Multi-judge courts may seem like paradigmatic examples of group agents. For instance, they issue decisions in the name of a group. Like other groups, courts arrive at these decisions by means of a vote that is not always unanimous. Unlike other groups, courts do not need a majority vote to issue a decision. Plurality judgements can occur, where the court’s decision is formed by multiple sets of reasons, none of which represents a majority of the judges. These show that a court’s decisions on issues and outcomes are distinct. Minority reasons may influence the state of the law on a particular issue if they agree with another set of reasons. This allows the court to preserve decision-making both on outcome and on premises. The result is that Kornhauser and Sager’s doctrinal paradox, sometimes called the discursive dilemma, is not the same for courts as it is for other group agents.

Human beings are a highly social species, and there are neural systems that have a role in enabling human beings to function as the social animals they are. They connect people into smaller or larger social groups; and at least some of these groups have a unity that lets the united human beings function as one. That this is so has implications for an array of philosophical and theological issues, including the notion of a people, the concomitant notions of a people’s communal guilt and communal shame, the notion of the church as the body of Christ, the understanding of human perfection as a likeness to a triune God, and many other such issues. What is required to elucidate these issues is a metaphysics that can explain the nature of a united something-or-other that includes human persons as constituents. This article explores these issues and outlines the nature of the needed metaphysics.

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents.

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: (1) the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; (2) the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative.

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts.