The Social and Moral Cognition of Group Agents

To better understand the possibility, scope, and limits of punishment for groups we must understand how humans conceptualize group agents, interpret their actions, and make moral judgments about them. In this article I therefore examine the social-cognitive foundations for human perceptions of groups and the moral evaluations of their conduct. Part I identifies the conceptual framework within which people perceive, interpret, and reason about individual agents. Part II examines whether people apply the same framework to cognitions of group agents. Part III introduces the psychological system that accomplishes people’s moral judgments of individual agents. Part IV explores whether people equally apply this system to moral judgments of group agents. Finally, Part V discusses the limits of perceiving groups as moral agents—limits that the perceiver may feel more painfully than the agent.