Constituted Group Agents

Carolina Berrutti Bartesaghi

University of Vienna

It is generally accepted that agency requires materiality, since action must originate somewhere. In group agents, this implies that they are agential material objects rather than hovering, mind-like entities (Hess 2025). In this paper, I argue that the material existence of group agents can be best explained through a constitution relation between a group and its members that is strictly non-mereological.
First, I argue against Collins (2023) that her mereological account of group agents cannot successfully explain the relation between a group and its members because it fails to meet the non-transitivity desiderata of group agents. I subsequently show how this critique can be generalized to all mereological proposals (Hawley 2017; Hansson Wahlberg 2014) since the transitivity of parthood is one of the key features of a mereological relation.
Secondly, I argue that the existing constitution accounts of group agents either fail to identify the correct material object from which the action of a group originates by confusing it with the institutional-legal location (Epstein 2015; Hindriks 2013; Uzquiano 2004) or account for it through mereological views of constitution, which run into the same aforementioned problem of transitivity (Harris 2020).
I conclude that my constitution account of the material existence of group agents, developed from Baker’s (2000) account of material constitution, is the most explanatorily successful, as it can preserve the non-transitivity of group agents. Providing the group agent with a physical location further grounds the idea that action can originate from the group agent itself rather than its members. This has major consequences for responsibility attributions to group agents since they are plausibly responsible for their actions independently of their members.

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