by Theodor Adorno? As always, it is hard to compare the present with the past. At one point, Debord deplores a decline in the quality of shows (without making any examples) when there are good reasons to argue that it has much improved. Indeed, a contemporary TV series has conceptual and technical subtleties that would have been unimaginable not only in commercial products eighty years ago, but also in Greek tragedy (provided of course that tragedy viewers were not themselves alienated, demented, etc.). However, in the media phase there was a verticality to the system that is opposed to the horizontality of the documedia age. Debord insisted on separating the spectator from the performer, and considered this separation and division of labour as two essential characteristics of the spectacle. In this sense, divas would have the same origin as gods according to the later Feuerbach: pieces of consciousness of the spectator that are alienated and become superhuman and transcendent through the spectacle, so that, due to a specialization of labour, the show speaks in the name of the spectators. This transcendence of the media phase is the complete opposite of the documedia “one counts as one”. However, even in this case the change has been progressive, and already in the media world there were processes announcing the documedia horizontality: quizzes, talk shows, reality shows, and all forms of trash TV.  In some cases (talent shows) the narrative is that of the apotheosis: the passage from the human to the divine through the show. Monads  Finally, let’s come to monadization and horizontalization. The structures aimed at achieving goals (barracks, factories) of the production age, and the large

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audiences generated by communication, were followed by a documedia ­fragmentation creating social atomization (echo chambers, sense fields, etc.). Each monad reflects from its point of view – as a force representing the universe – everything that happens on the Web (as a library of Babel). Note well: the point of view is individual, implying a powerful anamorphosis of which post-truth is but one of the outcomes. In documediality social divisions cease to matter: master and servant work in the same space and do the same things through the same media. At the same time, however, instead of massification there is a leveling, a horizontality of monads that takes the place of the capitalist class verticality. There are still some that are above the others, but there is so few of them that they are not a class: about a hundred people in the San Francisco area. What bourgeoisie could ever control systems such as the documedia ones? It’s not like owning newspapers or televisions. Hence the crisis of trust in the digital world (Domenicucci and Doueihi 2017). The modern ideological structures were Capital, Race, Faith, Homeland, Conspiracy, and so on – that is, notions spread between wide and cohesive groups. Postmodern ideological structures, developed after the end of great narratives, represented a privatization or tribalization of truth. It is worth noting that the end of the great narratives coincides – consistently with the creation of “regional rationality” – with the first cases of negationism (Wieviorka 2017). Perfecting and spreading this process, documediality has created the atomism of millions of people who are convinced that they are right: not together (as believed, mistakenly, by the ideological churches of the past century) but on their own, or rather with the sole response of the Internet. The centre of this new ideology lies in the pretense of being in the right regardless, and in seeking recognition through a technical apparatus: the Web. The latter facilitates the circulation of individual ideas while making them irrelevant (precisely because one counts as one) and realizes the microphysics of power, channeling all these ideas – different but all equivalent – into an immanent like, an apparatus that counts for the sheer numbers it expresses, manifesting a punctiform public opinion. This is me: that’s the refrain underlying an inflation of self-made truths. Instead, in the age of ideologies, there was only one truth that was believed in by wide communities.

8.6  Conclusion Have we reached the bottom, to use a moralistic (and optimistic) expression always referred to all technological and social transformations? Of course not. Rather, based on the theory of revelation that I have tried to present in these pages, we are now closer to truth: social structures manifest themselves more clearly, and humankind reveals its nature. This, despite appearances, is progress (indeed, there is no argument to justify any talk of regression). More generally, every next stage reveals the essence of the previous ones: every stage shows dialectic advancement, not regression. Documediality reveals the decisive role it played in manufacture and mediality; the recorded act shows that both the commodity and the spectacle are

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indeed social objects; mobilization proves the overcoming of labour through free activity (qua non-retributed); the monads are the conciliation of class collectivity and user individuality in a single being representing the universe; the need for recognition and self-affirmation show human nature as the bearer of values; and revelation is the non-idealized manifestation of humanity. It is from here, from Documediality, that one must start today to understand the ongoing social transformations as well as human nature, leaving Capital to historians.

References De Soto, H. (2000). The mystery of capital. New York: Basic Books. Debord, G. (1994). The society of spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Domenicucci, J., & Doueihi, M. (Eds.). (2017). La confiance à l’ère numérique. Paris: Éditions Berger-Levrault et Éditions Rue d’Ulm. Ferraris, M. (2012). Documentality. New York: Fordham University Press. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: The Free Press. Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character, the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. New York/London: Norton. Wieviorka, M. (2017). Face à la «postvérité » et au «complotisme». Socio, 08, 81–96.

Chapter 9

The Basis of European Cooperation Jonathan Wolff

Abstract  The European Union brings together European nations into a scheme of cooperation. Cooperation can take many forms. This paper suggests that different forms of cooperation bring with them different norms and principles of justice. It is argued that in order to understand the point or purpose of the EU it is essential to debate the underlying understanding of cooperation. This, in turn, will have implications for such things as immigration policy and political union. Unfortunately, however, this debate has not taken place to the extent required, and, it is suggested, Brexit is one of the consequences that the UK is paying for this lack of analysis. Keywords  Europe · European union · Cooperation · Brexit · Principles · Advantage · Mutual Brexit · Cooperation · Competition · Europe · European Union · Fairtrade · GDP · Germany · Humanitarianism · Hume, David · Immigration · Impartiality · Justice · Marshall Plan · Rawls, John · Reciprocity · Rousseau, Jean-Jacques · Smith, Adam · Surplus · Trump, Donald · Union · United Kingdom · United States of America · Wages · War

The early sections of this paper draw very extensively on my previous writings, most notably Wolff, Integration, justice and exclusion. In: Bernitz U, Hallstrom P (eds) Principles of justice and the European Union. Juristforlaget, Stickhom, p  16–26, 1996 and Global justice and norms of cooperation: The “Layers of Justice” view. In: de Wijze, Kramer M, Carter I (eds) Hillel Steiner and the anatomy of justice. Routledge, New York, p 34–50, 2009. It is, in effect, a combination and reworking of those papers in the context of reflection on the current state of the European Union. It is, in turn, greatly influenced by the writings of Brian Barry, and especially Barry, Justice as impartiality. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995. J. Wolff (*) Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Wolfson College Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected]; http://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/people/jonathan-wolff; https://jonathanwolff.wordpress.com © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_9

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At a time when the UK is making its preparation to leave the European Union, it is worth asking a question that should have been essential to the referendum debate but was not brought to the surface as often or as clearly as it might have been: what is the point or purpose of the European Union? It is hard to argue that that there is an agreed single answer to this question. Indeed a number of differing accounts can be found, including: 1. To end the division in Europe that led to two catastrophic wars in the twentieth century.1 2. To achieve an ‘ever-closer union’ of the peoples of Europe.2 3. To achieve economic and social progress. 4. To effect a constant improvement in the living and working conditions of the peoples of Europe. 5. To reduce the differences between the more and less favoured regions of Europe. 6. To create an entity of sufficient strength to be able to compete on a world stage. Though there is no logical contradiction between these ideas there are likely to be some practical conflicts. Most obviously, reducing the differences between regions could slow overall economic growth, at least in the short term, and dull the EU’s competitive edge, which could have cumulative effects. This is an instance of an often-claimed – though also contested – conflict between the demands of social justice, and especially a concern for the worst off, and economic growth. But even if there were no practical conflict between the goals, adopting one of these ideas as primary will affect the character of the union, and also its criterion of success. Regarding the aim as providing an ‘ever-closer union’ will provide a rationale for seeking political connecting-tissue and harmonization of regulations, ideology and institutions, such as a common currency and visa-free travel. By contrast, seeing the Union as a way in which a cluster of small and mid-size nations, faced with cut-throat international competition, can huddle together to protect themselves, will have very different implications for policy. It will mean that there is far less imperative for true integration. It could also mean that there will be little appetite to pursue policies of social justice. How, then, we conceive of the European Union will have consequences for what sorts of policies should properly fall within its scope, and how they should be pursued and implemented. Hence debates about the appropriateness of policies are often premised on disputes about the purpose of the union, or, to put it another way, about its point and philosophical basis. In the next section I will set out some ideas about possible forms of cooperation, and then, in the following section, turn back to the question of the implications of these forms for thinking about the nature of the European Union, and, in particular, the UK’s exit from it.

1  Implied in preamble to European Steel and Coal Treaty, signed shortly after World War II, in 1951. (ESCT 1951) 2  Preamble to the Treaty of Rome (EEC 1957), which also contains 3, 4, and 5.

