I am quite convinced that if standard (non-evolutionary, non-Aristotelian) functionalism is true, then complex organizations such as universities and nations have minds and are conscious. For it is clear to me that dogs are conscious, and the functioning of complex organizations is more intellectually sophisticated than that of dogs, and has the kind of desire-satisfaction drivers that dogs and maybe even humans have.
(I am pretty sure I posted something like this before, but I can’t find it.)
One of our grad students brought to my attention a question I never thought about: Which communities have genuine authority? (Furthermore, this needs to be fine-grained as the question of which communities have genuine authority in which respect.)
If I move to a neighborhood with a home owners’ association, and the neighborhood tells me that zip lines are forbidden, that is presumably an authoritative norm. But if I move to neighborhood without any such association, and all my neighbors come and tell me that zip lines just aren’t done around here, and that I am not to build one, the command not to build a zip line is just bluster. I may have reasons of peaceful coexistence or prudence not to build a zip line, but the command does not constitute an authoritative norm.
The question of what conditions a state-like entity has to satisfy (say, not being radically unjust) to have authority has been very widely discussed. This isn’t my area of philosophy, but I feel that the question of which non-state communities have authority is much less discussed. Here, think of clubs, committees, religious congregations, families, neighborhoods, Internet forums, etc. And it’s not just a question of when, say, a neighborhood is being unjust. There may be nothing unjust about having a standard that forbids zip lines, but nonetheless if the community lacks authority, that standard is not an authoritative norm, and has no reason-giving force (beyond reasons of peaceful coexistence or the like).
And of course the question needs to be more fine-grained. Even with a home owners’ association, the authority of the neighborhood only applies to a limited number of things—it cannot, for instance, govern the content of private conversations inside the house.
The problem is particularly pressing for anyone who is a social relativist about some domain and thinks that norms of some sort (e.g., moral, aesthetic, or epistemic) come from community standards. For intuitively not every community standard is authoritative.
There is a deontic prohibition on killing innocent people. But in general I think there is no similar deontic prohibition on destroying communities. For instance, there seems to be no deontic prohibition on a government dissolving a village or a city. Indeed, the reasons the state would need to have for such dissolution would have to be grave, but not outlandishly so. The state could permissibly intentionally dissolve a village or a city to end a war, but could not permissibly intentionally kill an innocent for the same end.
One might think this means that individuals are more valuable than the communities they compose. But we shouldn’t think that in general to be true, either. For instance, if a foreign invader were to threaten to dissolve a city without however killing anyone there, and the citizens could repel the invader at an expected cost of, say, six defenders’ and six attackers’ lives, it would be reasonable for the city to conscript its citizens to repel the invader. Thus the value of the shared life of the citizens is worth sacrificing some individual lives to uphold. But it is still not permissible to intentionally kill these innocent civilians.
I think it’s not that persons are more valuable than the villages and cities they compose, but rather they are sacred.
It is worth noting that where a community is sacred (two potential examples: sacramental marriages; God’s chosen people), there could very plausibly be a deontic prohibition on dissolution.
More and more I think the sacred is an ethical category, not just a theological one.
