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Organizations as Wrongdoers
Organizations as
Wrongdoers
From Ontology to Morality

STEPHANIE COLLINS
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Stephanie Collins 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
Impression: 1
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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945694
ISBN 978–0–19–287043–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192870438.001.0001
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

PART I. METAPHYSICS
1. The Reality of Organizations 3
1.1 Overview 3
1.2 Organizations’ Attributes 8
1.3 Realism about Organizations 14
1.4 The Questions 24
2. Towards a Metaphysics of Membership 27
2.1 Introduction 27
2.2 Causation, Supervenience, Anchoring 30
2.3 Grounding and Parthood 36
2.4 Members as Parts-Plus: Existing Accounts 42
2.5 Conclusion 48
3. A Metaphysics of Membership 50
3.1 Introduction 50
3.2 Members: Parts with Commitments, Inputs, and Enactment 51
3.3 Objections and Replies 59
3.4 Members of Corporations 65
3.5 Members of Liberal-Democratic States 75
3.6 Conclusion 79

PART II. BLAMEWORTHINESS

4. Varieties of Organizational Blameworthiness 83
4.1 Introduction 83
4.2 Volitionism for Organizations 86
4.3 Attributivism for Organizations 92
4.4 Aretaicism for Organizations 97
4.5 Conclusion 105
vi 

5. Organizations’ Moral Self-Awareness 107

5.1 Introduction 107
5.2 Robotic Blameworthiness 108
5.3 Why Moral Self-Awareness Matters 113
5.4 Plural and We-mode Self-Awareness 120
5.5 Organization-level Moral Self-Awareness 122
5.6 Conclusion 130

PART III. MEMBERS

6. How Members Are Implicated 133
6.1 Introduction 133
6.2 Enactors 136
6.3 Endorsers 142
6.4 Omitters 149
6.5 Conclusion 155
7. Apportioning Members’ Burdens 158
7.1 Introduction 158
7.2 Sources of Cost 161
7.3 The Source-Tracking Model 163
7.4 Responding to Shortfalls 171
7.5 Conclusion 183
Conclusions 185

References 189
Index 199
 Acknowledgements

The ideas in this book have been gestating for more than a decade and have
followed me to five universities in three countries. I first started thinking
about group agents in 2010 as a PhD student at the Australian National
University, under the primary supervision of Bob Goodin and Nic
Southwood. I took these thoughts to my first academic job at the
University of Manchester, where in 2016 I wrote the article on which
Chapter 7 is based and in 2017 wrote the article on which Section 6.3 is
based. In 2019, I wrote the article on which Chapter 5 is based while I was a
visiting research professor at the University of Vienna. The first full type-
script was written in 2020–2021, while I was at the Australian Catholic
University. Final revisions were done from Monash University in 2022.
I thank each of these organizations—and, more importantly to me, their
members—for their support and encouragement.
Financial support was provided by the above universities, but also by
external funding bodies. This research was funded by the European Union’s
Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement
No. 740922, ERC Advanced Grant ‘The Normative and Moral Foundations
of Group Agency’. I subsequently worked on the book while holding an
Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for
the project ‘Organisations’ Wrongdoing: From Metaphysics to Practice’
(project number DE200101413).
For helpful comments on presentations of the ideas, I thank audiences at
the following events: the University of Auckland Philosophy Seminar,
a workshop on Acts and Omissions at the Australian Catholic University,
the Australian Catholic University’s Dianoia Institute of Philosophy
Workshop, a conference on Collectivity at the University of Bristol, the
Social Ontology 2021 Conference at the University of California at San
Diego, the Deakin University Philosophy Seminar, the Collective
Intentionality X Conference at Delft University of Technology, the TU
Eindhoven Philosophy and Ethics Seminar, a workshop on Collective
Responsibility at University of Jyväskylä, the University of Leeds Ethics
and Metaethics Seminar, the London School of Economics Political
Philosophy Seminar, the Macquarie University Philosophy Seminar, a
viii 

workshop on Collective and Shared Responsibility at the 2019 Mancept

Workshops in Political Theory at the University of Manchester, the
Monash University Philosophy Seminar, a workshop on Role Ethics at the
Open University, the University of New South Wales Philosophy Seminar,
the Otago University Philosophy Seminar, a workshop on States as
Collective Agents at Princeton University, a workshop on Group Agency
and Belief at St Andrews University, the Practical Philosophy Workshop at
Saarland University, the University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar (twice),
the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia’s 2020 Online
Conference, the Australasian Association of Philosophy’s 2021 Conference
at the University of Waikato, the University of Wollongong Philosophy
Seminar, and the 2020 Social Ontology Zoom Family Reunion.
For comments on written drafts of individual chapters or the articles on
which they’re based, I thank Nevin Climenhaga, Jonathan Farrell, Luara
Ferracioli, Simon Goldstein, John Hawthorne, Frank Hindriks, Violetta
Igneski, Ole Koksvik, Holly Lawford-Smith, Avia Pasternak, James
Pattison, Richard Rowland, Liam Shields, Anna Stilz, David Strohmaier,
and Hannah Tierney. I thank Herlinde Pauer-Studer for several deeply
enriching conversations about Chapter 5. For comments on full drafts of
the book, I thank two anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press and
a reading group at Monash University constituted by Will Cailes, Andy
McKilliam, James Molesworth, Andris Raivars, and Simon van Baal.
Chapter 5, Section 6.3, and Chapter 7 each closely follow the arguments of
my previously published work. I thank the publishers for permission to
reprint substantial tracts of the below articles:
Collins, Stephanie. 2016. ‘Distributing States’ Duties’. Journal of Political
Philosophy, 24/3: 344–66.
Collins, Stephanie. 2017. ‘Filling Collective Duty Gaps’. Journal of
Philosophy, 114/11: 573–91.
Collins, Stephanie. 2022. ‘I, Volkswagen’. Philosophical Quarterly, 72/2:
283–304.
 PART I
METAPHYSICS
 1
The Reality of Organizations

