The Freedom of Collective Agents*

Abstract

G IVEN the dominance of liberalism in analytic political philosophy, it is perhaps not surprising that the freedom of collective agents has hardly been explored.1 One of the reasons why this topic might have been neglected is that many liberals are interested in freedom because of the value they assign to individual autonomy.Although this makes the focus on individual freedom intelligible, it does not imply that the lack of concern with the freedom of collective agents is justified.Here is a reason why it is not: some activities that individuals might want to engage in-such as dancing the tango, playing soccer, or producing airplanes-can only be pursued collectively.And it is often most effective to pursue collective goals as part of a team or organization.Note, too, that some of our core freedoms, including, for instance, freedom of religion, involve inherently joint activities.It may well be that the freedom of collective agents can be defended by an appeal to the value of individual autonomy, just as many individual freedoms can.Perhaps the freedom of collective agents deserves philosophical attention in and of itself.The line of reasoning presented here, however, suggests that even those who give priority to individuals over collective agents should regard the topic as one of philosophical and political significance.2 I shall use the term 'corporate freedom' for the freedom of a collective or corporate agent.A corporate agent is an entity that can act and that consists of two or more individual agents.I shall assume that teams and organizations are corporate agents.The actions that such agents perform are joint actions.In this paper, I propose an analysis of the conditions under which a corporate agent is free to perform some kind of joint action.I start by considering a reductive

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