Frank Hindriks
Biographic Data
| ID | 258686 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Frank Hindriks |
| GIVEN NAMES | Frank |
| FAMILY NAME | Hindriks |
| SIGNATURE | HINDRIKS F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5818-4071 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
In Praise of Collective Agents
Collective agents can be praiseworthy without any of their members being praiseworthy. To support this “discontinuity thesis,” we consider the role that motivation plays in the attribution of moral responsibility. An agent who is praiseworthy must have had the appropriate moral motivation. We argue that it is possible that the collective agent was appropriately motivated, while its members were not. Subsequently, we develop an account of corporat…
How institutions decay: Towards an endogenous theory
When organizations solve collective action problems or realize values, they do so by means of institutions. These are commonly regarded as self-stabilizing. Yet, they can also be subject to endogenous processes of decay, or so we argue. We explain this in terms of psychological and cultural processes, which can change even if the formal structures remain unchanged. One key implication is that the extent to which norms, values and ideals motivate …
The moral failures of collective agents: Responsibility voids and control gaps
Why do collective agents violate their obligations? They can but need not do so intentionally. Furthermore, if it happens accidentally, this can often be explained in terms of what I call ‘control gaps’, which are deficiencies in moral control. In other words, they are obstacles that make it more difficult for the collective agent and its members to fulfill corporate obligations. Hence, they increase the likelihood of corporate wrongdoings. And t…
Sustainable Institutions: How to Secure Values
Social sustainability plays a prominent role in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, but a proper analysis of the concept is still lacking. According to a widespread conception, a system is sustainable when it is preserved or developed in a robust manner. I argue, however, that social sustainability is best understood in explicitly normative terms. Formulating suitable development goals requires a conception of the kind of society t…
Artificial agents: Responsibility & control gaps
Artificial agents create significant moral opportunities and challenges. Over the last two decades, discourse has largely focused on the concept of a ‘responsibility gap.’ We argue that this concept is incoherent, misguided, and diverts attention from the core issue of ‘control gaps.’ Control gaps arise when there is a discrepancy between the causal control an agent exercises and the moral control it should possess or emulate. Such gaps present m…
The Social Construction of Collective Moral Agency
Moral agents possess a moral point of view: they have a moral identity or a moral self-conception. This implies that, in order for an organization to be a moral agent, it must have a moral point of view. Importantly, acquiring such a point of view is a social process. In light of this, I argue that collective moral agency is a social construct. It follows that organizations can but need not be moral agents. This raises questions about the validit…
Moral Bookkeeping
There is widespread agreement among philosophers about the Mens Rea Asymmetry (MRA), according to which praise requires intent, whereas blame does not. However, there is evidence showing that MRA is descriptively inadequate. We hypothesize that the violations of MRA found in the experimental literature are due to what we call “moral compositionality,” by which we mean that people evaluate the component parts of a moral problem separately and then…
Rules, Equilibria and Virtual Control: How to Explain Persistence, Resilience and Fragility
Institutions are often regarded either as rules or as equilibria sustained by self-interested agents. I ask how these two theories can be combined. According to Philip Pettit’s Virtual Control Theory , they explain different things: rules explain why regularities persist; self-interest why they are resilient. Thus, his theory reconciles the two theories by adjusting their domains of application. However, the available evidence suggests that rules…
When to Start Saving the Planet
People should take immediate action to prevent climate harms. Although intuitive, this claim faces two important problems. First, no individual can avert a climate harm on their own. Second, too few people are typically willing to contribute. In response, I point out that individuals can sometimes help prevent harm to the climate, and I argue that they should take preventive action when the prospect of success is good enough. Furthermore, when to…
The nature and significance of social ontology
We propose a bridge-builder perspective on social ontology. Our point of departure is that an important task of philosophy is to provide the bigger picture. To this end, it should investigate folk views and determine whether and how they can be preserved once scrutinized from the perspective of the sciences. However, the sciences typically present us with a fragmented picture of reality. Thus, an important intermediate step is to integrate the mo…
The risks of autonomous machines: From responsibility gaps to control gaps