1.1 Overview

Organizations do moral wrong. States pursue unjust wars, businesses avoid

tax, and charities misdirect funds. Our social, political, and legal responses
require guidance. We need to know what the thing is we’re responding to
and how we should respond to it. We need a metaphysical and moral theory
of wrongful organizations.
This book provides a new such theory, paying particular attention to
questions that have been underexplored in existing debates. The under-
explored questions include: what’s the metaphysical relation between organ-
izations and their members, and how can this help us to make sense
of organizations’ blameworthiness? Can organizations be blameworthy in
all the myriad ways ‘blameworthy’ is understood in contemporary moral
theory? And what about feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame—can organ-
izations experience these feelings in a phenomenological sense (not just their
‘functional equivalents’)—and why does this matter for organizations’
blameworthiness? And if organizations are wrongdoers ‘in their own
right,’ then what does this imply for members? How and why are members
implicated in organizations’ wrongs, and how should reparative costs be
apportioned among members?
This book will answer these and other questions. In doing so, I aim to
bridge a divide. On one side of the chasm, recent work in social ontology has
aimed to account for the metaphysics of organizations. But this work has not
considered how the metaphysics can address the distinctive moral issues
raised by organizations’ wrongdoing. On the other side of the chasm, recent
work has taken groups’ moral blameworthiness seriously, but without
fully establishing the underlying metaphysics and exploring how that meta-
physics can inform our moral conclusions.¹ In short: the metaphysical and

¹ For example, List and Pettit 2011 and Tollefsen 2015 address group responsibility with a
focus on the underlying philosophy of mind; Isaacs 2011 with an emphasis on philosophy of
action.

Organizations as Wrongdoers: From Ontology to Morality. Stephanie Collins, Oxford University Press.
© Stephanie Collins 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192870438.003.0001
4   

moral treatment of organizations have become detached in the literature.

This book aims to attach them and to demonstrate why that attachment
matters.
The book’s primary metaphysical thesis is that members are material
parts of organizations—much as the engine, wheels, and so on are the
material parts of a motorcycle. I argue for this thesis in Part I (Chapters 1,
2, and 3). In Part II (Chapters 4 and 5), I demonstrate that this metaphysical
thesis yields important moral conclusions: organizations can be blame-
worthy for a wide range of actions, attitudes, and character traits (including
those of members qua members) and organizations can literally feel guilt
(when members feel guilt qua members). In Part III (Chapters 6 and 7),
I explore the implications of organizations’ wrongdoing for members.
I catalogue the ways in which members-as-material-parts can be implicated
in organizations’ wrongdoing. As we will see, not all members are equally
implicated in each wrongdoing of each organization. There are some organ-
izational wrongdoings in which only a few members are implicated, despite
the fact that all members are material parts of the organization that has done
wrong. I argue that the costs of organizations’ wrongdoing should be
distributed to members in proportion to members’ level of implication in
the wrongdoing, rather than being distributed equally on the basis of
membership-as-parthood alone.
In these ways, I aim to connect the metaphysics and morality of wrong-
doing organizations. Of course, not all readers will be interested in this
connection. Those who are interested only in the metaphysics might stop
reading after Chapter 3. I hope that Chapters 2 and 3 will appeal to anyone
interested in the metaphysics of ordinary objects—not only those interested
in the metaphysics of social objects. Meanwhile, those who are interested
only in the moral and political implications can skip Chapters 2 and 3,
without much loss of understanding (though such readers will, I think,
be interested in Sections 3.4 and 3.5). Such readers are asked simply to
grant me the assumption that members are material parts of organizations.
I hope that Part III (Chapters 6 and 7) will engage anyone with an interest in
historical injustice and reparations, regardless of their interest in metaphysics.
Still, the book’s arguments are best understood as forming a coherent whole:
the metaphysical picture is an important premise in the moral arguments,
while the moral arguments explain why the metaphysical picture matters.
To settle ideas and begin to demonstrate the practical importance of this
inquiry, let me lay out two examples.
     5

1.1.1 Australian Banking Royal Commission

In 2019, Australia received the final report of its Royal Commission into
Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services
Industry. In Australia, Royal Commissions engage in inquiry and fact-
finding. They’re less formal than a court, but they have the power to refer
entities to courts for prosecution. Perhaps most importantly, their policy
recommendations are taken seriously by government and the media.
The Banking Royal Commission (as I’ll call it) was set up to inquire
whether there was ‘misconduct, or conduct falling short of community
standards and expectations, in Australian financial services entities’. If so,
the Commission was asked to report on whether that conduct was ‘attrib-
utable to the particular culture and governance practices of a financial
services entity or broader cultural or governance practices in the relevant
industry or relevant subsector’ and whether the conduct ‘result[ed] from
other practices, including risk management, recruitment and remuneration
practices of a financial services entity, or in the relevant industry or relevant
subsector’ (2018, 2).
The Commission revealed that Australia’s biggest banks had engaged in
widespread and pervasive dishonest practices. These included charging fees
when no service had been provided (including to deceased customers), lying
to customers, forging customers’ signatures, impersonating customers,
falsely witnessing documents, transferring customers’ funds to advisors’
personal bank accounts, underpaying interest on term deposits, and on
and on. The Commission’s report attacked the ‘culture’ of ‘dishonesty and
greed’ in Australia’s largest banking and finance corporations (Royal
Commission 2018, 73; 2019, 138). The Commission’s final report asserted
that the corporations themselves were culpable for the misconduct the
Commission uncovered (2019, 4).
Yet the Commission didn’t explicitly endorse the idea that the banks were
blameworthy in a manner ‘irreducible’ to the blameworthiness of the indi-
viduals involved. Instead, the Commission simply raised the question:
‘[s]hould there be more focus on criminal proceedings against [banks and
financial institutions] rather than individual advisors?’ (Royal Commission
2018, 158). It left answering this question to the politicians and bureaucrats
who were the primary audience of its report. In this, the Commission
arguably submitted to a long tradition in Australia of viewing corporations
as ‘legal fictions’, with individuals (such as financial advisors) being the ones
6   

