May I Treat A Collective as A Means

Forthcoming in American Philosophical Quarterly. Final, accepted version.

May I Treat A Collective As A Mere Means?

Bill Wringe, Dept of Philosophy, Bilkent University, ANKARA

Abstract: According to Kant, it is impermissible to treat humanity as a mere means. If we

accept Kant's equation of humanity with rational agency, and are literalists about ascriptions

of agency to collectives it appears to follow that we may not treat collectives as mere means.

On most standard accounts of what it is to treat something as a means this conclusion seems

highly implausible. I conclude that we are faced with a range of options. One would be to

rethink the equation of humanity with rationality. Another would be to abandon the

prohibition on treating as a means. The last would be to abandon literalist construals of

attribution of agency to collectives.

I: Introduction

Kant famously argued that it is morally impermissible to treat humanity merely as a

means to an end.i The formulation of the categorical imperative in which Kant expresses this

prohibition - the so-called formula of humanity – is widely held to be among the more

plausible and contentful of Kant's various formulations of the categorical imperative. ii

Furthermore, while Kant’s prohibition on treating others as a means - what I shall call,

following Samuel Kerstein, the ‘Mere Means Principle’, or MMP for short - may not exhaust

the full content of the Kantian duty to respect rational nature as an end-in-itself, MMP has

formed the basis of many of the most plausible attempts to show how we might derive some

substantive moral content from the formula of humanity. iii

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To understand MMP, we need to know two things: what counts as treating something

as a means, and which beings we are precluded from treating in this way. Many recent

discussions of MMP have concentrated on the first question. Here I shall be mostly

concerned with the second. I shall argue that if we understand the scope of MMP in the way

which many Kant commentators suggest, Kantians are committed to an implausible view

about our moral relationship to collective agents: the view that we may not treat collective

agents as mere means, even in situations where this would not involve treating any individual

agent as a mere means.iv

Since Kant tends to use the terms ‘humanity’ and ‘rational nature’ interchangeably,

we should not understand MMP as claiming only that it is impermissible to treat individual

human beings as mere means.v Many of Kant’s arguments about the specific duties which

agents owe to one another are grounded simply in considerations about what is required, and

what is owed to creatures with a capacity for rational agency, where rational agency requires

little more than the ability to set oneself goals and to pursue them.vivii For Kantians, the class

of rational agents need not be identical with the class of human beings. (This is one reason

why the notion of a person, rather than that of a human being, is often prominent in

discussions of Kantian ethics.)

However, one class of entities which many philosophers recognize as agents, and

which are not identical with individual human beings, is rarely discussed in this context:

collective agents.viii There are many kinds of collective agent. The class of such agents has

been taken to include both groups with some sort of formal organization such as states,

committees, and business corporations, and more informal groupings, such as pairs of friends

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going for a walk.ix Does the Kantian prohibition on treating humanity as a mere means apply

to agents of this sort? If, as Kant thinks, humanity and rational nature are the same thing, then

it is hard to see why it should not. If we take the prohibition seriously, and if we think

corporations are capable of rational agency it seems as though we are prohibited from treating

corporations as means to ends. This seems highly implausible.

One might suppose that treating a collective as a means to an end will always be

wrong if treating an individual agent as a means to an end is wrong simply because treating a

collective as a means to an end will require treating at least some of the individuals who

make up that collective as means to an end. In section VII, I shall argue that this need not be

true: there are actions which treat collectives as mere means but which do not involve treating

individuals as mere means.

If this is correct, we have a choice between a number of options. One is to

give up on either the formula of humanity or on the claim thatrationality and humanity are

interchangeable terms. Howeverthese claims seem to be central to Kantian ethics: it is not

clear whether a view of ethics which abandoned them could be regarded as Kantian in any

interesting sense. An alternative would be to treat the arguments advanced here as a reductio

ad absurdum of literal ascriptions of agency to collective agents. If collectives are not

genuine agents, they cannot be regarded as having a rational nature, and MMP is presumably

inapplicable to them.

Some readers may find this response attractive. I do not: I think that we should take

ascriptions of agency to collectives at face value.But there is clearly a price to be paid for

doing so.