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9.1  Forms of Cooperation My purpose in this section is to lay out several different models of cooperation, as a preliminary to exploring which is of most relevance to the European Union. The reason for doing this is that cooperation comes in many distinct forms, each with their own norms and expectations. Not all forms of interaction are forms of cooperation. Violence, conquest, intimidation and so on, are forms of interaction that are not cooperation and they are not what I have in mind here. Rather I am relying on a distinction between (relatively) forced and (relatively) free association, although, of course, difficult circumstances can blur, or even eliminate, such a line. Perhaps the weakest notion of (voluntary) cooperation is what is now known as the ‘stag-hunt’ game, after an example from Rousseau: Taught by experience that the love of well-being is the sole motive of human actions, [the savage] found himself in a position to distinguish the few cases, in which mutual interest might justify him in relying upon the assistance of his fellows… [and] joined in the same herd with them, or at most in some kind of loose association, that laid no restraint on its members, and lasted no longer than the transitory occasion that formed it. … In this manner, men may have insensibly acquired some gross ideas of mutual undertakings, and of the advantages of fulfilling them: that is, just so far as their present and apparent interest was concerned: for they were perfect strangers to foresight, and were so far from troubling themselves about the distant future, that they hardly thought of the morrow. If a deer was to be taken, every one saw that, in order to succeed, he must abide faithfully by his post: but if a hare happened to come within the reach of any one of them, it is not to be doubted that he pursued it without scruple, and, having seized his prey, cared very little, if by so doing he caused his companions to miss theirs. (Rousseau 1973 86–7).

In the stag-hunt cooperation is entirely instrumental to each individual’s good. There is a clear question of whether this ‘loose association’ generates or relies upon any deeper normative ideas at all. Each person is free to come and go as they please, and cooperation lasts only for as long as each individual remains part of the joint enterprise. As soon as they see a prospect they prefer they can, and do, leave, even if they leave the others stranded and frustrated. Here they treat others as purely means to their own ends. The key feature in Rousseau’s example is that the participants are not committed to each other in any way. Any savage who leaves to chase a hare has not violated obligations to others. We could call the stag hunt an example of ‘bare cooperation’, in that it is the most minimal form available. Over time, though, more committed models of cooperation are very likely to develop. Those who too readily chase a passing hare will find themselves not included in future stag hunts. Hence those with the self-discipline to accept a short-­ term loss for the sake of a longer-term gain will be rewarded. This generates the next model; cooperation for enlightened self-interest, or justice as mutual advantage. If everyone went their separate ways, they would achieve modest benefits. However with the continued cooperation of others, they can each do better. A surplus is possible, compared to independent action, although further rules are needed for the

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distribution of that surplus. In the absence of other norms, bargaining strength will determine outcomes. This is the idea of justice as a mutual advantage; a type of bargain, in which those with the greatest bargaining power will, as a matter of justice (according to this theory, which in turn reveals its weakness), receive most. Note that bargaining power is determined by how much one – or rather one’s agreement – is needed by others, and not the extent of one’s contribution. This we see, rather chillingly, illustrated in Hume’s own application of the theory, worth quoting at length: Were there a species of creatures intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound by the laws of humanity to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords. Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality; but absolute command on the one side, and servile obedience on the other. Whatever we covet, they must instantly resign: Our permission is the only tenure, by which they hold their possessions: Our compassion and kindness the only check, by which they curb our lawless will: And as no inconvenience ever results from the exercise of a power, so firmly established in nature, the restraints of justice and property, being totally USELESS, would never have place in so unequal a confederacy. This is plainly the situation of men, with regard to animals; and how far these may be said to possess reason, I leave it to others to determine. The great superiority of civilized Europeans above barbarous Indians, tempted us to imagine ourselves on the same footing with regard to them, and made us throw off all restraints of justice, and even of humanity, in our treatment of them. In many nations, the female sex are reduced to like slavery, and are rendered incapable of all property, in opposition to their lordly masters. But though the males, when united, have in all countries bodily force sufficient to maintain this severe tyranny, yet such are the insinuation, address, and charms of their fair companions, that women are commonly able to break the confederacy, and share with the other sex in all the rights and privileges of society. (Hume 1975, 190–91)

The logic of Hume’s position is that if others have nothing to offer us, or what they have we can take from them independently of what they decide or want, then we have no duties of justice, strictly speaking, towards them. If there is no point to making a bargain, or no need to do so, then there is no justice. Hume does not deny that we have moral duties of humanity in such cases, but not of justice. Hume’s argument appears to be, then, that if the stronger party can get what it wants from others, without their cooperation, then there are no norms of justice by which their behaviour can be criticized. Cooperation begins when the agreement of both parties is needed, at least in the circumstances as they present themselves, in order to generate the surplus. Justice as mutual advantage requires both parties to be better off than they would have been without agreement, but beyond this point of minimal surplus to both, there is a sense in which ‘might is right’. The obvious problem with the idea of justice as mutual advantage is that it doesn’t rule out the possibility of the stronger party using their bargaining advan-

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tage to reap virtually the entire surplus. There are, of course, many historical ­examples of such arrangements: such as the wage rates of workers in early capitalism, and international trade between rich and poor nations. Somehow, to achieve a more appropriate understanding of justice, the idea of ‘proper reward’ needs to be introduced, which generates the theory of justice known as ‘justice as reciprocity’ or ‘justice as fair exchange’. On this view justice requires not so much bargaining as proportionality: those who make the greatest contribution should, in justice, receive the greatest return. It is easy to see that ideas of desert naturally fit into this picture, although as soon as this is said it will also be seen that there are many ways of fleshing this out. Does desert attach to effort? Or to achievement? Or to some hybrid of the two. Many theories are possible, but the general notion of justice as fair exchange has great popular resonance, underlying slogans such as ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’, and in the international arena the idea of ‘fairtrade’. Justice as reciprocity is an intuitively powerful theory of justice. Yet it has a problem in common with justice as mutual advantage. Both leave out of account those who may have nothing to contribute or exchange. Consider anyone who, for whatever reason, is unable to make any productive contribution. On the accounts of cooperation discussed so far there is no obvious way of generating duties towards them. Equally, those who play a minor role in cooperation, but have little bargaining power, and make only a modest contribution, would receive only a small return, even if their needs are great. If it is felt that under such circumstances those who cannot contribute, or only modestly, are nevertheless owed assistance from those who are in a better position then, according to justice as mutual advantage and justice as reciprocity these duties would have to be of charity, rather than justice. But to many this will seem wrong, and that others have a duty of justice to help those who cannot help themselves or offer anything, or very much, in exchange for help. A different theory is needed to explain this. The most prominent candidate is ‘justice as impartiality’, where justice requires taking everyone’s situation and interests into account in determining what is to count as a just outcome. Here mechanisms for determining just outcomes take as their inspiration the thought ‘how would you like it if you were in that situation?’ So, for example, Adam Smith’s device of the ‘impartial spectator’ (Smith 2002, Part 3, Ch 3), or John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’ (Rawls 1971) require the decision maker to take on the perspective of every individual involved or affected. To apply Rawls’ model to the case of international justice (something Rawls himself does not do, of course) would be to ask the question: ‘what provisions for poor members of less-developed nations would you wish to see if you didn’t know whether or not you were rich or poor?’ Here a balance needs to be struck between the interests of those who are from poor countries, and those who will have to work to provide things such people cannot provide for themselves.

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9.2  Applying the Models The obvious next step is to consider the list of possible goals of the EU and to see how they relate to the four models of cooperation just given: bare cooperation; mutual advantage; reciprocity; and impartiality. Let us take the goals in turn: 1. To end the division in Europe that led to two catastrophic wars in the twentieth century. This idea seems to be consistent with several of the models of cooperation. Ending war is to the mutual advantage of all, assuming that, in the modern world, no victor in a war would be able to achieve sufficient spoils of war to repay the costs of fighting it. Of course, there could be exceptions, where, for example, a brief border skirmish captures a valuable asset. But in the present time it would be hard to see how such a quick victory could be sustained without escalating, or being reversed by the international community. Hence justice as mutual advantage would seem to rule out war. A policy of not engaging in war would also be mandated by the value of impartiality, which would insist that any potential war is considered from the standpoint of all parties that are affected by it. On the other hand, bare cooperation between parties on some occasions does not rule out a war between them on other occasions, and justice as reciprocity seems to have little to do with whether or not the parties fight a war, although it may well have consequences for how a war should be fought and the resulting settlement. 2. To achieve an ‘ever-closer union’ of the peoples of Europe. In its strictest form an ever-closer union takes us beyond the realm of cooperation as normally understood, to the type of identity of interests supposed to exist within an ideal family or community, in a type of organic whole. But given that no member of the union has such a degree of internal unity, it would be highly unrealistic to expect such a thing in a union between peoples. This observation, however, raises the question of what we could call the agents of cooperation: who is the cooperation between? Is it a form of international cooperation, between nations, or cooperation between the many citizens of each nation across national boundaries? The use of the term ‘peoples’ – a term Rawls was later to use (Rawls 1999) – leaves us somewhat in the dark here. But in any case desiring an ever-closer union seems to take us beyond mutual advantage and reciprocity to impartiality. The contrast to a closer union would be a situation in which each nation insisted on its distinctive character and right to self-determination, even if exercising such a right could have adverse effects for other nations in the Union. 3. To achieve economic and social progress. This understandable, though rather bland, goal, seems consistent with all of the models of cooperation, with the likely exception of bare cooperation. 4. To effect a constant improvement in the living and working conditions of the peoples of Europe.