who are chased by the legal system. The Commission left it up to regulators
whether this tradition should be overthrown.
You might think the Commission’s question is a legal one, not a philo-
sophical one. But Australian law gives a philosophically contentious answer.
Australia’s Criminal Code ‘applies to bodies corporate in the same way as it
applies to individuals’—yet it allows for prosecution of a corporation only
when ‘an offence is committed by an employee, agent or officer . . . within the
actual or apparent scope of his or her employment, or . . . authority’
(Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), Part 2.5, Sec. 12.1, emphasis added).
Crimes can also be attributed to a ‘corporate culture’, understood as ‘an
attitude, policy, rule, course of conduct or practice existing within the body
corporate generally or in the part of the body corporate in which the relevant
activities [of employees, agents, or officers] take place’ (Criminal Code Act
1995 (Cth), Part 2.5, Sec. 12.4). But even within this ‘corporate culture’
provision, identifiable wrongful activities of individuals are what’s attributed
to the corporate culture. And the corporate culture provision has rarely been
used, so there is little clarity over how to interpret and apply it (Hill 2003;
Adams et al. 2017). The upshot: legally, in Australia at least, corporate
criminal wrongdoings generally exist only when individual criminal wrong-
doings exist.
In recent years, several philosophers have provided pictures of collective
wrongdoing that allow us to argue that this legal orthodoxy is wrong-headed
(e.g., French 1984; Pettit 2007; Isaacs 2011; Tollefsen 2015). However, as
I aim to show, our current philosophical picture of corporate wrongdoing is
incomplete. Therefore, our potential to provide a full and defensible answer
to the Commission’s question is also incomplete. This book will fill the gaps,
providing the theoretical tools for us to answer the Commission’s question
of whether it is desirable—or even defensible, or even possible—to hold
organizations themselves culpable.
What’s true of legal wrongdoing is also true of legal metaphysics: the
picture that prevails is an individualist picture. The above legal approach to
corporate criminal wrongdoing reflects the fact that much of Australia’s
corporate law seems to employ a shareholder-based metaphysics of corpor-
ations, in which the corporation is identified with its shareholders (Hill 2003;
this view has recently received philosophical defence in Ludwig 2017a)—or,
only slightly less reductively, with a ‘nexus of contracts’ that includes employ-
ees, suppliers, customers, and so on (Jensen and Meckling 1976).
The nexus-of-contracts model arguably encourages the reduction of the
corporation and its wrongdoing to individuals and their wrongdoing: on this
     7

model, if we can find out what those in the nexus have done, then we will
have found out what the organization has done. But organizational wrong-
doing is both narrower and broader than this. It’s narrower insofar as many
in the contractual nexus—such as suppliers and customers—should not
have their actions attributable to the corporation. And it’s broader insofar
as wrongs sometimes seem attributable to corporations’ cultures (as the
Banking Royal Commission claimed). It’s unclear where to locate a ‘culture’
within a nexus-of-contracts metaphysics. All of this suggests that philosophy
can help to answer the Commission’s question—in both its moral and
metaphysical dimensions.

1.1.2 The Polluter Pays Principle

A second example is the role of the Polluter Pays Principle in distributing

the costs of mitigating the devastating effects of climate change—and, in
particular, in implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement under the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Polluter Pays
Principle asserts that industrialized states should set high emissions reduc-
tion targets under the Paris Agreement, because these states are culpable for
wrongfully high historical emissions. Disagreement over the truth of the
Polluter Pays Principle (among many other things) has prevented states
from setting sufficiently ambitious emissions reduction targets under the
Paris Agreement. Predictably, developing states argue in favour of the
principle while developed state resist it (Stavins 2018).
If we are to vindicate the Polluter Pays Principle, we need a conception of
states as unitary actors, who nonetheless relate to their citizens in such a way
that (i) citizens’ polluting actions are attributable to states and (ii) costs
attributed to polluting states can justly be passed on to a wide diversity
citizens—including passed on to citizens who are not themselves wrongful
polluters. Parts I and II of this book vindicate point (i), while Part III
vindicates point (ii).
As with Australia’s Banking Royal Commission, the law gets us only so far
in sorting out these issues. Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law
(Crawford 2012) is the canon on states’ legal treatment. Here, states are
metaphysically conceptualized as unitary actors rather than a ‘nexus of
contracts’ or a collection of individuals. But in the place of the nexus of
contracts, there’s an empty hole: states’ relation to individuals is left entirely
untheorized. It’s as if states are completely separate from their individual
8   

constituents—whether these constituents are conceptualized so as to include

ordinary citizens, or not. Part I of this book aims to fill the hole.
And needless to say, the force of international law has not been used
against states who are high emitters. None of them have been condemned by
the United Nations Security Council or referred to the International Court
of Justice, for example. Philosophy can help us to work out whether that
would be morally appropriate. Although Chapters 2 and 3 will argue that
citizens are the material parts of their states, Chapter 4 will demonstrate
that many of the moral failings of organizations—including states—cannot
be located in the wrongful actions of individuals. Organizations’ moral failings
often lie in organizations’ evaluative attitudes or character traits, where these
organizational attitudes and traits are not straightforwardly understandable in
terms of the wrongful evaluative attitudes or wrongful character traits of
members. This analysis reveals the shortcomings of existing treatments of
organizations’ wrongdoing, which have tended to focus on organizations’
blameworthiness for their irreducibly group-level choices or decisions. If we
can hold organizations blameworthy for their evaluative attitudes and their
character traits (not just their choices or decisions), we potentially get many
more environmentally negligent organizations on the hook.
These two examples will recur throughout the book’s discussion, helping
to illustrate and problematize various claims that I’ll consider and defend.
But this is a book of philosophy. My arguments will remain theoretical and
general, with the details sketched primarily via these two examples. To
introduce the book’s philosophical approach, the rest of this introductory
chapter turns to theoretical issues. I will first outline how I conceptualize
organizations. I’ll then briefly explain why we should be realists about them.
Finally, I will give an overview of the arguments to come in the rest of
the book.

1.2 Organizations’ Attributes

In outlining the Banking Royal Commission and the Polluter Pays Principle,
I’ve made an assumption that may surprise some readers. I’ve assumed
states are organizations. Often, when we hear ‘organization’, we think of
large corporations and charities, but not states.² My usage is broader. As I’ll

² Though I’m certainly not the first to argue that states are collective moral agents (see e.g.,
Erskine 2001; Erskine 2003; Wendt 2004).
     9

