Collectivity

Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice

Kendy M. Hess, Violetta Igneski, Tracy Isaacs

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786606327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice brings new voices and new approaches to under-developed areas in the philosophical literature on collectives and collective action. The essays in this volume introduce and explore a range of topics that fall under the more general concept of collectivity, including collective ontology, collective action, collective obligation, and collective responsibility. A number of the chapters link collectivity directly to significant issues of social justice. The volume addresses a variety of questions including the ontology and taxonomy of social groups and other collective entities, ethical frameworks for understanding the nature and extent of individual and collective moral obligations, and applications of these conceptual explorations to oppressive social practices like mass incarceration, climate change, and global poverty. The essays draw on a variety of approaches and disciplines, including feminist and continental approaches and work in legal theory and geography, as well as more traditional philosophical contributions.

Part I

Ontology

Chapter 1

Social Creationism and Social Groups

Katherine Ritchie

Social groups, like gender and racial groups, teams, committees, and ­legislative bodies, seem to be the sort of things that are created by us. If there were no humans,¹ we didn’t act in particular ways, or we didn’t have certain kinds of attitudes and intentions, there would be no such groups. Given that social groups depend on us (in some sense or other), one might take the following thesis to be true:

Social Creationism: All social groups are social objects created through (some specific types of) thoughts, intentions, agreements, habits, patterns of interaction, and practices.

Here I argue that not all social groups come to be in the same way. This is due, in part, to social groups failing to share a uniform nature. I focus on two rough classes of groups. The first, which I call “feature social groups,” include racial, gender, sexual orientation, and other groups that involve sharing (or being taken to share) some features.² Feature groups, I argue, are social kinds. They either falsify Social Creationism or are created but in an easy way as byproducts of property instantiations. The second, which I call “organized social groups,” include groups such as teams, committees, courts, and clubs.³ They are objects that are socially created in the way Social Creationism requires.

I adopt the distinction between objects and properties (i.e., the particular-universal distinction).⁴ Notice that Social Creationism is a thesis about objects. If kinds are properties or clusters of properties (the two dominant views of the metaphysics of kinds), groups that are social kinds falsify the thesis. However, this is not to arbitrarily stack the deck. For, I argue that even if kinds are objects, they come to be in a way that is distinct from and “easier” than the way organized social groups are created. The difference is not just relevant to metaphysical inquiry. It helps to explain why some groups seem to be natural and others do not and why some groups often come to be without people (collectively) intending for them to exist, while others do not (or do so less often). It is also part of the explanation as to why certain sorts of groups are widespread and persistent (e.g., racial groups) while others (e.g., a graduate admissions committee) are not.

To keep track of the distinction between the ways objects and properties depend on social factors, I adopt the following terminological conventions. I reserve “social creation” for claims about objects (i.e., particulars) coming to be through beliefs, intentions, practices, and so on. I use “social construction” for the claim that properties (i.e., universals) come to be through beliefs, intentions, and so on.

The chapter is structured as follows. I sketch a view of feature social groups as social kinds (Section 1). I then (Section 2) examine three views of natural kinds, outline social analogs, and consider whether feature groups (so understood) are socially created. I argue that they are not on two of the three approaches and that on the third approach, while they are created, it is only derivatively. They are just the extensions of social properties. Next, I sketch a view of organized groups as structured wholes (Section 3). I argue that organized groups are socially created in a robust sense (Section 4). Finally, I draw concluding remarks (Section 5).

Before proceeding, notes on the complexity of the categorization of groups and on connections to other arguments are needed. Brian Epstein has convincingly argued that social groups vary along multiple dimensions.⁵ While I take groups within a class (e.g., groups that are in the class of organized groups) to share a general ontological status, I do not require that they all share a highly specific nature. Moreover, while here I discuss two classes of groups, I do not commit to the view that all groups can be classified as either feature or organized groups. In addition to teams, courts, races, and genders, there are non-human animals groups (e.g., pods of dolphins and herds of elephants) and groups of inanimate entities (e.g., books in a library and food groups). There are also human groups such as communities, crowds, queues, and mobs. There might be many classes of social groups and groups more generally. Part of my aim here is to shed some light on the massive complexity of the social world by revealing some of the complexity of a small portion of social reality.

