Here is a hypothetical case of group intention, formulated by Ben Koons:
Imagine the following case: the country Freedonia consists of three ethnic groups: Blue, Violet, and Green, which are each perfectly represented by an ephor, while a king presents the resolutions to be voted on for any judgment. Its founders framed the Freedonian constitution with the following rules for judicial proceedings:
- A simple majority of the ephors is sufficient for any resolution to pass.
- Each resolution consists of a single clause (to avoid riders).
- The executive must enact the ephors’ resolutions without inquiry.1
A case arises where a Sylvanian settlement in Freedonia (Sylvania is a neighboring country) is accused of flying a Sylvanian flag. This causes a great stir, and the king proposes the following three resolutions:
- The Sylvanians flew a Sylvanian flag.
- Flying a foreign flag is a treasonous act.
- Treasonous acts are to be punished by execution.
The following resolution, which represents A&B&C, won’t be voted on though:
- The Sylvanians are to be executed.
The three ephors vote in the following way on these three issues, and I also show how they would vote on D (A&B&C) if they could:
| A. Flew Flag? | B. Treason? | C. Execution? | D. Execute Sylvanians? | |
| Blue | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Violet | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Green | No | Yes | Yes | No |
Each of A, B, and C pass by a two-thirds majority, and so the executive enacts the ephors’ resolutions by executing the Sylvanians. None of the ephors or their respective ethnic groups is individually responsible for this act, since none of them supported D. The ephors’ votes only cause the execution given the constitution, but the constitution itself isn’t intrinsically wicked. In fact, it reflects a good cognitive design. So when the Sylvanians are wrongly executed, Freedonia has done an injustice, but no individual Freedonian is responsible.
In this case, we have wrongful group intention, without any wrongful individual intention.
Let’s look again at group cognition and knowledge. There is good reason to suppose that a collective judgment can be (both objectively and subjectively) more reliably ordered to the truth than any of the judgments of individual members. This is the “wisdom of the crowds” phenomenon.2 Condorcet proved a result called the “Jury Theorem,” in which he proved that, on the assumption that individual errors are independently randomly distributed, the majority judgment is more likely to be true than that of any individual. List and Goodin generalized this result in 2001.3
Aristotle already recognized the phenomenon:
“It is possible that the many, though not individually good men, yet when they come together may be better, not individually but collectively, than those who are so, just as public dinners to which many contribute are better than those supplied at one man’s cost.” Aristotle, Politics, Book 3.11 (Rackham trans.).
If we apply these results to real life, we need to limit group judgment to the basic acts of perception and understanding (the foundational premises), rather than to the conclusions reached by reasoning, since errors produced by the reasoning of various individuals are not in general mutually independent. Individuals are prone to make the same errors in complicated cases.
Therefore, to apply the Condorcet-List-Goodin results, we have to assume a foundationalist rather than a coherentist account of rational justification. We have to assume that there are certain foundational beliefs that are justifiable without inference or argument, and that beliefs can be added in a step-by-step, wedding-cake sort of structure, with each justified belief belonging to a discrete stage of the process, justified entirely by beliefs belonging to lower stages. On these assumptions, we can suppose that the group decides (perhaps by majority vote or other collective method) on a case-by-case basis which propositions to adopt as basic beliefs. It then proceeds to decide, again on a case-by-case basis, which beliefs can justifiably be inferred on the first level on the basis of basic beliefs, and so on up the hierarchy, until propositions are reached which delineate effective means for reaching the group’s ultimate goals. (Deliberation is needed at each step to evaluate inductive and illative inferences.) The group then consents to each of those propositions.
In practical deliberations, the reasoning proceeds from ultimate ends to progressively more proximate means, terminating in a set of basic actions, actions that can be performed at will. In the case of a group agency, such basic actions might consist in issuing a finding or an order to a subordinate officer or agency.
Such a foundationalist design plan is crucial if we want our deliberative bodies to act with a coherent set of reasons. It is easy to see that if a group believes everything that a majority of its members believes, the group will often have inconsistent beliefs. List, C. and P. Pettit, 2002, “Aggregating Sets of Judgments: An Impossibility Result,” Economics and Philosophy, 18(1): 89–110
Many regulatory and judicial bodies do have such group cognitive design plans. In some jury trials, the judge asks the jury not for a simple verdict, but rather for a set of group decisions on critical issues, requiring that the ultimate verdict reflect the logical implications of these prior decisions. This prevents a case in which the jury agrees on the verdict but does so on the basis of logically incompatible sets of reasons. Similarly, some regulative agencies are required to issue rulings on matters of fact or policy that then can act as logical constraints on subsidiary decisions.
Here is an example related to just war. Suppose that a parliament is empowered to decide whether a war in just. This could be done in two ways: (i) the Parliament deliberates whether or not to endorse the war, in light of the traditional criteria, or (ii) the Parliament votes on each of the criteria individually, with the war authorized authorized if and only if each criterion is affirmed. If it takes the second approach, it is possible that the war could be authorized even though every member of the Parliament believes the war to be unjustified.
The process could be further elaborated. We could require that the Parliament affirm the justice of one or more specific causes for the war, rather than simply affirming that there is some just cause or other. In the former case, we could identify the nation’s intention with the set of approved causes, even if no PM agrees with every cause in the set. Of course, the parliamentary debates and conversations could be relevant. If a majority conspire to approve formally the justice of a cause they do not in fact believe in, that would vitiate the claim that the government is acting with the corresponding intention. This would involve a malfunctioning of the parliament’s deliberative design plan.
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The Analytic Thomist 