use the term, an ‘organization’ is a collective agent that involves a large

number of people who realize a structure that coordinates divided labour via
rules and hierarchical command relations, guided by a collective decision-
making procedure.
This definition is intended to be ecumenical between many different
characterizations found across the academic literature. It follows a long
tradition in sociology, starting with Max Weber’s characterization of bur-
eaucracies as involving rules and regulations, a division of labour and
responsibility, and hierarchical authority structures (1968, vol. I, 223ff.;
1968, vol. III, 956ff.). More recently, sociologists have given similar analyses
of institutions, such as Rom Harre’s view of an institution as ‘an interlocking
double-structure of persons-as-role-holders or office-bearers and the like,
and of social practices involving both expressive and practical aims and
outcomes’ (1979, 98) or Jonathan Turner’s definition of an institution as ‘a
complex of positions, roles, norms and values lodged in particular types of
social structures and organizing relatively stable patterns of human activity’
(1997, 6). My use of ‘organization’ rather than ‘bureaucracy’ or ‘institution’
reflects recent philosophical usage, in which ‘bureaucracy’ has fallen out of
the lexicon, while ‘institution’ is often used to capture a wider range of
phenomena—including institutions such as marriage or promise-keeping,
which are not ‘organizations’ in any sense.
My characterization of organizations also roughly matches recent man-
agement theory, particularly Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s distinction between
social structures, institutions, and organizations. According to Hodgson,
‘[s]ocial structures include all sets of social relations, including the episodic
and those without rules, as well as social institutions. Institutions are
systems of established and embedded social rules that structure social
interactions. Organizations are special institutions that involve (a) criteria
to establish their boundaries and to distinguish their members from non-
members, (b) principles of sovereignty concerning who is in charge and
(c) chains of command delineating responsibilities within the organization’
(Hodgson 2007).
In addition to sociology and management theory, my characterization
resonates with related work in philosophy. Thus my ‘organizations’ include
Peter French’s ‘conglomerates’, which have (i) internal organization or
decision procedures for choosing courses of action, (ii) enforceable codes
of conduct for members, and (iii) members who replaceably occupy roles
that provide them with power over other members (French 1984, 13ff.). My
view likewise dovetails with Raimo Tuomela’s view of a group agent as ‘an
10   

interactive social system . . . that consists of interrelated individuals such that

this system is, through them, capable of producing uniform actions and
outcomes’ (2013, 21).
Because my definition encompasses the above definitions, I hope that my
metaphysical and moral claims will appeal to a range of different theorists,
who might subscribe to different of the above-cited definitions and charac-
terizations of organizations. That is to say, my aim here is not to improve on
any of the definitions quoted above from other theorists. Rather, I aim for
my definition to be consistent with—and neutral between—all the above
definitions. That said, my definition raises a question: what makes organiza-
tions (as I’ve characterized them) worthy of a unitary analysis as wrongdoers,
despite the vast differences between various types of organization—states, for-
profits, and non-profits, for example? After all, many philosophers differen-
tiate organizations according to those organizations’ ends (e.g., French 1984;
Rovane 1998; Miller 2010). One might think that organizations with different
ends should be conceptualized differently as wrongdoers.
On the contrary, the various components of my definition demonstrate
that organizations warrant treatment as a class. First, consider organizations’
large size. By ‘large’, I mean ‘large enough that not all members are known to
one another personally’. The numerical cut-off here will differ for different
organizations, depending on how channels of communication are set up.
Definitionally, all organizations are large enough that members cannot have
pairwise in-depth conversations about the organization’s plans and policies
(at least, not consistently with having the time to ensure those plans and
policies are enacted). This is significant, because it means that it is extremely
unlikely for there to be perfect uniformity amongst members’ reasons for
supporting or opposing particular plans or policies, or even their interpret-
ations of the content of plans and policies. The members cannot gather
around a table to reach a consensus view on the whys and hows of organ-
izational practices and policies. This mandates heterogeneity in how we treat
members of wrongdoing organizations, as Part III of this book will explain.
Such heterogeneity is common to organizations, while not always being true
of smaller, more collaborative, collective agents. The lack of cohesion
entailed by organizations’ large size also means that organizations’ members
cannot simply be picked out by the fact that they all share identical goals,
visions, or values. A more complicated account of membership is required,
as Chapters 2 and 3 will explain.
Second, the members occupy places in a structure. A structure is a
collection of roles that stand in relations. In an organization, the roles are
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jobs or tasks and the relations are usually reporting and delegation lines. The
roles and their relations can be highly diverse. Both the roles and the
relations are representable in an organization chart (that depicts the roles
as ‘nodes’ and the relations as ‘edges’).
Organizations are composed of people who ‘realize a structure’—that is,
occupy the roles in the structure. A structure is an abstract representation of
various roles and of the relations between those roles. As an analogy, we can
think of a recipe. A recipe is an abstract representation of various roles (the
onion role, the garlic role, and so on) and of how the occupants of those roles
must be related to one another in order to realize a certain dish. For the dish
to be realized, we must find particular role-occupants (particular onions,
particular bulbs of garlic, and so on) and we must make it the case that those
role-occupants are related in such a way as to follow the recipe.³
Following Katherine Ritchie, saying that an organization is composed of
people who realize a structure allows us to say that an organization is a
realized structure, where a structure is ‘realized’ when enough people
occupy the structure’s roles. (How many is ‘enough’? That will be dictated
by the organization’s decision-making procedure—something I will charac-
terize shortly.) This idea of structure gives us an explanation of how an
organization is both ‘one’ and ‘many’. It is ‘one’ because it is a realized
structure—a single thing. It is ‘many’ because it is the many individuals who
occupy its roles.⁴
Chapters 2 and 3 will say much more about the metaphysics here.
Specifically, I will argue that members are physical parts of an organization,
and that an organization is located wherever its members are. This will
incorporate organizations into a naturalist, materialist view of the world.
For now, the important point is this: since all organizations are realized
structures, the just-mentioned metaphysical views can apply in the same
way to different types of organizations (states, for-profits, non-profits, and
so on). This vindicates the project of developing a unified theory of organ-
izations as wrongdoers.

³ The recipe analogy comes from Kathrin Koslicki’s (2008) discussion of ordinary objects.
⁴ See Ritchie (2013). Harris (2020, 360–1) objects to Ritchie’s particular version of the
organizations-as-structure view: structures do not allow for changes in members, roles, or
relations; clearly, organizations can change members, roles, and relations while remaining the
same organization. We can respond to this by saying that two realized structures, which exist at
different times, are the same organization just in case the later structure is descended in the right
way from the earlier structure.
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Third, an organization has a division of labour. Members don’t know

