Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 00:20:29 -0700 (PDT) From: LH Engelskirchen <lhengels-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: BHA: ontology of common purpose A couple of months ago I raised a question about the status of corporate entities or groups within the ontology of critical realism. I'd like to push that question further. RB says there are structures on the one hand which are reproduced or transformed but do not purpose or intend, and agents on the other, which do purpose or intend: the garbage person's reasons are not (normally) the reason garbage is collected. Social life generates structures of waste production and its disposal. Such structures, which exist only through the activity of individual agents, provide positioned practices within which a particular agent fits. The agent, pursuing his or her own purposes, acts intentionally and in so doing reproduces the structures of waste disposal. My question concerns WASTE MANAGEMENT, LTD., INC. Is the company a structure or an agent? WMLI presumably exists to make a profit, in fact by law it owes a duty to its shareholders to maximize profits. As such it is what Marx called a "traeger" or bearer of the economic relation of capital. Capital is surely a social structure. But WMLI does all sorts of intentional things like buying new trucks, laying off workers, gathering garbage at this address, but not next door, expanding service to another town, etc., etc. Or take a union which pickets. The legality or illegality of its action will depend on the purpose for which it picketed -- for recognition, to protest a discriminatory firing, etc. Is the union a structure or an agent? What is the ontological status of its "purpose"? The soup, I think, thickens with this observation: under capitalism the means of production are socialized. That means that the action which occurs by means of which things get produced is action of associated workers. The collective worker. Now from the fact that the world is transformed by associated labor -- the transformative negation of the given takes place through the activity of associated labor -- we can infer intent from what is actually done. This is nothing different from what we do all the time with individuals -- why did she pull the trigger? Because she intended to kill him. And we can imagine that in the instance of the associated laborer it would often be the case that the intent we would infer would not correspond to the intent of any particular individual engaged in the common action. We would not suppose that the garbage person's intent is the intent realized in WMLI's action. So what is the ontological status of this intent we infer? This is the collective intent of the union or the corporation or the state or the legislature or the university, or the board of directors, or political party, etc. Is the intent real? That question depends on whether it causes anything to be different than it would otherwise be in the material world. Does it? The self, RB, argues in DIALECTIC, is the agent's "dispositional identity with her changing causal powers" (p149). The causal powers which drive our action are plainly a composite of both social and psychological structures. Does the collective agent also have a real or, using the words with ontological specificity, actual "self" that can also be characterized by its dispositional identity with the collective agent's changing causal powers? Then what of the union's, political party's, corporation's, legislature's, university's, nation state's reasons for action? Are they real in the sense that reasons are causes just as for an individual reasons are causes? Or is it the case, as Colin not long ago reminded us, "that nothing happens in society save in or in virtue of something human beings do or have done?" Do we read a rigorous little parentheses before "human" with the word "(individual)"? Yes, only individuals act, but when they act in common, they act within the framework of structures that are real, and which they reproduce or transform, and they act often to realize common purposes. What is the ontological status of those common purposes? Take an example. Suppose a group proposes to do a thing, but they can't agree on "what is to be done." (The question here is indeed a question of laying a common line. What is the ontological status of a political line?) Scenario 1. The group fusses and fumes and never agrees and winds up doing nothing. Scenario 2. The group fusses and fumes and finally comes to a common understanding and acts on it. The common purpose agreed to by the individuals in the group guides their action. And it may actually not correspond to the individual purpose of any of the individuals in the group. What is the ontological status of the common purpose? Plainly there is something in Scenario 2 there was not in Scenario 1, and it makes a difference. In Scenario 2 there is an articulated (or implicit) common purpose according to which individual human agents have aligned their individual purposes. * * * For Tobin -- What Oscar Wilde forgot is what every real socialist knows -- we work for a society where meetings are life's prime need! Why even today I know of an academic dean or two who thinks that way. Howard Howard Engelskirchen Western State University "What is there just now you lack" Hakuin --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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