Construction For Autonomy Of Social Group

Common sense and social science usually treat group as a whole.Based on this view,society and the law demand social groups take social responsibility and legal responsibility accordingly.Sometimes social groups even are required to take responsibility independently.Pursuing group responsibility needs a claim of right—autonomy of social groups,for the reason that right and responsibility are closely related.Autonomy is different when talking about different responsibilities.Casual responsibility is related to autonomy of action,and moral responsibility is related to autonomy of morality.Therefore,pursuing group responsibility requires autonomy of both action and morality which I prefer to call as ontological autonomy and moral autonomy.The research object is social group.Social groups are defined as an entity constituted by and only by people who are with a collective acceptance.This definition ensures coincidence of groups and shows the relationship between group and society.It also makes up shortages of other definitions.Types of group in other definitions of social groups can be covered in this definition.Aggregations are excluded from groups.Reductionism argues that action and responsibility of groups are able to be reduced to action and responsibility of members.To fight against the challenge form reductionism and explain the case cannot be reduced,group agent is constructed.Being an autonomous group agent means the group has desires and intentions over its members,and it can achieve its goals without being reduced to members’ desire and intentions.Group agent is started from collective intentionality.It is ’I’ who form a collective intentionality in the procedure of actualizing a group agent.This kind of collective intentionality is called we-intention by Tuomela.We-intention is based on two abilities of human—planning agency as a natural ability and response-to-expectation obligation as a social ability.Group agent decides through a relationship between members and group called supervenience.The core to realize supervenience is decision mechanism.Group judgments shall satisfy robust group rationality to keep the judgments robustly complete,consistent and deductively closed.The only supervenience which can satisfy robust group rationality is holistic supervenience.Group judgments have an authority which gives group reason to act and translate its self into members5 reason to act.Group agency is built on shared intention.Shared intention ensures that the collective members can be coordinated,their plans mesh in the sense that they are co-realizable of collective goals to be organized and planned to achieve.The control of group agent is conflict with individual’s control over their body.A nested casual theory justify that group agent has an overall control,solved the confliction.So far,group agent is irreducible and is a self-controlled agent which equals to an ontological autonomy agent.The core of the control of moral autonomy of group is the decision-making mechanism.However,the decision-making mechanism is not the only guarantee for moral autonomy.Two other conditions have to be met as well.They are a value-laden event to be determined and value-laden judgments form group members.When the above conditions are ensured,the group has the moral autonomy to the decided event.On this basis,if the group has a feedback of group level,then the group is a moral autonomy agent,can achieve continuous moral reasoning.Base on above theory,a hierarchical group can be an autonomous agent.The conditions supporting hierarchical group’s autonomy are:the first,the group judgments need to supervene on members judgments.The second,the intentions of members’ judgments need to point to the group judgment in every level of the group.Some practical questions can be explained by this theory,for instance,overdetemination problem,the "Challenger" accident and the system of People’s Congress.The groups in these cases could be considered as autonomous group agent and take responsibility.