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This goal seems a somewhat more specified version of the previous one, suggesting, so it appears, that economic progress is not simply a matter of increasing GDP but allowing for benefits to spread to citizens, both in terms of their standard of living and conditions of work. Here we see an important aspect of the Union, in that it is interested not only in the results of economic production but also the manner in which the economic benefits are produced. This will give rise to concerns about health and safety at work, working conditions, contractual arrangements and a range of issues around employment that can easily get lost in discussions of distributive justice. These considerations move us, I think, beyond mutual advantage to an understanding of fair employment and terms and conditions of work. It is important that individuals are respected and treated well. Given that they have an important hand in creating prosperity it is only right, so it seems to be implied, that they should reap their fair reward. Hence this particular goal takes us at least some way to the idea of cooperation as reciprocity, in which people should be rewarded in proportion to their contribution. Of course no strict proportionality is implied by the statement, but it does seem to go further than mere mutual advantage to a reasonable sharing in the benefits created. 5. To reduce the differences between the more and less favoured regions of Europe. This goal could be understood in at least two ways; first in terms of the enlightened self-interest of the ‘more favoured’ regions; and second, in terms of an understanding that there is no good moral justification for there to be a difference between the more and less favoured regions. Consider, by way of analogy, the Marshall Plan at the end of World War II, in which the United States contributed very significant sums for the reconstruction of Europe (and incidentally has been credited as being one of the initial steps that sparked European integration). Why did the United States provide these resources? There probably isn’t a single answer, but at least three candidate answers suggest themselves. One is that it was simply an act of humanitarian assistance. A second, that the United States needed a reasonably well-­ developed Europe as a trading partner and market for US goods. If Europe became stuck with the level of poverty apparent at the end of the war, the long term interests of the United States would have suffered. Finally, a justice based argument is possible. Europe had been torn up in a way in which the United States had escaped, even though it was a critical part of the Allied Forces. A Rawlsian veil of ignorance argument would make it very clear that justice required transfer of resources from a country that had emerged from the war with relative wealth, towards others that had been devastated. But of course this, as we have seen, is an impartiality argument. Given that the humanitarian argument is not an argument about cooperation as such, we can see that the goal of reducing the difference between the more favoured and less favoured regions is consistent with two models of cooperation: mutual advantage and impartiality. The long term nature of the goal means that is cannot be based purely on bare cooperation, and the fact that rewards are, if anything, in inverse relationship to produced output, indicates that the goal is not at all based on an idea of cooperation as reciprocity. There is a complexity here as there could be

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some sort of appeal to desert, but the appeal is likely to be a negative one; that the less favoured regions or nations do not deserve their fate. But this is not a reciprocity argument; rather it is an impartiality one. To conclude, the goal of reducing differences is either a matter of long-term mutual advantage or (tending toward) impartiality. 6. To create an entity of sufficient strength to be able to compete on a world stage. This is a clear matter of mutual advantage, not unlike the first aim of avoiding war. It is compatible with all other norms, though, as before, is unlikely to be generated by bare cooperation or reciprocity. If the arguments of this section are accepted it is clear that the different presumed goals of the EU presuppose differing ideas of cooperation, and therefore, have a different vision of the nature of the relationship between the parties. In evaluating which goal or goals should be at the forefront of our understanding of the EU, it seems less a matter of deciding which is in itself correct or incorrect, or just or unjust, but rather whether any genuinely reflect a shared vision. This is the topic of the next section.

9.3  Is There a Shared Vision of the EU? For there to be a shared vision of the EU it would be necessary for there to be sufficient agreement on its goals, and, indirectly, on its underlying norms of cooperation, as to mark some forms of action as appropriate and others as inappropriate. This does not mean, however, an agreement on goals is always necessary in order to judge the acceptability of particular action. In some cases, the same behaviour could be mandated or prohibited even from a variety of standpoints. The more difficult cases occur when behaviour is acceptable according to one understanding of cooperation, but not so according to another. And, that, sadly, seems to be our most recent history. The obvious case study to consider is Brexit, with the UK voting by a small majority to leave the EU, and that vote being considered as binding on the government, although the ground rules for the vote had not been made completely clear beforehand. As it was a vote, rather than a declared policy set out with reasons, it is unsafe to conclude that there was a single, or even a dominant, idea that led to this outcome. However, it seems reasonable to conclude that a significant proportion of those who voted to leave rejected the idea of an ‘ever-closer union’ and resented what they believed to be an erosion of UK sovereignty,3 especially with regard to immigration and control of borders.4 In some cases they felt that it was possible to

3  For interesting brief analysis, see Dunt 2016, which also supports much of the following analysis. 4  See Goodhart 2017.

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reclaim sovereignty without suffering significant losses (in fact many believed that there would be gains) whereas others believed there would be economic losses of some magnitude, though probably rather small and recoverable, but these losses were not significant when compared to the benefits of reclaiming sovereignty. Take, first, those who believed that there would be economic benefits from leaving the EU. This view comes in various forms. Some people regarded the EU as diminishing the UK both politically and economically, and saw no benefit at all from membership. For these people the EU fails even the most basic tests of successful cooperation, and it was an obvious decision to leave. Membership, on such a view, would, at best, have a symbolic or sentimental function. Others saw membership as having economic benefits but at a political cost that was too high to pay. They would, perhaps, have been happy if the level of cooperation remained one of mutual advantage, or even better reciprocity, but were not prepared to countenance moving to another level, especially when that involved European freedom of movement, which fits most happily with an impartiality model of cooperation. On an impartiality view, place of birth within the EU is treated as an accident, arbitrary from a moral point of view, and all should have the right to live and work wherever suits them best within the Union. In addition, on an impartiality model, the EU would be required to take special measures to improve the prosperity of less favoured regions. Those who reject the impartiality model can argue that European integration has gone further than is justified by the appropriate underlying model of cooperation, and that attempts to rein it in have failed. Therefore, they will say, there is no option but to leave. It is also possible that there is an element of the stag hunt – of bare cooperation – that played a part for some Leave voters. Even if the Union does potentially offer benefits for all, nevertheless the UK’s immediate interest is to leave, for, it was often said, the UK pays more into the EU than it receives back (a failure of reciprocity). On some very crude forms of calculation this may be true, but looking at things this way does not price in the benefits (and costs) from membership that are not direct financial flows from or to the EU, such as freedom of movement for UK citizens, as well as being part of a collective block in trade negotiations, and so on. Understood this way, the UK has left the stag hunt (offering uncertain deferred benefits) to pursue the immediate prize of a hare, which might, on further investigation, turn out to be imaginary. But imaginary or not, to leave in pursuit of short-term self-interest presupposes that the cooperation involved is very shallow. The logic of the stag hunt presupposes that mutual benefits are available, relative to no hunting, even if they are given up to pursue another avenue. But is it true that mutual benefits are available? I raised the question earlier of who the agents of cooperation are: nations or their citizens? On a simple ‘mutual advantage between nations’ conception the test could be whether GDP is higher for all given membership than it would have been without it. As a hypothetical this can be contested, but at least gives a clear focus. Mutual advantage between citizens, however, is another matter, given that some individuals can lose out even as GDP rises. Where a significant number suffer, or at least believe they do, then this can lead to considerable

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discontent even in the face of rising national prosperity. And indeed, this may well have been the perception in the UK, where numerous individuals appear to believe that they have suffered reduced job prospects, lower wages, higher rents, and disappearing healthcare and school places, owing to EU immigration to the UK. Whether they are right about this is another matter, but the perception seems to be widespread, as it often is in the case of immigration. The position was summed up very well in 1938 when the USA was considering taking more refugees from Nazi Germany: “[Nations] seem to believe that [immigrants] represent a net burden—as if their competition for jobs were certain to throw native citizens out of work, or as if they would otherwise have to be fed at public expense. There is a good deal of stubborn truth, under present circumstances, in this view, since the nations in question cannot keep their existing populations fully employed. Nevertheless there is no really good reason why it should be so. The worker who fears immigration because of the immigrant’s competition for jobs ought to be reassured by the reflection that for every new pair of hands to work there is at least one new mouth to feed and body to clothe, which should provide a market demand for the equivalent of what the hands can produce.” (Editorial, New Republic, quoted in Evian Conference on Political Refugees Social Service Review Vol. 12, No. 3 (Sep., 1938), pp. 514-518.)

