P
ilas: So, I haven't reached a conclusion yet on this one, I'm going to need you to help me figure it out.
Temas: You've literally said that corporations are people.
Pilas: We had that conversation, yes, but I was just working through someone else's ideas, kind of for fun. Also corporation is a much broader term in that context than just "large businesses", but I digress.
Temas: So you think communities are people, then.
Pilas: Well, let's not jump immediately into that specific a name. Let me propose that communities are distinct, unified things. That we can talk about communities taking actions, having qualities, that sort of thing.
Temas: This feels awfully arbitrary. I can accept human agency, at least for the time being, but drawing lines around groups of people and saying that they suddenly take on agency on this higher level... it just seems like magical thinking. You can draw these lines anywhere.
Pilas: In a sense you can, but I think it's important to note that people don't just draw these lines anywhere, when they talk about communities. People talk about Harlem, or Haredi Jews, or ANTIFA, or Southern Baptists—they don't talk about "the collection of people in Wal-Mart right now". Certain kinds of groups seem unified enough to be talked about in ordinary language, and others don't. You can refer to any collection of people, but a collection does not a community make.
Temas: Sure, but that's just because similar people tend to act similarly. My point is really, how is the action of a community not just the actions of all the people within it? Why add in this special extra thing called "community" that is the one acting?
Pilas: Maybe you can reduce a community to its constituent members, but we might as well keep looking deeper; I think our conclusions on this will actually matter, have consequences for how we think about the world. Now, also in natural language, we do ascribe actions to groups—it is after all nations that go to war, not individuals. We say that Germany invaded Poland, not that a bunch of individual soldiers somehow decided to do it together.
Temas: Hitler gave the order. A bunch of soldiers obeyed. Just individuals acting.
Pilas: Hitler's orders had the power they had because the community had vested them with it. What I'd like to propose is that communities maintain themselves through time, even as individual members die; that people refer to communities as though they were distinct things; that communities have mechanisms for imbuing certain individuals with powers of representation, and that individuals within the community accept these mechanisms as causes of action; and that groups can have rights and obligations that don't make sense to ascribe to individuals. All this I think counts as evidence that communities are higher level objects in their own right, with distinctive powers and qualities.
Temas: I'm not totally convinced. Everything you just said seems like it could have been cooked up by people with power in a community to justify their remaining in power. It sounds like obfuscation, like a way of tricking others into doing your will. I'm especially suspicious of communities having rights. That just seems like either trying to protect guilty individuals by letting them hide behind the guise of a community, or trying to strip weak members of the community of what little power they have, by letting those who make decisions keep making them, backed by the "right" of the community.
Pilas: That's a good rebuttal. I'll have to think more about this. Why would people want to be members of communities if they're just going to be bossed around, though?
Temas: De gustibus non disputandum.