Others have made the point that some social entities are intentionally created, while others come to be in a derivative sense. For instance, Amie Thomasson has argued that some social entities are intentionally created, and others are byproducts.⁶ She argues that laws and corporations are things that are intentionally created, while class systems, gender bias, and economic recessions are byproducts that are, as she puts it, “generated, rather than created or constructed.”⁷ Raimo Tuomela takes states of inflation and pollution to “belong to social artifacts broadly understood” but takes these to be derived in a way that can be unintended and unanticipated.⁸ John Searle holds that there are “systematic fallouts” (e.g., recessions) that are at the “macro” level.⁹

The examples Thomasson, Tuomela, and Searle offer all involve systematic patterns or events. They do not consider the question of whether groups could be “generated” in this way. Groups might depend on broad social patterns, but groups themselves are far more entity-like than economic cycles or class discrimination. Social groups can be parts of events. For example, two teams might play a game. However, groups are not identical to events. The arguments I offer here differ from those that have come before in focusing squarely on entities that are neither events nor processes or patterns. Given the important roles social groups play in our lives and their centrality in social and political debates, a direct examination of the ways social groups come to be is called for.

1. Feature Groups as Social Kinds

As the name suggests, membership in a feature group seems to require sharing (or being taken to share) one or more properties or features. Someone’s being a member of a feature group is also often used to infer that the individual has other features. For example, if I find out that the candidate I am scheduled to interview is a woman, I might infer that she will be wearing makeup and will carry a purse rather than a briefcase. These features might not be part of what it is to be a woman but features that are commonly associated with women given broader social norms and practices. Depending on the particulars of the view, the metaphysics of feature groups may also help to explain stereotypes operative in making additional inferences, as for example one drawing the inference from the interviewee being a woman to the conclusion that she will be good at organizing departmental events.¹⁰ These conditions can be formulated more generally as follows:

Membership in Feature Groups: Someone, x, is a member of feature group G just in case x has (been socially assigned) features associated with G.¹¹

Feature Group Induction: If x is a member of feature group G, it will often be inferred that x has additional features F associated with G.

Membership in Feature Groups and Feature Group Induction are strikingly similar to conditions often given for natural kinds. Natural kinds are usually taken to be characterized by some essential or defining feature(s) and to factor in inductive inferences. For instance, water might be characterized by the feature of being composed of H₂O. That some particular sample is water might figure in inferences about its boiling and freezing points.

While one might hold that feature social groups are kinds, they do not seem to be paradigmatic instances of natural kinds. Some natural kinds, like H₂O, might have shared intrinsic (i.e., internal and non-relational) essences, but social feature groups plausibly do not. There is, for example, no genetic material that all and only Blacks share. If one holds that a shared intrinsic essence is necessary for a kind to be natural, feature social groups are not natural kinds. Further, while being a member of a feature social group might figure in inductive inferences, the conclusions drawn are often unreliable and can be normatively dangerous in ways inferences from something’s inclusion in a natural kind are not. The example involving the woman job candidate above provides one instance of an unreliable and potentially oppressive inference involving a social kind. How to understand naturalness is contentious, but these disanalogies between paradigmatic natural kinds and paradigmatic feature social groups provide reason to hold that feature groups are not natural kinds.¹² However, the similarities between feature groups and kinds made manifest by the conditions above should not be overlooked.

To account for the similarities and differences, we should take feature groups to be social kinds.¹³ The features associated with social kinds do not “cut nature at its joints”; social kinds are not nomologically necessary. Rather, social kinds are kinds with membership or instantiation conditions that depend on social factors such as social behavior, patterns of action, habits, beliefs, intentions, processes, practices, activities, rules, laws, norms, and arrangements.¹⁴ The intensions (i.e., membership conditions) of feature groups could depend on social factors in two distinct, but not mutually exclusive, ways.

First, our practices and intentions might be used to count the possession of some natural non-socially dependent properties as those that specify membership in some feature group. For example, levels of skin pigmentation and having XX chromosomes are properties that are not constitutively dependent on our intentions or practices. They are properties that are “out there” in the world. Our practices and beliefs could classify (or “count”) these as the properties required for being a member of a feature group and endow them with further features (e.g., norms or statuses).

Mari Mikkola’s trait/norm covariance model of sex and gender “counts” non-socially dependent properties as social kind properties in this way. She takes descriptive traits to describe “the way the world is.”¹⁵ Descriptive traits include, for instance, physical traits, features of one’s appearance, that one engages in particular tasks, and that one calls oneself a woman. Evaluative norms, on the other hand, are stereotypical judgments that reflect values and norms of a culture. Descriptive traits and evaluative norms are linked or co-vary due to social views. Mikkola states that “although it is a mind-independent feature of reality that Jane wears makeup, that Jane acts in a feminine way because she wears makeup is mind-dependent.”¹⁶ Societal views are what “count” Jane’s wearing makeup as feminine or womanly.

Second, social practices and intentions might construct properties that determine feature group membership.¹⁷ On this picture, natural features might help to guide our ascriptions of social kind membership, but the properties that ultimately define membership in a feature group are constitutively dependent on social factors. They might d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: Ontology
• PART II: Ethics
• PART III: Social Justice
• Index
• About the Contributors