all the details of what all the others are doing vis-à-vis the organization’s
plans and policies. This complicates the extent to which each can be held
blameworthy for what the others (fail to) do. Diminished individual blame-
worthiness has two implications. First, it generates an imperative that
we have a sound theory of distinctively organization-level wrong, since
often we won’t find individual-level wrongs that are proportionate to an
organization-level wrong. Part II of this book (Chapters 4 and 5) theorizes
distinctively organization-level wrongs, including distinctively organization-
level guilt. Second, diminished individual blameworthiness implies that we
need to take care when spelling out the implications of organizations’
wrongdoings for members, since those implications will not be as uniform
as they would be in a group with less informational asymmetry between
members. Those implications for members are spelled out in Part III
(Chapters 6 and 7).
Fourth, an organization has rules and hierarchical command relations via
which it pursues its plans and policies. These matter because—similar to the
informational asymmetries that result from the division of labour—they
sometimes attenuate individuals’ blameworthiness. If an individual has
perfectly good reason to trust the system, then she may be perfectly within
reason to obey the rules and/or her superiors. Yet if the rules themselves, or
the command relations, are morally wrong, then this can lead to the
organization doing wrong. This phenomenon is common across a wide
range of organizations, even if the precise details vary.
Worse, because the rules and command relations are themselves designed
through a process with a division of labour (including through legislation
and regulation that is imposed upon organizations from the outside), there
may be no individual who is blameworthy for the fact that the rules and
command relations are as they are. This relates to Anthony Downs’ ‘Law of
Imperfect Control’, according to which no one individual can fully control a
large organization—as well as his ‘Law of Diminishing Control’, according
to which the more effort at control is made at the top, the more subordinates
will try to evade or counteract such control (Downs 1967, 143–50). Thus,
rules and hierarchical command relationships can relieve both superiors and
subordinates from blame. Of course, this is not to say individuals within
organizations are never blameworthy: Chapter 6 will spell out many ways in
which individuals can be implicated in organizations’ wrongdoing, and
Chapter 7 will justify individuals bearing costs to repair their organizations’
wrong. Again, though, these phenomena are common across a wide range of
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organizations, vindicating the project of developing a unified theory of

organizational wrongdoing.
Thus, organizations are distinctive by virtue of being composed of a large
number of people who are occupy places in a structure that coordinates
divided labour via rules and hierarchical command relations. This makes
them worthy of a unified analysis. And there are good reasons to want a
unified analysis. By aiming at unity, our theory is forced to fit with a wider
range of case studies and examples. All else being equal, this makes our
theory better. That is: if we developed a theory of wrongdoing for (say)
corporations but not states, then we’d need to develop a separate account of
states as wrongdoers. Our over-arching theory would therefore be less
unified and less simple. If we can develop a theory that applies to all
organizations in a unified way (as I suggest we can), then this is preferable
to going back to the drawing board for each and every different type of
organization.
At the same time, though, it’s worth theorizing about organizations
specifically, rather than about collective agents more generally. This is
because organizations raise their own problems, as just summarized.
While the theory developed in this book might apply to collective agents
more generally, I want to make sure we get organizations right.
What are ‘collective agents more generally’? I said earlier that organiza-
tions are collective agents that are guided by a collective decision-making
procedure. In my view, all collective agents are guided by a collective
decision-making procedure (Collins 2019a, ch. 6). Specifically, a collective
agent is composed of agents united under a rationally operated group-level
decision-making procedure that can attend to moral considerations. Thus,
each collective agent has its own decision-making procedure. Importantly
for organizations specifically, a collective’s decision-making procedure
includes the informal, tacit, and vague procedures that we might subsume
under the notion of an organization’s ‘culture’ (Weick and Sutcliffe 2001,
ch. 3; Herzog 2018). Why include ‘culture’ within a collective agent’s
‘procedure’? Because the norms, practices, and traditions that constitute a
culture often hugely constrain the real-world instantiation of any abstractly
defined ‘formal procedure’. Think, for instance, of a committee whose
formal procedure is ‘egalitarian discussion amongst committee members’.
When this formal procedure is actually instantiated, culture will inevitably
have a strong influence. For example, tradition and norms might informally
decree that older male members speak first, or for longer, or with more
authority. Such cultural aspects of an actually-instantiated procedure will
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often be crucial for understanding the procedure’s operation and outputs.

Chapter 3 will say more about organizational membership and how mem-
bers relate to an organization’s decision-making procedure.
My account of collective agency produces a broad church. Two friends
deciding where to go for lunch are a collective agent, just as much as BP,
France, or Oxfam. Thus, many collective agents are far more unstructured,
undivided, discretionary, small, and egalitarian than organizations. For the
purposes of analysing collective agents’ wrongdoing, it is useful to study
organizations specifically, rather than the broad church of collective agents
more generally (as was done by, for example, Isaacs 2011; List and Pettit
2011; Tollefsen 2015). This is because of the factors mentioned earlier:
organizations are (i) composed of many people, (ii) who realize a structure,
(iii) with a division of labour, (iv) governed by rules and hierarchical
command relations. These factors produce the complications sketched
above, which will be discussed as the book proceeds.

1.3 Realism about Organizations

So far, we have two examples where organizations’ wrongdoing is at stake

but contestable. And we have a conception of organizations that renders
them a distinct category. There is one more preliminary to establish in this
chapter: realism about organizations. This is the view that organizations ‘are
entities over which we quantify in the set of our best descriptions and
explanations of the social world’ (Sheehy 2006, 132).
As with any philosophical position, realism about organizations is
contested—not just in philosophy, but also in organization theory, business
ethics, sociology, and economics.⁵ It is not hard to see why it is contested. We
don’t seem to bump into organizations in the street. We might bump into
their buildings or billboards, but these things are buildings or billboards—they
are not, themselves, organizations. It is not clear where organizations are.
(I will defend a view of where they are in Chapters 2 and 3.) And if it’s not
clear where they are, then it’s not clear how they could possibly be part of the
causal pathways of the natural world. Those causal pathways require a spatio-
temporal location, or so it seems. Furthermore, when we look out into the

⁵ Recent sceptics include Heugens, Kaptein, and van Oosterhout 2008, Rönnegard 2015,
and Ludwig 2017a—tracing back to Popper 1945, Hayek 1948, Weber 1968, Weick 1979, and
Elster 1989.
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social and political world, what we do see is individual humans. Our society
and politics seems to be made up of humans. While we might sometimes refer
to groups of humans, it is tempting to view this as ‘mere shorthand’ for
humans themselves.
Despite these criticisms, realism is widely enough accepted—and the
reasons for it have been widely enough circulated—that my defence here
will be brief, schematic, and familiar to many readers.⁶ This truncated
defence will enable the remaining chapters to forge new ground. There are
three broad reasons for realism about organizations: their multiple realiz-
ability, their inward and outward causal-explanatory power, and (what I’ll
call) their functionalist-interpretivist agency.