In the UK there are clear labour shortages in some areas, given an ageing population and a decreasing willingness to do hard manual work, especially low skilled agricultural work. Hence health care and farming are both heavily dependent on immigrant labour. A reduction in immigration would require significant change in these areas, such as shutdowns or rising wages. Rising wages would, of course, be to the benefit of workers. However reduced immigration would also be likely to be to the detriment of ordinary citizens through shortages or higher prices. Nevertheless, it is plausible that there can be local adverse effects of immigration, which could lead to the impression that freedom of movement is against individual or even national interests, despite statistics purporting to show the opposite. For people who believe this, then cooperation does not yield mutual benefits. To accept losing fortunes for the sake of others requires some model of impartiality, and this is a demanding call for those who are already towards the bottom of the income distribution of their nation, even if those from other countries who would benefit are also badly off. The problem, then, for the UK, was that a large number of its voting population felt that their stagnating or declining economic position was a consequence of EU membership, while those who were already doing much better increasingly prospered. They are right that on all models of cooperation they do indeed face an injustice. What is much less clear, however, is that they have made the correct causal diagnosis of the basis of the injustice they suffer. If the Union was to have prevented this result, it would have had to develop policies based on an underlying model that was a hybrid of mutual advantage and impartiality. The EU had to be  – and had to be seen to be  – of benefit to those towards the bottom of the income distribution of each nation, while giving special attention to those who were towards the bottom of the income distribution of the EU as a whole. And if this turned out to be of less advantage – even a cost – to those who

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were already very well off then this should have been perceived as the price to be paid for justice. Sadly, in recent years, progress in the EU of advancing the interests of the disadvantaged has gone into reverse, although how much the EU bears responsibility is debatable. The UK voted only by a small majority to leave, and, as is well-known, the elderly voted to leave in much greater numbers than the young, who saw the opportunities that the EU offered to them, in terms of choices of where to live and work. Although, perhaps, few people desired a United States of Europe as extensively integrated as the United States of American, many saw integration as a progressive movement that has led to international friendship, trade and prosperity, and has generally improved prospects for the disadvantaged, especially through freedom of movement. Optimists saw the union as containing elements of impartiality. Opponents of integration on the right and left worried about the lack of UK sovereignty in the face either of creeping neo-liberal trade policies or a power grab by other European nations and especially Germany. On these views EU pretend impartiality is merely an ideology hiding sinister interests. And yet another nationalistic group simply opposed impartiality between British citizens and other Europeans, believing that the UK has a right or duty to put its own interests first (just as we have heard President Trump suggest about the USA). What seems clear is that there has never been a completely shared understanding of the nature of cooperation that underlies the Union. Elements of the stag hunt, mutual advantage, reciprocity and impartiality can be detected. When they all dictate the same goals, such as economic prosperity, the lack of a shared understanding may not matter. But when there is a disagreement about the proper goals of the union the philosophical cracks become more apparent. There becomes an urgent need for philosophical discussion to understand the disagreements, their consequences and what might be done to overcome those disagreement. Unfortunately those who achieved a wide public audience in the run up to the vote were not reported as raising such issues, and the debate remained at the level of false promises and exaggerated fears. Predictions of immediate economic disaster as a result of a ‘leave’ vote have not come true (although there are many years before the full effect is known) and equally the idea that Brexit would lead to a large stream of available cash that could be spent on the NHS is increasingly being exposed as mere fantasy or worse. What it means to reclaim British sovereignty also remains unclear, partly because it has not been made apparent what had been lost previously, beyond the ability to have a greater measure of control over borders. Newspapers glorying in UK independence have failed to come up with compelling examples of the EU red tape that was supposedly holding back British business, or initiatives that the UK will be able pursue with its new found freedom, beyond changing the colour of the national passport and restoring pre-metric measurements. Philosophical lack of clarity rarely has disastrous practical consequences, and it is hard to argue that the Brexit vote would have gone any other way had the debate included discussion about the model of cooperation underlying the Union. The damage had been done over many years, in which newspapers prospered by point-

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ing out claimed absurdities in EU regulations, money wasted, and power abused, as a convenient scapegoat. The UK never took the trouble to understand the ­philosophical basis of the EU, or to adopt the policies that would cement it in the affections of its citizens, and is now paying the price.

References Barry, B. (1995). Justice as impartiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ECSC. (1951). Treaty establishing the European coal and steel community. http://www.cvce.eu/ en/obj/treaty_establishing_the_european_coal_and_steel_community_paris_18_april_1951en-11a21305-941e-49d7-a171-ed5be548cd58.html. Accessed 5 Apr 2017. EEC. (1957). Treaty establishing the European economic community. http://www.cvce.eu/ obj/treaty_establishing_the_european_economic_community_rome_25_march_1957-encca6ba28-0bf3-4ce6-8a76-6b0b3252696e.html. Accessed 5 Apr 2017. Dunt, I. (2016). Brexit: What the hell happens now? Kingstone: Canbury Press. Goodhart, D. (2017). The road to somewhere: The populist revolt and the future of politics. London: C. Hurst & Publishers. Hume, D. (1975). An enquiry concerning the principles of morals section III part 1, in Id., enquiries (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, J. (1999). The law of peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1973). Discourse on the origins of inequality in Id. The social contract and discourses (pp. 86–87). London: Dent. Smith, A. (2002). Theory of the moral sentiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, J. (1996). Integration, justice and exclusion. In U. Bernitz & P. Hallstrom (Eds.), Principles of justice and the European Union (pp. 16–26). Stickhom: Juristforlaget. Wolff, J. (2009). Global justice and norms of cooperation: The “Layers of Justice” view. In de Wijze, M. Kramer, & I. Carter (Eds.), Hillel Steiner and the anatomy of justice (pp. 34–50). New York: Routledge.

Chapter 10

Ways of Compromise-Building in a World of Institutions Emmanuel Picavet

Abstract  An exploration of the institutional challenges of the implementation of general principles is proposed. Special attention is paid to principles which receive a recognised moral interpretation, such as rights. It is argued that the implementation process is basically associated with power allocation issues, which can by no means be reduced to lateral, technical problems. On the contrary, they help shape the institutional effectivity and collective significance of principles. Keywords  Compromise · Institutions · Interpretation · Justice · Power · Principles · Rights

10.1  Introduction: Principles and Implementation Let’s start from the following observation: we often think of the agreement on the basic elements of political organisation (such as the terms of a “covenant” or “social contract”) in the manner of an agreement on principles. In mainstream contractarian theory, it is essential to agree on principles rather than anything else because principles have a moral significance and because we want the agreement to offer a morally significant perspective on society and political organisation. In Rawls’s theory of justice, for example, the rivals which stand in need of enlightened, philosophical arbitration are moral principles which encapsulate generally applicable and universally understandable requirements of social organisation. The general argumentative pattern which needs careful attention is the one which deductively takes us from a definite view of such principles about justice or the

E. Picavet (*) UFR 10 (Philosophie), Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la Sorbonne (UMR 8103, CNRS Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne), “axe RSE” & CPCS, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-­Sorbonne & FMSH-CEM, “Chaire Ethique & Finance”, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. Andina, P. Bojanić (eds.), Institutions in Action, Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32618-0_10

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common good to allocations of powers, along the lines of a quite mechanical implementation operation. I want to show that the rejection of such a pattern helps to promote pluralism and openness to compromise with no mechanically incurred associated damage to concerns about the common good or justice, given differing views or beliefs (even opposite ones). Provided we believe ethics shouldn’t be completely separated out from politics, there is no denying that we commonly expect to find the elements which best express a sharable conception of the common good or justice in a certain stratum of political and administrative principles. But these elements only find effectiveness through power relations and administrative proceedings, and this is sometimes a rather straightforward operation, sometimes a very tricky and unsettling one. The implementation is in some cases quite direct, for example in the case of so-­ called “negative-freedom” principles of individual rights. To be sure, the details of real-world rights-holding (the companion real-world privileges and immunities) call for precise delineation and this is the job of many decision-makers all the way from government leaders or legislators to administrative offices. But details are details, and once such rights are granted, it seems quite clear that their nature should not be influenced by the implementation process. A core of rights-holding simply consists in not letting the associated rights-infringements uncontrolled and unpunished, and this is clear enough. The important fact here is that it seems to make good sense to differentiate a core meaning from implementation details in the first place. Even when a kernel of meaningful implications can be held secure in a reasonable way, and the distinction between the intrinsic meaning of principles and the implementation details turns out to make good sense, the precise range of the reasons why important exceptions might be in order (beyond consistency concerns) is a possible source of controversy. Indeed, reasons to do with national security, hate speech and other substantial concerns call for substantial reasons to support an understanding of appropriate limits to rights-exercising. Such reasons cannot have moment unless they have an impact on what it means to have rights. This is not to be ignored, even though successful argument, whatever it precise content in such contexts, is supposed to bring no change to the core meaning of the rights about which implementation details are being discussed. Other important general principles can be considered directly implementable because interpretation issues and the required implementation choices do not appear significant enough to pose a threat to the core meaning of their normative requirements. For example, the 1905 French law which states that the State doesn’t financially support religious groups (literally “cults”) has a pretty clear meaning and its administrative and judicial implementation is unlikely to bring alterations to the essentials of its meaning. In other cases, the situation is more intricate: the endorsement/ implementation link turns out to be indirect for more direct reasons. Such factors as balance-of-power shifts, technological change, the emergence and learning of corporate and inter-organisational routines, and interpretative tasks, and possibly other factors as well, might come into the picture and have a major impact. Each of those potential factors has documented impact on the way key institutional principles are handled in practice. First of all I’ll synthesise a number of reasons

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why variability and openness to compromise are relevant to basic principles of political architecture, such as fundamental rights. Then I will try to clarify some aspects of dynamic compromise in a world of institutions.