Responsibility gaps concern the attribution of blame for harms caused by autonomous machines. The worry has been that, because they are artificial agents, it is impossible to attribute blame, even though doing so would be appropriate given the harms they cause. We argue that there are no responsibility gaps. The harms can be blameless. And if they are not, the blame that is appropriate is indirect and can be attributed to designers, engineers, so…
Institutions and their strength
Institutions can be strong or weak. But what does this mean? Equilibrium theories equate institutions with behavioural regularities. In contrast, rule theories explicate them in terms of a standard that people are supposed to meet. I propose that, when an institution is weak, a discrepancy exists between the regularity and the standard or rule. To capture this discrepancy, I present a hybrid theory, the Rules-and-Equilibria Theory. According to t…
The problem of insignificant hands
Many morally significant outcomes can be brought about only if several individuals contribute to them. However, individual contributions to collective outcomes often fail to have morally significant effects on their own. Some have concluded from this that it is permissible to do nothing. What I call ‘the problem of insignificant hands’ is the challenge of determining whether and when people are obligated to contribute. For this to be the case, I …
Establishments as Material rather than Immaterial Objects
ABSTARCTWhen people go shopping, they enter a building. But the shop cannot be identified with the building, because it would remain the same shop if it moved to another building or if it became an e-store. Daniel Korman [2019] uses these two observations to argue that establishments are immaterial objects. However, all that follows is that establishments are not buildings. I argue that establishments are organisations or corporate agents that ar…
The functions of institutions: Etiology and teleology
Institutions generate cooperative benefits that explain why they exist and persist. Therefore, their etiological function is to promote cooperation. The function of a particular institution, such as money or traffic regulations, is to solve one or more cooperation problems. We go on to argue that the teleological function of institutions is to secure values by means of norms. Values can also be used to redesign an institution and to promote socia…
The mark of the moral: Beyond the sentimentalist turn
In light of recent empirical data, many psychologists and philosophers have turned away from rationalism about moral judgment and embraced sentimentalism. In the process, they have rejected the classical “moral signature” as a way of distinguishing moral from conventional norms in favor of a sentimentalist approach to carving out the moral domain. In this paper, we argue that this sentimentalist turn has been made prematurely. Although we agree t…
How Social Objects (Fail to) Function
Driver's licenses and traffic lights make driving safer. And dollar bills and credit cards make exchanges more efficient as compared to bartering. Social objects can be useful in such ways because they have certain powers. Dollar bills have purchasing power. And driver's licenses restrict access to the public road to people that have them. But what purpose do social objects serve more generally? To answer this question, I explore the role they pl…
Money: What It Is and What It Should Be
Norms that Make a Difference: Social Practices and Institutions
Institutions are norm-governed social practices, or so I propose. But what does it mean for a norm to govern a social practice? Theories that analyze institutions as equilibria equate norms with sanctions and model them as costs. The idea is that the sanctions change preferences and thereby behavior. This view fails to capture the fact that people are often motivated by social norms as such, when they regard them as legitimate. I argue that, in o…
Institutions and Collective Intentionality
This chapter considers that institutional actions necessarily depend on collective attitudes. It focuses on the normative dimension of institutions and evaluates the claim that institutional normativity can only be adequately explicated in terms of collective attitudes. The chapter addresses the idea that institutions are social constructions, and assesses the claim that social construction is to be understood in terms of collective attitudes. It…
Group Freedom: A Social Mechanism Account
Many existing defenses of group rights seem to rely on the notion of group freedom. To date, however, no adequate analysis of this notion has been offered. Group freedom is best understood in terms of processes of social categorization that are embedded in social mechanisms. Such processes often give rise to group-specific constraints and enablements. On the proposed social mechanism account, group rights are demands for group freedom. Even so, g…
Do social institutions require collective acceptance: Mattia Gallotti and John Michael (eds.): Perspectives on social ontology and social cognition. Studies in the philosophy of sociality 4. Dordrecht…
Deconstructing Searle’s Making the Social World
Hindriks argued that Searle’s theory of institutions suffers from a number of problems pertaining to the notions of constitutive rule, status function, Status Function Declaration, deontic power, and human right. Lobo argues that these criticisms are not sufficiently charitable. In response, it is argued here that the problems that were identified earlier are sufficiently severe to call for substantial revisions of the theory
