If one believes that a collective agent is also collectively autonomous, one apparently subscribes to at least two normatively relevant beliefs ([ 26]: 292–295): first, this autonomous collective agent is not only able to hold attitudes that are partly independent of the attitudes of its members, but it is also justified in overriding dissenting opinions of its members.
The first and second condition can certainly be met, and one can believe that the organizers of the PIA collectively recognize the public they involved as a collective agent.
People, for example, a small sociological research group, would just need to organize a PIA and collectively recognize the participants as a group forming a collective agent in order to satisfy one of three conditions for the creation of such a collective agent.
We discuss the general concept and architecture of a Hierarchical Collective Agent Network (HCAN) and its functional components for learning and adaptive control of the NDS.
But as Nietzsche understood, the idea of "humanity" as a collective agent with universal goals that it pursues in the course of history is a secular residue of a religious faith in providence.
In Democracy Denied, Charles Kurzman proposes that the collective agent most directly responsible for democratization was the emerging class of modern intellectuals, a group that had gained a global identity and a near-messianic sense of mission following the Dreyfus Affair of 1898.
This process-based wrong is at the level of a specific agent, albeit a collective agent.
When the pod creatures act together, and pull off the deception, they make themselves into a collective agent.
It is depicted as consisting in a complex nexus of interdependent individual attitudes and not as the intention of a collective agent or as a state of some collective mind (cf. Bratman 1999: 122 3).
To avoid this sort of back and forth, the pod creatures collectively have to adopt a general principle of action — perhaps, 'When mimicking Earthlings, coordinate the movements of individual pods in such and such a way.' And in acting on that principle, they thereby constitute themselves into a (in this case, collective) agent.
The NFL believes the NFLPA will pursue a legal strategy of Decertification to achieve its goals: effectively dissolving itself as a union, leaving the NFL no one to bargain with as the collective agent of the players.