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II: Collective Agency – Some Preliminaries

For most of this paper, I shall simply assume that at least some ascriptions of agency

to collective agents should be understood literally, and that when so understood at least some

of them are true. I have little to add to the substantial literature arguing for this view. Here are

some of the considerations which have been taken to count in favour of it. First, there are

many practical contexts, including moral, legal and political contexts where we do treat

collectives as agents in their own right, and where it is not obvious that we could reconstruct

these practices in ways which do not involve literal construals of agency without changing

them in significant ways. These practices include assigning blame,x assigning legal

responsibility and liability for punishment (at least within common-law based legal

systems),xi and assigning forward looking responsibilities both for remedying existing wrongs

and for preventing, or at least mitigating future ones.xii Furthermore, as List and Pettit have

argued there are important formal results which suggest that decision-making in collective

contexts is often best understood as involving decisions made by an irreducibly collective

agent: there are no straightforward rules that would enable us to move from descriptions of

collective behavior to descriptions of behavior at the individual level and vice versa.xiii

There are also good reasons for those who are attracted to Kantian accounts of

rationality and morality to be willing to countenance the possibility of literal ascriptions of

agency to collective agents. Kant's conceptions of rationality, morality, and even agency, are

typically taken to be purely formal. Those attracted to them seem to be in a poor position to

impose a priori restrictions on the kinds of things that could be agents.

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Many of the actions performed by individuals who are members of a collective are

not actions of the collective itself. A full account of collective agency needs to provide an

account of which actions can be attributed to a collective. Here, I shall follow Peter French

in taking it to be true that there is a class of collective agents – which I shall call corporate

agents – for which this problem can be solved by appeal to what French calls a 'Corporate

Decision Procedure'.xiv In general, a corporate decision procedure specifies that certain acts,

performed by individuals in specified circumstances, should count as acts of the corporate

agent. So for example, the corporate decision procedure may specify that particular

individuals – or individuals meeting certain conditions are members of the Board; and that

over a certain range of subject matters, decisions made by a majority vote of the Board

members are acts of the corporate body; that other actions performed by the Chief Financial

Officer are acts of the corporate agent and so on.

I shall rely on two points about corporate decision structures in what follows. First,

corporate decision structures may contain clauses which allow the corporate decision

structure to be amended in various ways. But not all corporate agents need to have corporate

decision structures which make this possible; and those that do need not allow for every

feature of the corporate decision structure to be changed. (So, for example, the corporate

decision structure of a charitable body might preclude the possibility of its being transformed

into a profit-making body.) Secondly, corporate decision structures may preclude a particular

corporate body from acting in particular ways, or in service of particular goals. Furthermore,

these features of a corporate decision structure may be among the ones that are not capable of

being amended. So there may be certain actions which a particular corporate agent is

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incapable of performing, and certain maxims which they are constitutionally incapable of

adopting.xv

III: Murder Inc.

Many people might take it to be intuitively obvious that there is nothing wrong with

treating collective agents such as nation-states, business corporations, or university

committees as mere means. A concern to treat such collective agents as ends in themselves,

independent of any concern we might have with treating individuals as ends in themselves

might initially seem to involve an unattractive kind of collectivist fetishism.xvi Reflecting on

the possibility of collective agents with predominantly evil purposes helps to bring out some

reasons why.

Consider one example of a collective agent which has predominantly evil purposes:

Murder, Inc., an organized crime syndicate which operated in the United States in the 1940s

and 1950s and which was responsible for over 1000 murders while operating a variety of

systems of racketeering and extortion.xvii Claudia Card has argued that we can see Murder Inc.

as an organization which can flourish and have interests. It also seems, at least initially, to be

a plausible candidate for being a collective agent. It is capable of having ends, taking means

towards these ends, and indeed of setting itself ends. Thus, for example, the bosses of Murder

Inc. might set themselves the goal of expanding their operations in California, and might take

this decision in such a way that it could be recognized as a goal of the organization. If this

characterization of Murder Inc. is correct, Murder Inc. is a rational agent. If so, it falls under

the scope of the Mere Means Principle.

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On some accounts of collective agency, Murder Inc. might not meet all of the

conditions for being a fully-fledged collective agent. Thus, for example, despite its name it

might be implausible to suppose that Murder Inc. had the kind of formally defined ‘corporate

decision structure’ which I described in Section II.xviii However it seems hard to think of any

compelling reason to deny that there could be a collective agent which had such a structure

but which had purposes that were just as nefarious as those of Murder Inc.

It seems initially implausible that there is anything wrong with treating Murder Inc.

as a mere means. This is particularly clear if we think that the claim that we should not treat

Murder Inc as a mere means entails that we owe the same kinds of duties to Murder Inc. as

we do to individual human agents. Consider something that Kant would regard as an

imperfect duty: the duty of benevolence. Even if Murder Inc. will go out of existence if it is

no longer able to make good on its debts to its hitmen, I am under no obligation to donate

money to its ‘Benevolent Fund’. In fact, I may well be under an obligation not to.