10.2  Basic Principles and the Development of Compromise Principles have a complex role in politics. Although “acting on principles” is sometimes associated with rigidity in personal conduct, they create a relatively flexible form of policy coordination. They receive “authentic” interpretations (by the courts or other organs) and such interpretations undergo changes over time. Beliefs about their purposes or proper implementation undergo decisive changes over time. Therefore, one cannot fail to ask: what do we really do, whenever we agree on political principles? This pertains to agreed views about the common good and the principles of good government. The interpretative instability of political principles is not only related to language and communication vicissitudes: it also reflects the compromise (the product of opposing tendencies) between dominant, rivaling interpretations. This property raises questions about the nature and effectiveness of the induced guarantees. The power relations between institutions do evolve in time, and so does the status of the individual vis-à-vis the state; therefore, shifting normative guarantees are serious possibilities. Out of a legitimate concern for secure rights-holding, should we not then check the existence of limits on interpretative developments? Or shouldn’t we perhaps develop an interest in the existence of procedural rights to influence the progressive development of interpretative compromise? Indeed, a study of such perspectives is in order because of a truth which proves hard to accept: our rights, especially our fundamental rights, are given a meaning that is closely linked to the relationship between the implementing political and administrative powers. Not only administrative capacities and relative power come into the picture here: dialogical relationships cannot be ignored either. For example, consider the lessons to be drawn from a study of compromise on rights in the process of writing down the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, in the Giscard d’Estaing convention (Bellamy and Schönlau 2004). The types of compromises that these authors considered were, roughly, as follows. First, the direct compromise between the rival views, which may assume the following forms: the negotiation of an acceptable in-between solution when the problem can be reduced to a matter of “more” and “less” according to one or several safely identified dimensions of consensus; or a negotiation for the sake of mutual benefit. In both cases, reaching a compromise can be facilitated by a focus on side transactions, even when the parties uphold incommensurable values. Consent to a certain “thickness” in the descriptions leads to deliberately ambiguous formulations. This is by no means a purely technical drawback of using ordinary language: it can be instrumental in reaching a compromise. Referring to issues

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met in the past may help the parties to find a compromise. Hence the relevance of the gradual development of a constitutional culture, serving as focal point for the coordination of political actors (Calvert and Johnson 1999). This shared culture can be informed by moral views: then culture and tradition can reach the status of a “public reason” more or less after the pattern of the kind of paradigmatic public argument which was at the heart of Rawls’s doctrine of political liberalism. Another well-documented type of compromise involves avoidance, and we may consider two main strategies. First, choosing distinct treatments for groups which have conflicting claims or interpretations. Alternatively, it is a matter of avoiding discussions about a given issue altogether, in order to seek agreement about something else, or with the aim of completely removing the issue from the agenda, through the use of devices meant at filtering the reasons and considerations which might possibly be taken into account. Dominant moral and political principles play a key role in such trimming operations (Picavet 2011). Referring to principles doesn’t boil down to a declaration of endorsement. It is effective when it comes to organising the competition between rival claims or divergent arguments. Part of this organisation process consists in making a number of claims inaudible in the first place, because they simply don’t fit the conceptual framework of the chosen principles. Liberal political principles and above all neoliberal economic principles probably play such a role in not-so-liberal political contexts. In most countries, it simply turns out that an important part of the population cherishes other principles. The resulting situation can be peaceful but it might also harbour what Jacques Rancière has called “la mésentente”, in which adverse claims are both listened to and out of reach (Rancière 1995). What might prevail, indeed, is a kind of instituted or stabilised misunderstanding in which the meaning of protest or disagreement is unclear, given the general setting of dominant discourse and legitimate controversy. Anguish over “populism” in contemporary liberal democracies arguably has to do with increasing difficulties to engage in decisive dialogue about issues which are antecedently amenable to definite solutions along the lines of the dominant doctrines which are influential in political and media circles. The call to a third party is another major method. A procedural route is chosen: given that we cannot agree on the substance, choosing the way to move ahead is left to an arbitrator. Compromise is then procedural in character and involves the institution of a specific power of arbitration. For example, in the case of the development of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Convention had to get to work in the presence of disagreements on both substantive issues relating to rights, and legitimate power relations between institutions. The bounds of the legitimate field of action of the European Union regarding citizens’s rights were unclear from the start and the nature of the exercise was unclear as a result: did it have to do with finding out the principles of a true and concrete European citizenship? Or simply with making things visible at the European level, starting from the national and international sources which are recognised by the EU institutions? The substance and the field of human rights were also under focus. What was it all about: civil and political rights only? Or alternatively, both economic and social

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rights? And if so, which ones? Notoriously, there existed contrasting views about the nature of rights: were they to be limited to procedural guarantees protecting formal equality, and obviously consistent with market logic? Or was it an occasion to favor the advancement of substantial guarantees after all – guarantees of such a kind that they could bring about a number of compatibility problems with respect to the basic proceedings of the market economy? Focusing on these issues, the study by R.  Bellamy and J.  Schönlau illustrates possible types of compromise on the significance of principles. For example, the compromise has taken the form of bargaining between supporters and opponents of strict social rights, art. 29 (concerning the guarantee of access to a placement service for workers) being obtained in exchange for the more liberal arts. 16 (right to run a business) and 17 (property prerogatives). Between supporters and opponents of a great extension of the powers of the Union, a compromise is also reached, with minimalist art. 51, which limits the application of the Charter to EU institutions and national institutions when they apply EU law, being exchanged for art. 52, in which on the one hand the scope of the mentioned rights may not be restricted under the principle of subsidiarity, and, on the other hand, this area cannot be more restricted than that provided by the European Convention on Human Rights. Real-world political stories show that compromises about basic principles are possible even in times of quiet and reflective politics. In addition to their moral significance, they also impact the power relations among institutions and between citizens and power holders. Beyond opportunistic arrangements, the gradual development of balanced compromise is not an easy thing, and this is somehow overlooked, owing to the predominance of the moral-consensus model in political theory, and the associated discarding of compromise, which is more often than not mixed up with a mere modus vivendi. Principle-based political discourse is made of principles but it also inevitably involves a reflection on the changing role of institutions and the development of their relations. If it were only moral, the right approach would be to try to determine the correct interpretation of the principles and then apply them. This would make good sense in theory but the real world is quite different from this purely cognitive scenario. In practice, there is a close interdependence between our reasoning on principles and our institutional reasoning on the relationships between powers. If it were only a matter of tactics veiled by ethics, it might be plainly immoral. What we find in real-world examples, though, is more complex and can hardly be accounted for in the language of cynical self-interest. Public life is structured by ethical principles; it is a matter of framework, not insiders’ tactics. This creates room for partly cognitive activities which have an impact of the interpretations and implementation schemes to be associated with moral principles. Correctness issues have a role to play in these activities even though the latter are neither purely moral nor exclusively cognitive in character. The perception of evolving relations between power holders is involved, quite clearly (alongside interests, partisan values and rightful or possibly wrongful perceptions of correctness in statements, interpretation and argument). Furthermore, the use of ethical principles in public life involves an explicit or implicit perception of pluralism and its proper role in public dialogue. Taking the

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differing viewpoints into account some way or other is a necessity. This is visible, for example, in public action in the advancement of a more satisfactory integration of the ethical dimension in sciences and new technologies. On the one hand, a common goal here is the strengthening of public dialogue about ethics. Of course, this might result in renewed doubts and misgivings. Hence a potential tension between this requirement and that other goal: promoting trust in science and technology in the general public. This kind of trust is quite generally thought of as desirable, in political and administrative circles at least, given the blessings associated with the general progress of science and technology (in an uncontroversial core of beneficial research at least). Encouraging researchers and the general public in their efforts to reach a good awareness of the ethical dimensions of scientific activities and innovative technological developments can only lead to the inclusion of a diversity of views and to the development of a critical attitude towards authoritative statements, it would seem. This might legitimately cause political or administrative concern. After all, when it comes to stability and harmony, what about gradually moving, through repeated dialogical exchanges, towards a single set of principles with their best interpretations, on the basis of moral analysis and technical expertise only? This might have some appeal when disagreement can be predicted to be moderate. Nevertheless, such a scenario is far from convincing in the presence of deep-rooted disagreement, which calls for institutional compromise on a reasoned and equitable basis, making full use of procedural agreement-building measures, instead of looking for a superficial substantial consensus, whenever we know for sure that no substantial consensus is reachable in the short run.

