Do group agents have free will?

CFS Talk with Christian List, Professor of Philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

It is common to ascribe agency to some organized collectives, such as corporations, courts, and states, and to treat them as loci of responsibility, over and above their members. But since responsibility is often assumed to require free will, should we also think that group agents have free will? Surprisingly, the literature contains very few in-depth discussions of this question (a notable exception is Hess 2014). I will argue that group agents can have free will not only in a relatively undemanding compatibilist sense but also in a recognizably libertarian sense, which includes the possibility of doing otherwise. In developing this account of corporate free will, I will bring together recent work on group agency and free will.