Suppose we have no obligation to avoid treating Murder Inc as a mere means. We

might think that this is because it has predominantly evil purposes. However, someone who

is attracted to MMP for Kantian reasons cannot easily appeal to the fact that Murder Inc. has

predominantly evil purposes to explain why there is nothing morally wrong with treating it as

a mere means. Notoriously, for Kant the fact that an agent has evil purposes on a particular

occasion does not normally exempt us from the duty to refrain from treating them as a

means.xix Indeed, there seems no reason to think that the fact that an individual human agent

had predominantly evil purposes would exempt them from the scope of MMP.xx So if we

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think that a collective agent's having predominantly evil purposes excludes it from the scope

of MMP but would not exclude individual human agents, we seem committed to a kind of

biological chauvinism which sits poorly with a moral theory which focuses on what we owe

to rational agents as such.xxi

So far, I have assumed that the claim that we should not treat Murder Inc as a mere

means entails that we owe the same kinds of duties to Murder Inc. as to individual human

agents. Someone might deny this, claiming that either the fact that Murder Inc. is a collective

agent, or the fact that it has predominantly evil purposes, or some combination of the two

means that the duties I owe it to Murder Inc in virtue of my obligation not to treat it as a mere

means do not include a duty of benevolence. To address this objection, we need a clearer

account of what duties the Mere Means Principle gives rise to and how it does so. This will

require us to scrutinize that principle more closely. In the next section, I shall look at three

accounts of what the Mere Means Principle requires. I shall argue that each of them has

implausible consequences, not just with respect to our treatment of collectives with evil

purposes, but with regard to our treatment of any collective.

IV: Treating as a Mere Means: Three Interpretations

Philosophers' views about what duties MMP entails will depend on what they take the

content of that principle to be. On one interpretation, known as the ‘End-Sharing’ account,

one agent treats a second as a mere means if the first agent’s action involves an end which the

second agent could not share.xxii On a second interpretation, known as the ‘Possible Consent’

account, an agent treats a second agent as a mere means when the first agent has as the

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maxim of their action something to which the second agent could not consent.xxiii Finally,

Samuel Kerstein has proposed a third account, which he calls the 'Revised Hybrid Account'

which he takes to be superior to both. I shall argue that each of these interpretations of MMP

has unacceptable consequences when applied to collectives.

The 'End-Sharing' version of MMP is not plausible as a constraint on our actions

with respect to collective entities. For many collective entities are formally constrained with

regard to the kinds of ends they may have. The University Promotions Committee may have

as one of its ends that the right kinds of individuals are promoted to responsible posts within

the university. It is not clear that it can share some of the ends which I might, quite

legitimately have when volunteering to sit on it – for example, that of satisfying my own

department’s service requirements.xxiv Indeed, it might be constitutionally precluded from

taking such matters into account when deciding who to co-opt to it. Under some regimes of

business law, business corporations are required to maximize shareholder profit. If so, they

are, by their very constitution, precluded from sharing many of the ends which I might have

in seeking employment with them. And whatever ends a nation may have in performing some

official act such as issuing me with a passport, it does not seem that my end of being able to

enjoy a pleasant and restful vacation is or could be one of them. xxv

If the End Sharing interpretation of MMP is correct, I treat a collective as a means

when I sit on the University Promotions Committee to satisfy my department's service

requirements; when I seek employment in order to keep body and soul together, or when I

apply for a passport to go on vacation. It seems highly implausible that any of these actions

are, in and of themselves morally problematic. So, if the End Sharing account of MMP is

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correct, there are occasions on which I may permissibly treat a collective agent as a mere

means.

Someone might argue that this account of the ends which collective may have is too

restrictive. Perhaps a collective may be said to 'share' an end with me if it acts in ways which

facilitate my performance of that end, or when it permits me to pursue that end rather than

hindering my pursuit of it. We might hold, in other words, that a collective agent should be

taken to share an end with an individual provided that it is so constituted as to be able to

permit the individual to pursue this end. If so, the End-Sharing account collapses into a

version of the Possible Consent account, which I discuss next. xxvi

Whatever ends committees, business corporations, and nation states might be capable

of having, they can presumably, consent to people sitting on them to fulfill service

requirements, promote the welfare of their families and enjoy restful vacations. Nevertheless,

the 'Possible Consent' interpretation of MMP also has counter-intuitive consequences. Just as

collectives may be formally constrained in respect of the ends which they can have, they can

also be constrained in respect of the sorts of things which they can consent to. Thus, for

example, a committee or corporation might be constrained by its own rules from consenting

to its own dissolution, or from permitting women to sit on the board, or from changing the

corporation’s name. But it is not clear that individual would be acting wrongly in seeking to

bring about any of these ends.