10.3  S  ome Benefits of Inclusion in a Pluralistic Process of Changing Interpretations: Dialogue, Reasoning and Feelings Recent political theories which focus on the value of disagreement about justice – see (Arnsperger 2002, 2004), (Arnsperger and Picavet 2004), (Bellamy 1999)  – must confront the challenges associated with encompassing different views and feelings which are present in society at a given time while making sure that one is able to take the very possibility of disagreement seriously, with all the obvious connections with a pretense at truth or validity in the claims about justice. In Justice Is Conflict, Stuart Hampshire has sketched a conception of the public debate which amounts to giving the old precept audi alteram partem a key role in the architecture of public ethics (Hampshire 1999). Bellamy (1999: 63) explained his own vision of compromise through an elucidation of the procedural requirements of balanced attention to conflicting claims. In solving conflicts between rights or between rights and other legal resources, an important normative benchmark is the actual weighting of various reasons in order

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to reach an agreement which cannot reasonably be interpreted as evidence of a lack of equal respect or equal concern. The attention paid to personal feelings naturally fits within this framework. The safest way to move ahead in this direction is to allow all groups in society to have a voice in civic life while making use of their own words and formulating their own perceptions. For practical purposes, how can we do justice to the various feelings and perceptions, sometimes antagonistic ones, which are present in society? One of the basic problems is the strength of certain feelings (of revolt, injustice …), which seems to make compromise difficult, for good reasons. No one should be induced to downplay his or her conception of justice, provided it is carefully and sincerely formulated – presumably, this should be a fixed point in political theory. Nevertheless, there is no denying that other facts must be considered, when it comes to understanding the resources for agreement in society. We must also consider the value given to political order as such, the logic of reciprocity and the various channels through which individuals and groups find a role and gain recognition in social procedures. In addition, the compromises which seem impossible about a given problem often become plausible when we consider a number of problems together, allowing for the possible reciprocal concessions. From this point of view, the benchmark liberal doctrines exhibit interesting features (Picavet 2006). Following a doctrine such as the one Rawls put forward in A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971/1999) and Political Liberalism (notwithstanding the important variations of the author on foundational issues in these two books) a proper recognition of the fact of pluralism must be accompanied by the recognition of a number of other facts (Rawls 1993). In particular, individuals should understand that conflicting and irreconcilable conceptions about things of value in human life are a permanent feature of any society in which freedom of thought and expression prevails. This holds even if doctrines of the good life are required to be reasonable. Rational persons should know that a shared commitment to a single comprehensive conception of the good life (or the external signs of what a sincere commitment would amount to) should not be exacted through the oppressive use of State power. This shared background knowledge is vital in the quest after a lasting social system which is based on a political conception of justice, which can be adopted by people who might have contrasting reasonable comprehensive doctrines. As a matter of fact, one may think that a fair amount of familiarity with the challenges, experiences and values of pluralism – through historical and philosophical education in particular – is likely to arouse feelings of attachment to the political procedures for themselves. Looking for justice should not lead us to underrate the importance of an issue which remains central in politics and civic ethics: may we take for granted the acceptance of the legitimacy of decision-making and interpretative procedures (and their upshots) by individuals who are unhappy with the proceedings or outcomes of such procedures? This issue makes reasoning and feelings equally relevant. Reasoning and feelings are de facto associated in the conditions of stability and social order. Indeed, the vulnerability of a tolerable social order to reasoned criticism is partly connected with the force of argument. Some conclusions are inescapable, for example “apart-

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heid cannot be accepted”, starting from very modest assumptions and any kind of social order which is unable to escape the related pieces of criticism is bound to be subverted now or later, some way or other, no matter the strength of traditional or local attachments. By contrast, other possible (more controversial) conclusions of moral reasoning are connected with dissent which does not inevitably lead citizens to weigh the existing reasons to act in such a way that active subversion is required. For example, death penalty, legal assisted suicide, the exploitation of animals, the destruction of valuable ecosystems etc. can be extremely abhorrent to some groups of citizens who are able to develop arguments in favor of their own conceptions. This, however, doesn’t usually lead citizens to believe that illegal action can be a justifiable means to fight the existing state of things. Feelings associated with the quality of social life can be valued and this valuing process gives reasons to refrain from engaging in highly divisive illegal action. Such is the case for feelings like patriotism and respect for the legitimate rules of the political community, the enjoyment of social harmony, a feeling of mutual trust in the value given by all to continuing argumentative experiences, the enjoyment of peaceful political experiences (taking part in regular elections for instance). Even though feelings should not be confused with moral reasoning, valuing the associated personal experience is a source of reasons which may have a role in the reasoned choice of actions. This provides a ground for believing that dissent isn’t automatically conducive to fearful social division and instability. The fear of instability should therefore not be considered sufficient as a ground for dismissing the consent to reasoned disagreement. As recalled by Mills (2000), the two questions answered by the theory of stability in Rawls’s liberal doctrine are: (a) is it the case that people who grow up in just institutions (in the sense suggested by the author) acquire a sense of justice which is normally sufficient to have them behave in a manner that respects the institutions? (b) is it the case that, given the general facts that characterise the public culture of a democracy (the fact of pluralism is one such fact), the proposed social structure may be the object of an overlapping consensus for reasonable comprehensive doctrines? The second question has to do with the justification of the basic principles and institutions. The first question has to do with the feelings of citizens. Answering the first question, C.  Mills suggested that intense attachment to institutions and political principles (or “wholehearted endorsement”) must come from the heart more than the head, and this  – according to her  – should commit us to paying attention to resources that are actually put to good use in the process of building a common life: history, culture and time (Mills 2000: 194). These remarks may support a critical perspective on the assumption of a required consensus on justice if society, or the political order, is to remain stable. All in all, it is far from clear that stability is or should be guaranteed by a moral consensus about principles of justice. Other candidates come to mind: many kinds of feelings which can play a positive role in the preservation of a tolerable social order, such as solidarity, kindness or the interest we take in harmonious – or at least acceptable – social life. Moreover, reasoning about the continuing competition of values or principles might play a role in the reasoned acceptance of a compromise situation which doesn’t really reflect a full-fledged consensus on principles. Different principles can

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be promoted by plural institutions simultaneously. This occasionally results in more or less stable patterns of axiological competition which certainly do not automatically lead to conflict. For example, controversies about the aims and types of higher education (for and against the traditional university model, for and against an active role of business in educational decision-making, for and against money-based admission strategies, etc.) aren’t typically solved through consensus; rather, they are associated with core features of the plurality of educational systems across countries and, more often than not, within each country. Quite clearly, this kind of pluralism is more difficult to accept when it comes to the fundamentals of a State structure, or the fundamentals of social life generally speaking. It should be noted, however, that the interpretative versatility of basic principles (Moor 2005) obliges us to consider a plurality of stabilised interpretations (and correlated practices) as a serious possibility. In spite of their heterogeneity, such argumentative resources may help address a number of issues which remain unsolved by and large in political theory. Is a fully consensual moral agreement on principles of justice really necessary for individuals to be expected to act in a way that perpetuates the stability of a society which reflects such principles in its basic structure? Given the fact that there is no consensus in pluralistic societies around the basic principles of justice in society after all (no consensus on social and economic rights for example), isn’t it surprising that liberal democracies are politically stable, and witness the continued development of a democratic political culture? To be sure, there is a serious presumption that institutions which are accepted for moral reasons are likely to be more stable, hence more durable. Consensual endorsement of common values is a cement of society and this cement is, more often than not, a precious resource for institutions; it makes it possible for individuals to realise that everyone abides by the rules for the right reasons. This is a resource for social stability; it should equally – maybe even more importantly – be viewed as a resource for the moral nature of this stability – not just a product of fear or the longing after sheer conformity, not just an armed peace, but a consensus among free persons. This provides reasons to value consensus as such for reasons other than the absence of instability, conflict or violence (Pogge 1989). Such reasons, however, need not lead us to underrate our collective ability to face, in a reasoned manner, the possibility of a real diversity in conceptions of justice (not just the good life). Nor should they be confused with hypotheses about the psychological bases of institutional or social stability. Rather, we might look at such reasons as reasonable statements about the way to structure a given kind of valuable experience or spiritual union, which may materialise or not at a given point in history. Accordingly, stability issues should be examined from a more empirical perspective. They need not be mixed up with moral issues in a systematic manner, even though moral endorsement is an integral part of the resources which can be put to use when it comes to explaining the effective implementation of principles or norms, or their usual effectiveness (“efficiency” in Kelsenian legal theory). This notional distinction between empirically associated facts makes it quite interesting to consider the reasons for the emergence of a stable modus vivendi in regions of social

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life which cannot be a priori associated with a full consensus on benchmark principles. Following the conclusions of Hershovitz (2000), a stable modus vivendi is likely to emerge when (1) the present situation represents a balance of powers; (2) the future is uncertain enough so that no group can be certain (or have a very good chance) to be able to dominate other groups; (3) the situation in which a group is dominated is deemed so bad by the members of this group that they are willing to sacrifice the opportunity to dominate others for the sake of avoiding this bad state of affairs. In pluralistic patterns, such a modus vivendi can be expected to emerge on the basis of enforceable limits to the coercive power of the State. Limits that incorporate liberal ideas, fundamental rights, the recognition of the principles of equality and tolerance are all-important here. In support of this understandable kind of processes, S. Hershovitz places hopes in the division of powers and the organisation of appropriate checks and balances, following a time-honoured tradition in American political thought (Hershovitz 2000: 225). Of course, a stable modus vivendi is a disappointing perspective for a political community. A more ambitious kind of union can be -and usually is – a matter of hope. Allowing for the existence of non-ethical stabilising mechanisms, however, isn’t just a contribution to the understanding of the dynamics of norms and the associated powers. It also epitomises important reasons to believe that pluralism in the fundamental regions of ideas about collective justice isn’t automatically threatening. It can be deplored and trying to overcome division in this respect is arguably a valuable moral enterprise. This, however, should not be confused with a factual diagnostic about the indispensability of a full-fledged consensus as a condition for a tolerably well-organised society.