1.3.1 Multiple Realizability

There are multiple ways organization-level facts, properties, events,

and explanations—as well as organizations themselves, as objects—can be
realized by individual-level facts, properties, events, explanations, and
objects. (The reader might doubt that organizations are objects; I will render
this plausible in Chapters 2 and 3.) Consider an event: the event of Australia
permitting a large new coalmine to be built. We could instead have con-
sidered the fact that Australia has permitted the mine, or Australia’s property
of having permitted the mine, or an explanation of the mine that includes
Australia’s having permitted it, or the entity that is Australia—all of these
are ‘multiply realizable’ in relevant individual-level phenomena. By ‘multi-
ply realizable’, I just mean that individual-level phenomena could have
been a variety of different ways, consistent with the organization-level
phenomenon remaining exactly the same. I focus on phenomena that are
events, just to settle ideas. (For discussion of the differences between the

⁶ See, e.g., Goodpaster and Mathews 1982, Ruben 1985, Pettit 1996, Hatch 1997, Reed 2001,
Fairclough 2005, Hess 2013, and Thomasson 2019. In her influential overview of organization
theory, Hatch (1997) divides organization theory into ‘modern’, ‘symbolic’, and ‘postmodern’
perspectives. In the sense I’m using here, all three perspectives are ‘realist’. The modern
perspective analyses organizations as agents of rational control; the symbolic perspective
views organizations as sites of cultural meaning and symbolism; and the postmodern perspec-
tive views organizations as ideologically driven forces of hegemonic power. My arguments can
be wielded from any of these perspectives. More generally, the metaphysical and moral issues
addressed in this book cross-cut debates in organization theory about organizations’ interests,
values, and meanings.
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multiple realizability of social-level properties, facts, events, and so on, see

List and Spiekermann 2013.)
The individual-level events that constitute the Australia-level event most
prominently include actions on the part of state bureaucrats. And each of
these individual-level events could have gone various ways: individuals
could work more or less reluctantly, callously, carefully, obediently, etc.
Each of these possible realizations is ‘Australia permitting the mine,’ just
so long as two conditions are met.
First, in each realization, the individual actions are performed by mem-
bers within the constraints of, and because of, their role in Australia; or, as
I will equivalently say, the actions are performed by members while they are
performing their role. This is what makes the event one of Australia permit-
ting the mine, rather than one of some private individuals abusing
Australia’s procedures to produce a permission for the mine. Second, the
permission of the mine results from each realization. This is what makes the
event one of Australia permitting the mine, rather than merely trying to
permit the mine.
If these two conditions are met, then each realization is a realization of
Australia’s permitting the mine. The realizations are different from each
other, since they each involve individuals performing different actions.
Thus, the realizations are not identical to each other. It’s also not true that
all the realizations are identical to the permitting of the mine—if they were,
and if we accept transitivity of identity, then the realizations would also have
to be identical to one another (which we’ve already ruled out, because they
are discernible from one another). We also cannot arbitrarily choose just
one realization, and say that the permitting of the mine is identical to that
realization but not any of the others: if we did that, then the permitting of the
mine would not occur if one of the other realizations happened. So, we
should say that the permitting of the mine is something distinct from, but
that unites, the distinct realizations (Jackson and Pettit 1992; List and
Menzies 2009). This is just to say that we should be realists about the
organization-level event.
Importantly, if the multiple realizability of some organization-level phe-
nomenon is to render it distinct from its individual-level realizers, then the
different potential individual-level realizers must be of different types, not
just different tokens of the same type (Shapiro 2000; Couch 2004). To see
this, consider the analogous case in philosophy of mind. Suppose my pain
is always realized by C-fibres firing in my brain, though different C-fibres
fire on different pain-occasions (because C-fibres degenerate and are
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replaced by new ones). Then, pain is equivalent to C-fibres firing. For pain to
be non-equivalent to (i.e., distinct from) its neural realizers, there must be
different types of potential neural realizers. This holds in our example:
Australia’s act of permitting the mine could have been secured by legislation,
or by a judicial ruling, or by the run-of-the-mill implementation of some
existing policy, or in some other way. These are all different types of realizers
of the organization-level event.
Other philosophers have similarly used multiple realizability to argue for
organizations’ existence, but those arguments have tended to focus on how
an organization manifests itself across time (e.g., List and Pettit 2011; List
and Spiekermann 2013). Such cross-temporal arguments says that an organ-
ization persists through time even while its members alter. For example, an
organization persists even though some members leave while other mem-
bers join. Such persistence across changes in membership provides reason to
view the organization as a metaphysically distinct entity. But such cross-
temporal change is not the only relevant kind of multiple realizability.
Instead of tracking the organization across time, we can track the organ-
ization across different possible worlds: even if members never change in the
actual world, we should be realists about the organization if it’s true that the
organization would persist were members to change. The counterfactual
(rather than cross-temporal) version of multiple realizability is worthwhile
for a few reasons. First, it enables realism about a broader pool of organiza-
tions than the cross-temporal version of the argument. Second (and more
importantly), it enables us to assess just how robust the organizational entity
is. We can ask across how many changes in membership (or across what
kinds of changes in membership) the organization would remain. Of course,
any survival across changes in membership gives us reason to posit the
organization. But a more robust entity—an entity that would survive a
higher or more diverse range of changes to its membership—is likely to
have more explanatory power, and so more reason to be posited. This brings
us to the second reason for realism about organizations.

1.3.2 Inward and Outward Causal-Explanatory Power

Above, I mentioned that one might question organizations’ explanatory

power, because one might question where they are placed in the natural
world. I will address that issue at length in Chapters 2 and 3. Bracketing that
issue for now, we can see that organizations have causal-explanatory power
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in two directions. They have inward causal-explanatory power insofar as