Understanding institutions: Replies to Aoki, Binmore, Hodgson, Searle, Smith, and Sugden
Our goal is to develop a theory that combines the best insights of philosophical and scientific theories of institutions. We are not committed a priori to save the commonsense notion of institution, or the thesis of human exceptionalism. We think that human cognition is important, but we do not claim that common knowledge or collective intentions are necessary for coordination. Like most of our commentators, we believe that there is continuity be…
A Unified Social Ontology
Journal Article A UNIFIED SOCIAL ONTOLOGY Get access Francesco Guala, Francesco Guala University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Frank Hindriks Frank Hindriks University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
A Unified Social Ontology
Journal Article A UNIFIED SOCIAL ONTOLOGY Get access Francesco Guala, Francesco Guala University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Frank Hindriks Frank Hindriks University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
The location problem in social ontology
Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members ar…
The functions of institutions: Etiology and teleology
Institutions generate cooperative benefits that explain why they exist and persist. Therefore, their etiological function is to promote cooperation. The function of a particular institution, such as money or traffic regulations, is to solve one or more cooperation problems. We go on to argue that the teleological function of institutions is to secure values by means of norms. Values can also be used to redesign an institution and to promote socia…
But Where Is the University
Famously Ryle imagined a visitor who has seen the colleges, departments, and libraries of a university but still wonders where the university is. The visitor fails to realize that the university consists of these organizational units. In this paper I ask what exactly the relation is between institutional entities such as universities and the entities they are composed of. I argue that the relation is constitution, and that it can be illuminated i…
False Models as Explanatory Engines
Many models in economics are very unrealistic. At the same time, economists put a lot of effort into making their models more realistic. I argue that in many cases, including the Modigliani-Miller irrelevance theorem investigated in this paper, the purpose of this process of concretization is explanatory. When evaluated in combination with their assumptions, a highly unrealistic model may well be true. The purpose of relaxing an unrealistic assum…
The Freedom of Collective Agents
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 free…
The New Role of the Constitutive Rule
Searle used to analyze institutional facts in terms of the constitutive rule. In his more elaborate account in The Construction of Social Reality he introduces the notion of a status function. The "counts as" locution is central to both the constitutive rule and the status function. The main question I ask is what role is left for the constitutive rule after the introduction of the status function. In order to answer this question, I start by ana…
Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social World
Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article’s author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle’s notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses m…
Explanation, understanding, and unrealistic models
Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry
Recent empirical research by Joshua Knobe has uncovered two asymmetries in judgements about intentional action and moral responsibility. First., people are more inclined to say that a side effect was brought about intentionally when they regard that side effect as bad than when they regard it as good. Secondly, people are more inclined to ascribe blame to someone for bad effects than they are inclined to ascribe praise for good effects. These fin…
Acceptance‐dependence: A Social Kind of Response‐dependence
Neither Johnston's nor Wright's account of response‐dependence offers a complete picture of response‐dependence, as they do not apply to all concepts that are intrinsically related to our mental responses. In order to (begin to) remedy this situation, a new conception of response‐dependence is introduced that I call “acceptance‐dependence”. This account applies to concepts such as goal , constitutional , and money , the first two of which have mi…
The risks of autonomous machines: From responsibility gaps to control gaps
Responsibility gaps concern the attribution of blame for harms caused by autonomous machines. The worry has been that, because they are artificial agents, it is impossible to attribute blame, even though doing so would be appropriate given the harms they cause. We argue that there are no responsibility gaps. The harms can be blameless. And if they are not, the blame that is appropriate is indirect and can be attributed to designers, engineers, so…
Norms that Make a Difference: Social Practices and Institutions
Institutions are norm-governed social practices, or so I propose. But what does it mean for a norm to govern a social practice? Theories that analyze institutions as equilibria equate norms with sanctions and model them as costs. The idea is that the sanctions change preferences and thereby behavior. This view fails to capture the fact that people are often motivated by social norms as such, when they regard them as legitimate. I argue that, in o…
