DISSERTATION SUMMARY
Jacob Huls, Saint Louis University
There are groups that contain people. For instance, there are book clubs, philosophy departments, and nations. Furthermore, groups plausibly have some properties that are not identical to the properties of its individual members. Plausible examples include: corporations can be responsible for false advertising, governments can be responsible for war crimes. Further, and most importantly for my purposes, groups that contain people persist through time. The government of the United States existed two years ago, and likewise, it exists now. How can this be explained? How is it possible that the United States Government—which contained different people and perhaps even different agencies—is the very same government that exists now?
This question is important beyond getting at a philosophical puzzle about change. Many recognize that groups such as governments or corporations sometimes have moral characteristics like blameworthiness, praiseworthiness, or obligations. Suppose, then, that there is no explanation of the fact that the United States Government that exists now is the same government that existed last year, and that it, in fact, couldn’t be the very same government. It would appear that the United States Government, then, could not have any moral properties that are of much interest to us: we typically take such entities to be blameworthy or praiseworthy for things they have done in the past, and many obligations we are interested in arise out of things an entity has done in the past and dictate out said entity ought to act in the future.
The aim of my dissertation is, therefore, to explore how it is that social groups persist through time. In chapter 1, I get clearer about the nature of what needs to be explained. In particular, I devise a puzzle for the persistence of social groups through time. The gist of the puzzle is this: the U.S. Senate, at 2014, contains John McCain. The U.S. Senate, now, does not contain John McCain. But the U.S. at 2014 just is the same U.S. Senate that exists now. It follows that the U.S. Senate both does and does not contain John McCain. But clearly, it is impossible for a group to both contain and not contain the very same person. So, something needs to be said here. For the rest of chapter 1, I get clear about what the potential solutions are. By my lights, they are: presentism, relationalist endurantism, and four-dimensionalism. Presentists avoid the impossibility by denying that there is any such thing as the U.S. Senate in 2014. That is because, for the presentist, the past no longer exists. For the presentist, only things in the present exist. The relationalist-endurantist relativizes group-membership to times. So, for the relationalist endurantist, the U.S. Senate does not contain John McCain. Instead, the U.S. Senate contains-McCain-at-2014 and does not contain-McCain-at-2025. The four-dimensionalist evades the impossibility by maintaining that the U.S. Senate at 2014 is, strictly speaking, not identical to the U.S. Senate that exists now. Instead, both of them are parts of the same four-dimensionally extended entity that is the entire U.S. Senate.
In chapter 2, I argue that there is a significant issue facing the four-dimensionalist solution. In particular, I argue that four-dimensionalists face a dilemma: either, they must maintain that you are a part of a group that contains yourself and all of the Ancient Egyptians (which seems absurd), or they must give up on their preferred solution to mereological problems of vagueness. Either way, four-dimensionalists face a significant cost.
Chapter 3 is devoted to answering objections to both presentism and relationalist endurantism about social groups; some of these objections are extant in the literature and some are potential objections that I have devised. Many of the extant objections originate from August Faller and involve cases where social groups fission or fusion. A case of fission involving a social group is one where the group seems to “split in two.” A case of fusion involving a social group is one where two groups appear to fuse into one single group. As it turns out, Faller thinks endurantistism and presentism fail to explain how fission and fusion cases are possible for social groups. I respond to his argument, but I also take this as an opportunity to explore the metaphysics of fission and fusion cases involving social groups.
In the final chapter, chapter 4, I set out to develop a theory of the persistence of social groups in more detail. As I see it, doing this successfully involves doing two things: (i) ensuring that our versions of presentism and endurantism about the persistence of social groups really do solve the puzzle I set out in chapter 1, and (ii) answering what I dub “the social special composition question” or SSCQ. The SSCQ is the question: when do two or more people compose a social group? The SSCQ is a less general version of Peter van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question (SCQ). For part of this chapter, I argue that at least some answers to the SCQ also constitute plausible answers to the SSCQ: It turns out that social groups can plausibly be understood as ordinary composite material objects. I go on to argue that, given some contemporary findings in neuroscience, these answers to the SSCQ entail the existence of very small social groups (like marriages) in addition to the existence of very large social groups (like nations). I conclude this chapter by considering some objections.