organizational facts, properties, events, and entities can causally explain
facts, properties, events, and entities internal to the organization. And
organizations have outward causal-explanatory power insofar as organiza-
tional facts, properties, events, and entities can causally explain facts,
properties, events, and entities external to the organization. Inward causal-
explanatory power implies that (an event, fact, property, etc. that involves)
the organization sometimes causes (an event, fact, property, etc. that
involves) its components being certain ways. Outward causal-explanatory
power occurs when (an event, fact, property, etc. that involves) an organ-
ization causally explains (an event, fact, property, etc. that involves) phe-
nomena external to the organizations. Outward causal-explanatory power
demonstrates that organization-level explanations are different from an
aggregation of explanations that are about the organization’s components.
To intuitively see inward causal-explanatory power, consider again the
case of Australia permitting a new coal mine. To adequately explain or
describe the members’ actions that constitute the organization’s action—to
capture members’ motivations, constraints, goals, etc.—we need to refer to
the organization’s distinct features (e.g., judgements, goals, intentions, pro-
cedures). We can imagine a bureaucrat who is entirely opposed to permit-
ting the mine—who even secretly campaigned against it on weekends—yet
who does her role in implementing Australia’s decision. To fully explain and
motivate this individual’s actions, we need to refer not just to facts about her,
but also to facts about Australia—specifically, that Australia decided to
permit the mine. Her action is, in a sense, not her own (at least, it’s not
just her own). The locus of agency behind her action is (also) Australia’s.
This is the same sense in which the wrongdoings uncovered by the Banking
Royal Commissions were problems with the banks, not just with individuals
within the banks, and provides a rationale for why the Polluter Pays
Principle targets historically emitting states, not just collectives or individ-
uals governed by those states. (For similar points on inward explanatory
power, see Elder-Vass 2007, 32–4.)
To intuitively see outward causal-explanatory power, consider that
organizations can cause effects their members could not cause, were those
members to lack the properties in virtue of which they realize the organiza-
tion’s structure. The coal mine—situated on public land in Australia—could
not be permitted by one person acting alone (not even the Prime Minister,
without violating due process and therefore not acting as Prime Minister).
The coal mine couldn’t even be permitted by many Australian people
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together, if they were not acting within the structure governed by the
organization-level decision-making procedure of Australia. Of course,
the mine might end up on the land by sheer fluke, without any action by
the Australian state, but then we would not describe the mine as having been
permitted by anyone. The ‘permitting’ in that kind of case is not an inten-
tional action, but rather an accident or omission. By contrast, if the mine
is permitted by an edict produced by Australia’s organization-level decision-
making procedure, then the permission is reliably and intentionally
controlled; therefore, the permission is an action. Yet no individual can
successfully produce the permission on their own: the action must be
attributed to the state.
To these intuitive demonstrations, we can add that some of the leading
theories of causal explanation are amenable to including organizations in
causal explanations. This is most obviously true on counterfactual theories
of causal explanation (see, e.g., List and Menzies 2009; List and Spiekermann
2013). According to these theories, an outcome is explained by the facts that
hold across all (or most) of the possible counterfactual worlds where that
outcome obtains. Consider Australia’s permitting of the coal mine. This
outcome doesn’t co-vary with the specifics of particular individuals: the
individuals are more or less replaceable when it comes to securing the
outcome. Instead, it co-varies with organization-level facts (events, proper-
ties, entities) like ‘Australia’s belief that coal creates jobs and boosts GDP’.
Such organization-level phenomena also feature in causal explanations that
use a probabilistic theory (on which causes make effects more likely) or a
robustness theory (on which causes make effects more secure). (See similarly
List and Spiekermann 2013. I say more about social-level phenomena as
causes in Collins 2019b; Collins 2019a, ch. 3.)
Organizations can also be part of causal explanations if we use a process
theory of causal explanation. On these theories, the causes of some effect are
the internal elements of the process that pre-empted the event—where that
process might be a flow of energy, or might be the transmission of a
modification in an otherwise consistent structure, or might be the conser-
vation of a quantity (like mass-energy, linear momentum, or charge) within
a given object over time (Schaffer 2016). For organizations to be potential
causes on the process view, organizations would have to be concrete par-
ticulars: things through which energy can flow, modifications can be trans-
mitted, or mass-energy can be conserved. In Chapters 2 and 3, I will develop
and defend a view on which organizations are concrete particulars that have
members as material parts. Lines can be drawn around them via their
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structures, as outlined in Section 1.2. They are thus amenable to analysis as

causes, from within the process theory of causes. Naturally, both the coun-
terfactual and process theories of causation are open to objections. But they
demonstrate the breadth of causal-explanatory theories that accommodate
organization-level phenomena as causes.

1.3.3 Functionalist Interpretivism

A final reason for realism about organizations is that they are agents. I’ll
assume that if we should be realists about anything, we should be realists
about agents. I have argued elsewhere that collectives are agents—where
‘collectives’ are to be understood as entities composed of agents united
under a group-level decision-making procedure that can process moral
reasons (Collins 2019a, ch. 6; see similarly List and Pettit 2011; Isaacs
2011; Hess 2018b; Hindriks 2018). As already explained, organizations are
a type of collective agent: they are large, structured, labour-divided, gov-
erned, hierarchical collective agents. So, if my arguments elsewhere are
correct, then it follows that organizations are agents.
It is worth briefly recapitulating the reasons for believing in organizations’
agency, for two reasons. First, many working on collective agency (including
my earlier self) do not sufficiently distinguish between functionalist and
interpretivist reasons for believing in collectives’ agency. This distinction is
important, because philosophers of mind (and others) tend to fall on different
sides of the functionalist-interpretivist divide. If organizations were agents in
an interpretivist sense but not a functionalist sense, then any argument for
collective agency that relied on interpretivism would alienate those who have
independent reasons for believing in functionalism—and vice versa, if organ-
izations were functionalist agents but not interpretivist ones. Thus, my aim
here is to show that both accounts of agency render organizations agents.
The second reason for recapitulating reasons for believing in collectives’
agency is that organizations specifically are particularly clear cases of col-
lective agents. Thus, even if one doubts that collectives in general are agents
(for example, if one was unconvinced by my or others’ earlier arguments),
then one may still be convincible that organizations specifically are agents.
That’s what I aim to do here.
What are the functionalist and interpretivist accounts of agency? I will
start with functionalism. Within social ontology, functionalism about
agency has been defended by Bryce Huebner (2014), Gunnar Björnsson
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and Kendy Hess (2016), and David Strohmaier (2020). It’s a popular
account of mental states in general—and attitudes towards propositions in
particular—throughout philosophy of mind. The characteristic feature of
functionalism is that propositional attitudes are characterized by their
functional profile. That is: attitudes such as belief, desire, hope, regret, and
so on, when taken towards propositions, are characterized by the function
that those attitudes play within some system. This system is the agent or
entity that bears the attitude. The function of an attitude includes causing,
grounding, or blocking other attitudes and behavioural dispositions. For
example, we attribute to me the attitude of belief towards the proposition
‘the ice cream is in the freezer’, I have an attitude that causes me to perform
the behaviour of going to the freezer when I want ice cream. In this way,
propositional attitudes are characterized by their relations to one another,
and to behaviour.
By contrast, interpretivism has been defended within social ontology by
Christian List and Philip Pettit (2011)⁷ and Deborah Tollefsen (2015).
Under this approach, the key question for agency is whether it’s possible
(or rational, or reasonable) for an external observer to adopt the ‘intentional
stance’ towards an entity. The intentional stance is a mindset in which one
views the entity’s behaviours as explained by its beliefs, desires, hopes, fears,
regrets, and so on. This stance is rational if it does a good job of explaining
and predicting the observed behaviour of the entity. For example, if an
observer sees me take the ice cream from the freezer, they might interpret
me as desiring ice cream and believing it’s in the freezer. After observing me
for a few days, they might predict that I’ll perform this behaviour in all
future days after dinner. The (rationality of) ascriptions determine or
even constitute my desiring ice cream after dinner and my believing it’s in
the fridge.
A key distinction between functionalism and interpretivism, then, is that
the functionalist focuses on mechanisms internal to the agent, while the
interpretivist focuses on behaviours that are observable from external to the
agent. The functionalist also includes behaviours in their characterization of