Group Freedom: A Social Mechanism Account
Many existing defenses of group rights seem to rely on the notion of group freedom. To date, however, no adequate analysis of this notion has been offered. Group freedom is best understood in terms of processes of social categorization that are embedded in social mechanisms. Such processes often give rise to group-specific constraints and enablements. On the proposed social mechanism account, group rights are demands for group freedom. Even so, g…
Understanding institutions: Replies to Aoki, Binmore, Hodgson, Searle, Smith, and Sugden
Our goal is to develop a theory that combines the best insights of philosophical and scientific theories of institutions. We are not committed a priori to save the commonsense notion of institution, or the thesis of human exceptionalism. We think that human cognition is important, but we do not claim that common knowledge or collective intentions are necessary for coordination. Like most of our commentators, we believe that there is continuity be…
Team reasoning and group identification
The team reasoning approach explains cooperation in terms of group identification, which in turn is explicated in terms of agency transformation and payoff transformation. Empirical research in social psychology is consistent with the significance of agency and payoff transformation. However, it also reveals that group identification depends on social categorization processes to a greater extent than is currently acknowledged within the team reas…
Institutional Facts and the Naturalistic Fallacy: Confronting Searle (1964) with Searle (1995)
In 1964 Searle argued against the naturalistic fallacy thesis that an ought-statement can in fact be derived from is-statements. From an analysis of this argument and of Searle’s social ontology of 1995 – which includes a full-blown theory of institutional facts – I conclude that this argument is unsound on his own (later) terms. The conclusion that can now be drawn from Searle’s argument is that social or institutional obligations are epistemica…
The New Role of the Constitutive Rule
Searle used to analyze institutional facts in terms of the constitutive rule. In his more elaborate account in The Construction of Social Reality he introduces the notion of a status function. The "counts as" locution is central to both the constitutive rule and the status function. The main question I ask is what role is left for the constitutive rule after the introduction of the status function. In order to answer this question, I start by ana…
Acceptance‐dependence: A Social Kind of Response‐dependence
Neither Johnston's nor Wright's account of response‐dependence offers a complete picture of response‐dependence, as they do not apply to all concepts that are intrinsically related to our mental responses. In order to (begin to) remedy this situation, a new conception of response‐dependence is introduced that I call “acceptance‐dependence”. This account applies to concepts such as goal , constitutional , and money , the first two of which have mi…
The Freedom of Collective Agents
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 free…
False Models as Explanatory Engines
Many models in economics are very unrealistic. At the same time, economists put a lot of effort into making their models more realistic. I argue that in many cases, including the Modigliani-Miller irrelevance theorem investigated in this paper, the purpose of this process of concretization is explanatory. When evaluated in combination with their assumptions, a highly unrealistic model may well be true. The purpose of relaxing an unrealistic assum…
Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry
Recent empirical research by Joshua Knobe has uncovered two asymmetries in judgements about intentional action and moral responsibility. First., people are more inclined to say that a side effect was brought about intentionally when they regard that side effect as bad than when they regard it as good. Secondly, people are more inclined to ascribe blame to someone for bad effects than they are inclined to ascribe praise for good effects. These fin…
Rationality and the Ideology of Disconnection
But Where Is the University
Famously Ryle imagined a visitor who has seen the colleges, departments, and libraries of a university but still wonders where the university is. The visitor fails to realize that the university consists of these organizational units. In this paper I ask what exactly the relation is between institutional entities such as universities and the entities they are composed of. I argue that the relation is constitution, and that it can be illuminated i…
Team reasoning and group identification
The team reasoning approach explains cooperation in terms of group identification, which in turn is explicated in terms of agency transformation and payoff transformation. Empirical research in social psychology is consistent with the significance of agency and payoff transformation. However, it also reveals that group identification depends on social categorization processes to a greater extent than is currently acknowledged within the team reas…
Collective Acceptance and the Is-Ought Argument
According to John Searle’s well-known Is-Ought Argument, it is possible to derive an ought-statement from is-statements only. This argument concerns obligations involved in institutions such as promising, and it relies on the idea that institutions can be conceptualized in terms of constitutive rules. In this paper, I argue that the structure of this argument has never been fully appreciated. Starting from my status account of constitutive rules,…
Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social World
Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article’s author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle’s notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses m…
The location problem in social ontology
Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members ar…
Explanation, understanding, and unrealistic models
Intuitions, Rationalizations, and Justification: A Defense of Sentimental Rationalism
Do social institutions require collective acceptance: Mattia Gallotti and John Michael (eds.): Perspectives on social ontology and social cognition. Studies in the philosophy of sociality 4. Dordrecht…
Deconstructing Searle’s Making the Social World
Hindriks argued that Searle’s theory of institutions suffers from a number of problems pertaining to the notions of constitutive rule, status function, Status Function Declaration, deontic power, and human right. Lobo argues that these criticisms are not sufficiently charitable. In response, it is argued here that the problems that were identified earlier are sufficiently severe to call for substantial revisions of the theory
Understanding institutions: Replies to Aoki, Binmore, Hodgson, Searle, Smith, and Sugden
Our goal is to develop a theory that combines the best insights of philosophical and scientific theories of institutions. We are not committed a priori to save the commonsense notion of institution, or the thesis of human exceptionalism. We think that human cognition is important, but we do not claim that common knowledge or collective intentions are necessary for coordination. Like most of our commentators, we believe that there is continuity be…
A Unified Social Ontology
Journal Article A UNIFIED SOCIAL ONTOLOGY Get access Francesco Guala, Francesco Guala University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Frank Hindriks Frank Hindriks University of Milan, Italy; University of Groningen, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
Institutions and Collective Intentionality
This chapter considers that institutional actions necessarily depend on collective attitudes. It focuses on the normative dimension of institutions and evaluates the claim that institutional normativity can only be adequately explicated in terms of collective attitudes. The chapter addresses the idea that institutions are social constructions, and assesses the claim that social construction is to be understood in terms of collective attitudes. It…
Group Freedom: A Social Mechanism Account
Many existing defenses of group rights seem to rely on the notion of group freedom. To date, however, no adequate analysis of this notion has been offered. Group freedom is best understood in terms of processes of social categorization that are embedded in social mechanisms. Such processes often give rise to group-specific constraints and enablements. On the proposed social mechanism account, group rights are demands for group freedom. Even so, g…
Norms that Make a Difference: Social Practices and Institutions
Institutions are norm-governed social practices, or so I propose. But what does it mean for a norm to govern a social practice? Theories that analyze institutions as equilibria equate norms with sanctions and model them as costs. The idea is that the sanctions change preferences and thereby behavior. This view fails to capture the fact that people are often motivated by social norms as such, when they regard them as legitimate. I argue that, in o…
The mark of the moral: Beyond the sentimentalist turn
In light of recent empirical data, many psychologists and philosophers have turned away from rationalism about moral judgment and embraced sentimentalism. In the process, they have rejected the classical “moral signature” as a way of distinguishing moral from conventional norms in favor of a sentimentalist approach to carving out the moral domain. In this paper, we argue that this sentimentalist turn has been made prematurely. Although we agree t…
How Social Objects (Fail to) Function
Driver's licenses and traffic lights make driving safer. And dollar bills and credit cards make exchanges more efficient as compared to bartering. Social objects can be useful in such ways because they have certain powers. Dollar bills have purchasing power. And driver's licenses restrict access to the public road to people that have them. But what purpose do social objects serve more generally? To answer this question, I explore the role they pl…
Money: What It Is and What It Should Be
Establishments as Material rather than Immaterial Objects
ABSTARCTWhen people go shopping, they enter a building. But the shop cannot be identified with the building, because it would remain the same shop if it moved to another building or if it became an e-store. Daniel Korman [2019] uses these two observations to argue that establishments are immaterial objects. However, all that follows is that establishments are not buildings. I argue that establishments are organisations or corporate agents that ar…
Epistemology (29 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Philosophy (22 works) · Economics (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Law and economics (14 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (13 works)