On What Makes a Social Group a Group Agent

Abstract

Thriving philosophical disputes in social ontology revolve around the question as to whether social groups can be agents. In this article, I contend that if there is something that can turn a social group into an agent, then that something must encompass the group’s ontological structure. The point is made by connecting Ritchie’s structuralist ontology (2018) with a widely received account of group agency proposed among others by List and Pettit (2011). If the argument is convincing, structuralism offers a helpful framework for vindicating realism about group agency and provides the tools to individuate agentive properties of different kinds.