Collective Virtue

One might think that this fact alone provides prima facie evidence that there are collective virtues. Some writers working on collective responsibility have maintained the similar point that the sheer fact that we ascribe blame to groups as well as to individuals speaks in favor of the existence of collective responsibility. Cf. David Cooper, “Collective Responsibility,” Philosophy 43 (1968): 258–268 and Deborah Tollefsen, “The Rationality of Collective Guilt,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30 (2006): 222–239.

E.g. Reza Larhroodi, “Collective Epistemic Virtues,” Social Epistemology 21 (2007): 281–297 and Miranda Fricker, “Can there be Institutional Virtues?” in T. Szabo Gendler & J. Hawthorne (ed.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 235–252.

Ibid.

Fricker, “Institutional Virtues?”.

See Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (New York: Routledge, 1989) and “Belief and Acceptance as Features of Groups,” Protosociology 16 (2002): 35–69 and “Collective Epistemology,” Episteme 1 (2004): 95–107.

Fricker, op. cit., 238–239.

Ibid., 247.

Ibid.

For discussion, see Nicholas Sturgeon, “Contents and Causes: A Reply to Blackburn,” Philosophical Studies 61 (1991): 19–37 and Brad Majors, “Moral Explanation,” Philosophy Compass 2(1) (2007): 1–15. As these authors note, one worry about counterfactual tests for explanatoriness is that they do not apply to cases where there is explanatory overdetermination (hence the ceteris paribus clause). Well aware of this concern, these authors continue to employ such tests in cases where explanatory overdetermination is absent. It is instructive to note, in particular, that these authors employ the test in conditions paralleling those of this paper—cases where realized entities (moral properties) perform better on the test than their (non-moral) realizers.

For classical examples, see Hilary Putnam, “Psychological Predicates,” in W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill (ed.), Art, Mind, and Religion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), pp. 37–48 and Jerry Fodor, “Special Sciences: Or the Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis,” Synthese 28 (1974): 97–115. For more recent examples, see Kenneth Aizawa and Carl Gillet, “The Autonomy of Psychology in the Age of Neuroscience,” in P. M. Illari, F. Russo, and J. Williamson (ed.), Causality in the Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 203–223.

Fricker, op. cit.

Ibid., 241.

Ibid., 241–242.

Ibid., 242.

Fricker, op. cit., 243.

Cf. Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Ethics,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Available online at: http://​plato.​stanford.​edu/​entries/​ethics-virtue/​, 2012).

First, we disagree with Ziv’s view that the existence of institutions is dependent on their fulfilling duties. An institution can exist and have as its telos or unique function the fulfillment of some duty without that institution succeeding in fulfilling it, just as, on an Aristotelian conception, the same can be true of an individual. Second, we disagree that one cannot offer legitimate praise to those who are doing what is expected of them by nature. If this were true, one could only praise virtuous conduct when it is performed by those who have not yet obtained to virtue, since once one has attained to virtue, one’s performing virtuous conduct is “second nature”. Third, we think Ziv confuses what we should expect an institution to do qua particular institution with a particular design with what we should expect an institution to do qua institution simpliciter. On a conception of virtue like Foot’s discussed in the text, a trait’s being a virtue depends upon its relation to what is difficult for members of a kind in general, rather than on its relation to what is difficult for some particular member of a kind. It may then be that some institutions, like some individuals, find certain virtuous conduct comes easily, but nonetheless because such conduct is difficult for individuals or institutions more generally, it is still appropriate to consider such conduct virtuous.

Larhroodi, op. cit., 284.

See discussion in Hursthouse (op. cit.).

Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Hanover: University Press of New England and Brown University Press, 1987) and James Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993) and “An ‘Internalist’ Conception of Epistemic Virtue,” in Guy Axtell (ed.), Knowledge, Belief, and Character: Readings in Virtue Epistemology (Lanham, MD: Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, 2000), pp. 135–148.

Hursthouse, op. cit.

Sandin (op. cit.) stresses this feature of virtues, making it a key part of his defense of collective virtue.

Note also that overviews of virtue ethics typically say nothing about collective virtue. See, e.g., Hursthouse (op. cit.).