Samuel Kerstein has argued that neither the ‘End-Sharing’ account nor the ‘Possible

Consent’ is a satisfactory interpretation of the Mere Means Principle. He has proposed an

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account which he calls the ‘Reinforced Hybrid’ account. xxviiAccording to this account one

agent treats a second agent as a mere means if

1) it is not reasonable for the first agent to believe that the second agent can either

consent to the first agent’s use of him or share the end he is pursuing in using him

and 2) it is not reasonable for the first agent to believe that what prevents the second agent

from sharing his end is that the second is using someone else in pursuing an end, and

it is reasonable for the second agent to believe neither that this person can consent to

the other’s use of him or share the end that the second person is using him.

This second clause is somewhat baroque. Kerstein includes it because he thinks that a

plausible version of MMP should not preclude someone coercing another agent in order to

prevent them from treating a third agent as a mere means – as, for example, in a case where I

engage in deception to prevent a murder.. (Some might regard this provision as alien to the

spirit of Kant’s principle, but this is not ou concern here).)

Kerstein’s account also seems to rule out behavior with respect to collectives which

is entirely unobjectionable. Consider once again the case of the committee which is formally

precluded from seeking its own dissolution. It may be both precluded from consenting to this

and from having it as an end. On Kerstein’s interpretation of the Mere Means principle,

trying to bring about the dissolution of the committee would involve a contravention of the

Mere Means Principle. However, it is hard to agree that this is really morally impermissible.

V: Humanity As Rationality – An Objection

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So far I have assumed the correctness of what Richard Dean has called the ‘standard

interpretation’ of Kant’s notion of humanity, on which humanity is equated with a fairly

minimal set of rational capacities.xxviii However,Dean argues that when Kant talks about

‘humanity’, he has something more than mere rationality in mind. What he really has in mind

is the good will.

Dean makes his case in the following way. Famously, Kant holds that the only thing

which is good without qualification is the good will. If we suppose that something can only

be an end-in-itself if it is good without qualification - something which seems initially

plausible – then Kant seems to be committed to the view that only the good will can be an

end-in-itself. xxix

Call this the ‘Good Will’ interpretation of humanity. If it is correct it suggests that we

are under no obligation to respect agents who do not have a good will. This aspect of Dean’s

view may seem particularly appealing in the current context. If we can hold that we are not

obliged to treat agents who lack a good will as ends-in-themselves, this might allow us to

escape commitment to the view that we ought to treat Murder Inc. as an end-in-itself. (An

alternative – perhaps more plausible - formulation on which we are required to treat as ends-

in-themselves agents which have a capacity for having a good will would not help us in this

way. For we might think that Murder Inc has the capacity for having a good will: perhaps it

is capable of being transformed, over a process of many years, first into an organization that

concentrates on defending the legitimate business interests of its members in legitimate ways,

and then into an organization primarily concerned with benevolent purposes, such as

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providing legal representation for wrongly-accused members of communities which are

disproportionately targeted by corrupt law-enforcement agencies and so on.xxx)

However, it is not clear that the ‘Good Will’ interpretation can really help us in this

way. It seems to suggest that we can tell lies, break promises and otherwise manipulate other

agents, provided they do not possess a good will. As Dean admits, this all seems highly

unKantian. He suggests that we can rescue the ‘Good Will’ interpretation from its apparently

unKantian implications regarding the treatment of other individuals by relying heavily on the

fact that, as Kant thinks, we can’t know very much about the quality of another agent’s will.

So, for example, the reason that on Kant’s view we cannot lie to, break promises to, or

otherwise manipulate an evil agent is that we can never be sure that we are dealing with such

an agent.xxxi

This kind of skepticism about other people’s motives seems implausible .xxxii It is also

hard to see why reasons for thinking that we cannot be sufficiently sure of the purposes of an

individual agent to be justified in being confident that they lack a good will would not also be

reasons for being equally skeptical as to whether we could correctly judge the quality of the

will of a collective agent. (The purposes of collective agents will often depend in significant

ways on the features of human beings which the account proposed suggest are inaccessible to

us). If this is correct, we cannot find a way of making Dean’s account plausible without

leaving the problems raised by Murder Inc unsolved.