10.4  Conclusion In all likelihood, the rational acceptance of moral disagreement about justice or the common good will not come to an end, no matter how inventive and persuasive theorists of justice are. Accepting the feelings of injustice and disagreement about the common good (or justice, or the general interest) may be an acceptable part of democratic life, rather than a failure of society to meet the standards of a well-­ organised society. This is not to say, however, that consent to the lack of moral alignment should be viewed as an incentive to uphold a purely mechanical view of what a well-organised society should be. Alternatively and more plausibly, a fair amount of missing moral alignment can be a fertile ground for continuing moral exchange and competition in argument and persuasion. It makes it necessary to take feelings of injustice seriously in a continuing manner and the same holds for argument about injustice. Sharing common principles with the appropriate interpretations is a great experience, like love and friendship, and it cannot automatically result from an ­appropriate

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set of conditions, even though we have good reasons to look for the best facilitating conditions. The reasoned acceptance of injustice for dissenting persons isn’t a transient anomaly: it is rather a permanent feature of democratic-pluralistic society. Hence the way to live with it is of moral significance in a moral community after all. It can – maybe it must – be based on a reasonable exchange of reasons, not just a submissive attitude with respect to politically legitimate power and coercion. Scaling up the value we give to reasoned compromise as such is a way to acknowledge the importance of this personal and collective task in a pluralistic society.

References Arnsperger, C. (2002, May). La philosophie politique et l'irréductibilité des antagonismes. Le Banquet, 17, 19–46. Arnsperger, C. (2004). The common good as a social compromise: Two conceptions of political negotiation. Ethique publique, 6(1), 79–87. Arnsperger, C., & Picavet, E. (2004). More than modus vivendi, less than overlapping consensus: Towards a political theory of social compromise. Social Science Information/Information on Social Sciences, 43(2), 167–204. Bellamy, R. (1999). Liberalism and pluralism. Towards a politics of compromise. London/New York: Routledge. Bellamy, R., & Schönlau, J. (2004). The normality of constitutional politics: An analysis of the drafting of the EU charter of fundamental rights. Constellations, 11(3), 412–433. Calvert, R., & Johnson, J. (1999). Interpretation and coordination in constitutional politics. In E. Hauser & J. Wasilewski (Eds.), Lessons in democracy. Rochester: Jagiellonian University Press/University of Rochester Press. Davion, V., & Wolf, C. (Eds.). (2000). The idea of a political liberalism. Essays on Rawls. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Hampshire, S. (1999). Justice is conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hershovitz, S. (2000). A Mere Modus Vivendi? In V.  Davion & C.  Wolf (Eds.),. Chap. 12 The idea of political liberalism: Essays on Rawls (pp.  221–230). Lanham/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Mills, C. (2000). “Not a Mere Modus Vivendi”: The basics for allegiance to the just state. In V.  Davion & C.  Wolf (Eds.),. Chap. 10 The idea of political liberalism: Essays on Rawls (pp. 190–203). Lanham/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Moor, P. (2005). Pour une théorie micropolitique du droit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Picavet, E. (2006). La doctrine de Rawls et le pluralisme comme modus vivendi. Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 237(3), 369–386. Picavet, E. (2011). La Revendication des droits. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Pogge, T. (1989). Realizing Rawls. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rancière, J. (1995). La Mésentente. Paris: Galilée. Rawls, J. (1971/1999). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (1993/1996). Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Index

A Abrams, P., 95 Actions, 2, 11, 22, 38–41, 43, 46–49, 54, 74, 93, 113, 125, 138 Addressees, 41–43 Addressers, 41, 43 Administration, 56, 61, 136, 137, 140 Administrator, 46 Advantage, 13, 16, 32, 55, 77, 94, 102, 125–132 Agents, 22, 24–31, 33, 37, 38, 43, 45, 49, 53, 58, 93, 103, 128, 131 Agreements, 3, 39, 40, 49, 59, 93, 94, 109, 126, 130, 135, 138, 140, 141, 143 Alienation, 55, 76, 93, 109–111, 115–119 Ambiguity, 74, 137 Answer, v, 9, 10, 18, 22, 40, 43, 48, 52, 62, 64, 82, 83, 85, 91, 93, 97, 100, 112, 114, 142 Argument, 4, 6, 10, 13, 17, 18, 26, 28, 65, 82, 86, 92, 96, 102, 120, 126, 129, 130, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141–144 Aristotelian principle, 67, 69 Army, 6 Assurance, 58 B Bad acts, 46 Basic institutions, 2, 3, 7, 87 Basic principles, 137–140, 142, 143 Bataille, G., 115 Beliefs, 4, 17, 22, 25–31, 33, 59, 97, 99, 118, 136, 137 Benefit cheats, 56, 62, 64

Bicchieri, C., 11, 58, 59, 70 Brexit, 130, 133 C Capital, 60, 107–121 Citizens, v, vi, 17, 24, 33, 52–57, 63, 64, 67, 69, 80, 85, 86, 88, 94, 95, 128, 129, 131–134, 138, 139, 142 Civil society, 60, 67 Claims, vi, 2, 3, 7, 10, 12, 17, 22, 29, 30, 32, 53, 54, 57, 60, 67, 75–77, 81–83, 86, 100, 111, 117, 134, 138, 140 Colleagues, 40, 41, 45, 46 Collective acceptance, 2–5, 23–25, 29 Collective actions, 4, 5, 97–105 Collective agents, 22, 24–29, 31 Collective epistemology, 25, 29–31 Collective intentionality, 23, 24, 27, 97, 98, 102, 118 Collective recognition, 23, 24 Collegial, 37–49 Commissives, 44 Commitment, 3, 25, 27–29, 31, 38–40, 47–49, 77–79, 98, 141 Communal mail service, 5, 6 Communication, 41–43, 64, 66, 69, 108–113, 116, 118, 120, 137 Community, v, 2, 4, 5, 7, 23–25, 42–44, 47–49, 53, 65, 68, 95, 102, 128, 142, 144, 145 Competition, 26, 93, 124, 132, 138, 142, 144 Compromise, 54, 135–145 Concessions, 141 Conflict, v, 59, 93, 124, 138, 140, 141, 143

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Index

148 Connection, 40, 42, 49, 53, 55–58, 60, 90, 96, 98, 104, 124, 140–142 Consensus, 29, 31, 54, 137, 140, 142–144 Constitutive rules, 2, 3, 5, 6, 23–25, 38 Context, 5, 13, 17, 26, 28, 40, 52, 53, 78, 90, 96, 102, 111, 136, 138 Contractualism, 74, 84 Cooperation, 13, 15, 16, 46, 52–56, 62, 64–66, 69, 70, 82, 88, 101, 102, 124–134 Coordination, 4, 5, 12–16, 54, 108, 137, 138 Corruption, 52, 60, 61, 78 Cultural institutions, 59, 61, 66 D Danto, A.C., 89 Debord, G., 110, 117, 119 Decent society, 52 Decision-making procedures, 55 Declaration, 3, 24, 44, 103, 138 Deontic powers, 2, 4–7, 23 Desire-independent reasons, 2 Disagreement, 54, 138, 140, 142, 144 Discretionary time, 68 Distress, 75, 80, 81 Distributive egalitarianism, 56 Division of labor, 6, 53 Documediality, 107–121 Documents, 42, 60, 96, 107, 109–112, 118, 136 Domenicucci, J., 120 Doueihi, M., 120 Duty of compliance, 84, 85 E Edmund, H., 41 Egalitarianism, 56 Endorsement, 136, 138, 142, 143 Engage, 16, 28, 30, 37–41, 43, 44, 46–49, 52, 55, 57, 59, 65, 76, 100, 101, 112, 117, 138 Engagement, 29, 37–49 Entity, vi, 3, 10, 16, 22–30, 37, 40, 41, 46, 94, 95, 97, 100, 124, 130 Epistemic agent, 28–31 collectivism, 22, 28, 30 individualism, 28–31 Epistemic responsibility, 30 Epistemic virtue of institutions, 22–33 Epistemic virtues, 22–33 Equilibrium/equilibria, 3–6, 11–16