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A second, less Kantian line of argument would start, not from the idea of a collective

belief, but that of a collective emotion. Margaret Gilbert has argued that groups can be the

subjects of collective emotions, including the emotion of remorse.xxxiii It is plausible that an

agent that has a capacity for remorse must have a capacity to grasp that it is an agent and that

it is responsible, morally, for its actions. It is also plausible that an agent which can see itself

as being morally responsible for its actions should see itself as having duties.

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VII: Collectives and Their Members

We might think that if it is wrong to treat individual agents as a mere means, it must

also be wrong to treat collectives as a means, on the grounds that treating a collective as a

mere means must involve treating some of the individuals who belong to it is a mere means.

However, treating a collective as a mere means need not involve treating the individuals that

make it up as mere means.

Start by considering the ‘end-sharing’ interpretation of the Mere Means principle. I

argued in section III that there are many kinds of ends which seem, intuitively, to be perfectly

morally acceptable, but which certain kinds of collective might be incapable of sharing,

simply because of the way in which they are constituted. Thus for example, I claimed that it

is morally permissible for me to apply for a passport with the end of enjoying a restful

holiday, while the British state is logically precluded from doing so; and it is morally

15


permissible for an individual manager to have as their end the promotion of the well-being of

their employees, even though the corporation may not legally have this as their end.

If these actions are morally permissible, then they will presumably not involve

treating any individuals as a means. So, on the End Sharing account I can treat a collective

body as a mere means without treating any individual as a mere means. And this seems to be

confirmed by further reflection: there does not seem to be anything about either of the ends

which I have discussed here which would preclude them from being shared by other

individuals.

On the Possible Consent account, matters are more complicated. On this account an

agent treats a second agent as a mere means when the first agent has as the maxim of their

action something to which the second agent could not consent. I shall argue that it does not

follow from the fact that a collective could not consent to the maxim of some agent’s action

that individuals who make up the collective could not each consent to it.

In order to defend this claim, I shall put forward an account of what it is for a

collective to consent to something which draws on Margaret Gilbert’s work on collective

action.xxxiv A key notion in Gilbert’s work is that of joint commitment. Roughly speaking a

group of individuals can be jointly committed to a certain proposition or course of action if

they each take it that they are committed to it as a body. On Gilbert's account a group of

individuals could consent, jointly, to be treated in a particular way if they agree that they

should be treated, collectively in that way.

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On Gilbert’s account there can be differences between what individuals are jointly

committed to and what each of them is individually committed to. In particular, I can take it

to be acceptable for myself and other members of a group to be treated in a certain way but

refrain from entering into a joint commitment to allow this. Furthermore, I might find reasons

for acceding to a joint decision for a group of which I am a member to be treated in a

particular way, even if I would not agree to be treated in that way myself. xxxv

A group of individuals might each individually be convinced that the treatment was

appropriate, while being unable to express a collective commitment to that view. For

example, each individual in the group might take themselves to be morally required - by

means of a previously given promise - to act in ways which served the interests of the other

individual members of the collective body. So the collective could be treated in ways to

which it was unable to consent without any of the individuals in question being unable to

consent to being treated in this way. In this situation it seems that the collective would be

treated as a mere means without any individual being treated as a mere means.

Here is a more concrete example. A corporate body might, for formal reasons, be

unable to consent to its own dissolution. For example, such a possibility is ruled out by its

articles of association). It would not follow from this fact about the corporation that anyone

involved in the corporation should be incapable of consenting to its being wound up. ()

Finally, consider Kerstein’s ‘Reinforced Hybrid’ account. Notice that any behaviour

which is ruled out by the first clause of this account must be ruled out either by the End-

Sharing account or the Possible Consent account. We need to find some kind of behavior

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which falls foul of both the end-sharing and possible consent conditions for a corporation,

and which involves ends that individuals can both share and consent to. We also need a case

where the second clause does not come into play.

It seems both that the corporate dissolution case fits these constraints. Notice how it

satisfies both parts of the first clause: the corporation cannot have as its end its own

dissolution; nor can it consent to it. What prevents it form doing so is its constitution, not the

fact that it is treating someone else as a means to an end. So this counts as treating the

corporation as a means to an end on Kerstein’s account. But it does not seem to involve

treating any individual in a way which involves an end which they cannot share, or a maxim

which they cannot consent to.