Ethics, vi, 76, 77, 101, 136, 139–141 Ethos, 4, 5, 7 Euler, L., 117 Europe, 14, 61, 124, 128, 129 European Union, 124, 138 Extended social institution, 2, 3, 5–7 F Fairtrade, 127 Ferraris, M., 96, 107 Freud, S., 110 Functions, 2–7, 9–18, 23–26, 28, 31, 37, 41, 44, 46, 59, 61, 68, 80, 85, 92, 93, 103, 108, 112–114, 131 G Gage, 38, 44, 47, 48 Game, 11–14, 17, 46, 51, 52, 54, 70, 98, 101, 102, 115, 125 GDP, 129, 131 Germany, 60, 62, 104, 132, 133 Ghetto, 83, 85–87 Gilbert, M., 25–28, 30, 38, 39, 43, 45 von Goethe, J.W., 117 Group, 2, 12, 22, 37, 57, 78, 104, 118, 133, 136 H Harmful chemical, 74, 81–83 Hegel, G.W.F., 95, 113, 117 Heidegger, M., 114, 116 Hobbes, T., 55, 93, 94 Horizontal moral ties, 79 Horizontal trust and vertical trust, 53 Hospital, 2, 5, 6 Humanitarianism, 111, 129 Hume, D., 126 I Immigration, 130, 132 Impartiality, v, 27, 31, 127–133 Implementation, vi, 61, 63, 66, 67, 95, 99, 124, 135–137, 139, 143 Individual morality, 73–88 Inherent stability and imposed stability, 55 Inner acts, 41, 42 Institutional agency, 49 Institutional facts, 2, 4, 23, 46

Index

149

J Justice, v, vi, 18, 54, 79–87, 124–129, 135, 140–144

N Negative social act, 41, 43, 46, 47 Neighborhood public address system, 82, 83 Nietzsche, F., 75, 116 Nitsch, H., 117 Non-profit organizations, 2 Non-summativism, 25–29 Norm-governed social organizations, 6 Norms, vi, 3–5, 7, 25, 44, 54, 64, 70, 125, 126, 130, 143, 144

K Kant, I., 48, 91–93 Kinds natural, 16 real, 16

O Obligations, 23, 24, 27, 38, 39, 46–49, 62, 76, 77, 79, 81–83, 86, 87, 103, 125 Others, v, 10, 23, 37–40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 51, 74, 89, 107

L Labour, 111–112, 115, 116, 119, 121, 132 Lacan, J., 118 Leisure, 51–70, 118 Levi, P., 113 Liberalism, 107, 138, 141 Locke, J., 94 Loyalty, 77–79

P Participation, 76, 82 Persistent injustice, 86 Persons, 4, 30, 38, 52, 77, 93, 108, 125, 141 Piketty, T., 109 Plato, 32, 119 Pledge, 38, 44, 47, 48 Pluralism, 136, 139, 141–144 Plutarch, 32, 117 Political institutions, 51–70 Political participation, 54, 55 Political philosophy, 52, 54, 69, 73, 74, 93, 96 The poor, 49, 59, 80–81, 87 Powers, v, 2, 4, 7, 12, 17, 40, 46, 58, 60, 61, 66, 83, 86, 87, 91, 93, 94, 100, 102, 107, 114, 118, 120, 126, 127, 133, 134, 136–139, 141, 144, 145 Principles, 7, 13, 32, 53, 54, 67, 69, 74, 77, 79, 84, 135–140, 142–144 Private and social norms, 58 Proust, M., 117 Public life, 66, 139 Public university, 6

Institutional statuses and powers, 4, 7 Institutions, v, 9, 22, 37, 52, 73, 83, 96, 124, 136 Interpretations, 26, 100, 109, 136–144 Intersubjectivity, 40, 43

M Marconi, G., 112 Marginalized groups, 57, 64, 65 Marriage gay, 10, 17 same-sex, 10 Marshall Plan, 129 Marx, K., 107–117 Meaning, 29, 39, 46, 47, 55, 57, 67, 92, 98, 118, 136–138 Members, v, 3–7, 13, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25–27, 29–31, 33, 40, 44–47, 59, 61, 69, 70, 79, 82, 103, 125, 127, 128, 131, 144 Misunderstanding, 27, 138 Modus vivendi, 139, 143, 144 Morality, 59, 73–88, 111, 112, 114, 117 Morality of institutions, 73–88 Moral philosophy, vi, 73, 76 Moral reasoning, 142, 143 Moral standards, 52, 74, 75, 78 Mutual, 14, 42, 43, 54, 55, 57, 65, 66, 77, 88, 125–132, 137, 142 Mutually, 12, 13, 44

R Rawls, J., 55, 67, 77, 79–85, 87, 127, 128, 135, 138, 141, 142 Reciprocal, 39–41, 43–45, 47, 141 Reciprocity, 41, 43, 45, 53, 69, 86, 88, 127–129, 131, 141 Reforms, 10, 11, 13, 16–18, 61 Regulative rules, 2, 4, 5, 7

Index

150 Reinach, A., 41–43 Relational egalitarianism, 56, 57 Relationships, vi, 10, 13, 40, 49, 60, 61, 66, 80, 90–92, 96, 98, 103, 108, 110, 111, 116, 117, 129, 137, 139 Remorse test, 75 Rights, v, 2, 4, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 23, 38, 39, 42, 44–46, 53, 60, 76, 85, 90, 93–96, 100, 103–105, 120, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 136–140, 143, 144 Rights-exercising, 136 Robinson, E., 96 Rothstein, B., 52, 54, 57, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69 Rousseau, J., 125 Routines, 4, 6, 44, 67, 136 Rules, 2, 11, 38, 46, 52, 78, 91, 125, 142 S Schmitt, C., 96 Schools, 2, 3, 5, 6, 66, 132 Schopenhauer, A., 117 Scientific activities, 140 Searle, J., 2, 3, 5 Searle, J.R., 23, 24, 26–28, 97, 98, 111 Sennett, R., 118 Serious leisure, 68–70 Shameful revelation, 56, 62, 63 Significance, 37, 58, 80, 135, 139, 145 Smith, A., 127 Smith, B., 96 Social actions, 95 Social acts, 37, 38, 41–46, 108 Social capital, 59, 60 Social cohesion, 63 Social corporations, 2–7 Social epistemology, 22 Social inclusion, 52–57, 65, 66, 69 Social institutions, 2–7, 22, 33, 44, 59, 67, 83 Social intelligence, 66, 69 Social ontologies, vi, 4, 42, 97, 111 Social practices, 2–5, 7 Social reality, v–vi, 3, 89–91, 97, 107, 113–115, 119 Social skills, 66, 67, 69 Social trust, 51–70 De Soto, H., 109 Spengler, O., 109 Stability, 13, 55, 140–143 Stalin, 118 States, v, 2, 16, 22, 48, 52, 74, 90, 113, 136 Status functions, 2, 4–6, 23–25, 31 Summativism, 25–27 Surplus, 101, 125–127

T Theodor, A., 119 Theory of justice, 77, 81, 127, 135, 141 Threats, 74, 85, 136 Toast, 44, 47 Tokens, 11, 13–16, 76 Transgenerational actions, 90–105 Transgenerationality, 90–93, 96, 103–105 Trump, D., 133 Trust, vi, 33, 51–70, 78, 103, 120, 140 Tuomela, R., 3, 4, 6, 7, 26, 27, 46, 98–101 Types, 11, 13–16, 24, 30, 47, 64, 89–91, 94, 97, 99, 103, 126, 128, 137–139, 143 U Unions, 10, 16, 124, 128–133, 138, 139, 143 United Kingdom (UK), 124, 130–134 United States of American, 133 Universal and selective policies, 63–65 Universal basic income (UBI), 65, 69 Unjust institutions, 80, 83–87 V Values, 4, 15, 18, 40, 56, 58, 59, 74, 77–79, 82, 102, 109, 111, 116, 118, 119, 121, 128, 137, 139–143, 145 Variability, 137 Vertical normative force, 79 Victims, 83, 85–87, 115 Virtue epistemology, 29–31 W Wages, 127, 132 Wars, 42, 48, 52, 94, 108, 113, 115, 118, 124, 128–130 We, 44, 45 Web, 108, 110, 114, 120 Weber, M., 110 Welfare institutions, 52, 55, 60, 61, 64 Welfare states, 52, 55, 56, 60, 61, 63, 64 We-mode, 2–6, 45 We-thinking, 2, 6 Wieviorka, M., 120 Wolff, J., 56, 57, 124–134 Z Zuckerberg, M., 119