VII: Conclusion

Implausible consequences follow if we accept Kant’s ‘Principle of Humanity’, think

that it forbids us to treat rational agents as mere means, and are serious about the idea that

collectives can be rational agents. What conclusions might we draw from this? There seem to

be two alternatives. One would be to conclude that we should not be literalists about the

attribution of agency to collectives. Some Kant scholars - such as Onora O’Neillxxxvi -have

suggested this, talking of corporations and states as being mere ‘secondary agents’; and it

may have been Kant’s own view. But given that Kant wants to allow personhood to

individuals in ways that depend only on their rational nature and not on the details of how

that personhood is instantiated, this seems uncomfortably ad hoc: it seems to involve what

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we might regard (by analogy with the term ‘speciesism’) as an unmotivated kind of

‘individualist chauvinism’.xxxvii

A second response, which might seem more appealing to those who are not

independently committed to Kantian positions in moral theory, would be to abandon the

Principle of Humanity, or at least MMP. This need not involve saying that it is acceptable to

treat human beings as mere means. Instead it would involve saying that our duty not to do so

was grounded in something other than simply our rational nature. This would then raise the

question of what, other than our minimally rational nature, the relevant feature of human

beings might be. But that is matter for a future enquiry.xxxviii

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i Kant 1785/1992

ii Dean 2006 pp1-2

iii Wood 2007, Nelson 2008

iv One might be skeptical as to whether such cases are possible. I argue that they are in section VII .

v In the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant tells us that ‘the capacity to set oneself an end - any end

whatsoever – is what characterizes humanity.’ (Kant 1797/1996). See Kerstein 2008, Kerstein 2009,

p165. Dean claims that ‘the standard view’ among Kant commentators is that “ ‘humanity’ refers to

some minimal feature or feaures of rationality necessarily possessed by any rational agent.’ (Dean

2006 pp18-19) I discuss Dean’s own, non-standard view in Section IV below.

vi As Kerstein 2008 also points out.

vii Nelson 2008 has a similar formulation.

viii Kutz 2000 is a rare exception.

ix French 1984, Gilbert 1989, Pettit 2007, Pettit and List 2011, Hess (forthcoming). Note that on all

of these accounts, collective agents have the capacity to set themselves ends, as Kant requires.

x Tollefsen 2003

xi Wringe 2012, Wells 2001

xii Miller 2007

xiii List and Pettit 2011

xiv I take there to be a number of different kinds of collective agency, but that corporate agency of this

sort is a useful one to think about in this context.

xvOf course, the individuals who make up a particular collective body might decide to constitute

themselves as a corporate body, with a different corporate decision structure. My claim is that in

doing so, they would constitute a different collective agent. In other words I am claiming that the

corporate decision structure plays a role in individuating this kind of collective agent. The idea that

the same individuals might constitute two distinct corporate agents is not a new one. See eg Sheehy

2006

xvi Some early analytic discussions of collective responsibility and collective agency – for example

that of Lewis 1948 - seem to be animated by a sense there is something morally problematic about

such a notion. One element in such discussions is an unease with the idea of a distributive notion of

xxvii Kerstein 2009

xxviii Dean 2006

xxix Frierson 2007 Glasgow 2007

xxx I am grateful to an anonymous referee for American Philosophical Quarterly for a comment

which prompted this clarification.

xxxi Dean 2006 chapter 5

xxxii Frierson 2007 suggests that it is also implauible to see Kant as having this view.

xxxiii Gilbert 2001

xxxiv Gilbert 1989

xxxv Gilbert 1989

xxxvi O’Neill 2001

xxxvii As one referee pointed out, this unmotivated individualist chauvinism, might, under the title of

'normative individualism' be taken to be a central tenet of liberalism. While I am sympathetic to

some forms of liberalism, my point still stands: if, like Kant, we take agency to be what is most

central to personhood, then normative individualism seems unmotivated. The moral, which I draw

tentatively, would appear to be that liberals should see normative value as deriving from more than

just agency.

xxxviii I am grateful to Henry Richardson for encouraging me to pursue this topic and to audiences at

the Joint Session of the Mind Association and Aristotelian Society at Stirling in 2012 and at a Work

in Progress seminar at Bilkent University in 2013, as well as to Sandrine Berges, Frank Hindriks,

Kendy Hess, Kourken Michaelian, Mark Steen, Lucas Thorpe, Lars Vinx and Mike Wheeler, an

anonymous referee for American Philosophical Quarterly, and the editor John Greco for comments

and suggestions which have helped me improve the paper.

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May I Treat A Collective as A Means