⁷ List and Pettit appeal to interpretivism at some points (e.g., 2011, 11, 13, 23) and to
functionalism at other points (e.g., 2011, 171). However, at one point they say ‘the performance
[behaviour] itself should dictate the representations and motivations we ascribe to the agent’
(2011, 28). This places them more strongly in the interpretivist camp. I thank David Strohmaier
for convincing me of this; see also Strohmaier 2020. Interpretivism differs from behaviourism:
I take behaviourism to explain mentality just in terms of an entity’s behaviours, while inter-
pretivism explains mentality in terms of how an idealized observer would interpret those
behaviours.
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an attitude’s functional role, but the primary focus is on an attitude’s relation

to other attitudes, and in any case the behaviour is taken to be internal to the
system, with no observer necessary. As I hope is clear, both functionalism
and interpretivism have their merits.⁸
In the case of organizations, functionalism and interpretivism usually rise
and fall together: an organization that’s an agent by functionalist lights will
almost always happen to be an agent by interpretivist lights, and vice versa.
Thus, for it to be sensible for an observer to adopt the intentional stance
towards an organization over time, it will usually be the case that the
organization has certain internal mechanisms (such as mechanisms that
ensure the organization behaves in ways that are roughly consistent across
time, as emphasized by List and Pettit (2011)). Meanwhile, an organization’s
operation of rationality-producing internal mechanisms will almost always
happen to result in outward organizational behaviour towards which it is
appropriate for an observer to take the intentional stance. For purposes of
figuring out whether real-world organizations are agents, then, we often
don’t need to pick between functionalism and interpretivism. Partly because
of this, I will make things difficult for myself: I’ll assume that an organization
must meet both criteria in order to count as an agent.
There’s another reason to insist that both functions and interpretations
are important for organizations’ agency: in the case of organizations, it’s
rather unclear where internal mechanisms end and observable behaviour
begins (Strohmaier 2020). For example, are discussions between board
members an internal mechanism, or an observable behaviour? If we endorse
a combined ‘functionalist-interpretivist’ account (which demands an
agent has both internal mechanisms and outward behaviour), then we
don’t need to draw a sharp line between internal mechanisms and observ-
able behaviour.
What’s more, we should require both outward behaviour and internal
mechanisms because doing so gives us a stronger argument against the
sceptic of organizational agency. The higher a bar we force organizational
agents to meet, the less room there is for complaint that we are being too

⁸ Both also have problems. Arguably, each theory countenances too many agents. For
functionalism, collective agents are sometimes taken to be counterexamples (Block 1978);
another would be complex robots. For interpretivism, it seems odd that my mental states are
determined by, or even constituted by, someone else’s ascriptions. It seems there must be
constraints on the interpreter’s ascriptions, if the ascriptions are to determine my agency.
I will assume such problems don’t undermine understanding organisations as agents, though
in Chapters 4 and 5 I will address nearby worries about organizations’ blameworthiness, namely,
the worry that organizations lack the phenomenology necessary for blameworthiness.
     23

permissive by including organizations in the category ‘agent’. At the same

time, requiring organizations to meet both the functionalist requirement and
the interpretivist requirement enables us to retain a clean theory of organ-
izational agency. The two requirements do not contradict one another, and
nor are we treating them as disjuncts (which would result in a somewhat
disunified theory, with some organizations being ‘functionalist agents’ and
others being ‘interpretivist agents’). Instead, the two requirements are
layered neatly on top of each other. For all these reasons, I’ll assume an
organizational agent must have both internal mechanisms and rationalizable
external behaviour.
On the functionalist picture, the features of organizations that render
them agents are that their structure coordinates divided labour via rules and
hierarchical command relations, guided by a collective decision-making pro-
cedure. While other kinds of collectives have the last of these features (a
decision-making procedure), they do not necessarily coordinate divided
labour via rules and hierarchical command relations.
Arguably, the decision-making procedure is enough to produce
collective-level agency (assuming the procedure abides by rationality con-
straints). But the other three features (coordinating divided labour, rules,
hierarchies) are not present in all collective agents, and they boost the case
for the agency of organizations specifically. These features ensure that—by
and large, and about as reliably as individual agents—organizations have
large webs of mutually-consistent beliefs, preferences, and other propos-
itional attitudes. Such large webs of consistency are needed on the function-
alist picture, because this picture characterizes particular propositional
attitudes via their causal (and other) relations to other propositional atti-
tudes. Organizations’ coordinated division of labour, rules, and hierarchies
ensure that relations of consistency and mutual inter-definability hold
between the organizations’ various propositional attitudes. An organiza-
tion’s decision-making procedures, labour divisions, rules, and hierarchies
are the mechanisms by which the web of mental states are produced and
revised.
What about interpretivism? Notice that organizations (perhaps unlike
other collectives) are composed of people who realize a structure. This
allows us to be clear about which behaviour belongs to the people qua
private individuals, and which behaviour belongs to the organization—
which ultimately allows us to attribute actions to the organization. The
structure enables us to do this for two reasons. First, the structure provides
boundaries to the organization: either a person is a role bearer or she is not;
24   

only the former’s behaviour should be attributed to the organizational entity

towards which we adopt the intentional stance. Second, the structure con-
tains roles. It is only when a person is not just a role-bearer, but also a role-
bear who is performing her role, that her behaviour should be attributed to
the organizational entity towards which we adopt the intentional stance.
Thus, organizations’ nature helps us to pick out the entity towards which we
adopt the intentional stance.
Most importantly, when we adopt the intentional stance to an organiza-
tion, we find behaviour that is understandable and predictable: it’s under-
standable and predictable that banks will push legal limits for a profit and
that states will permit environmentally dubious behaviour that boosts the
short-term economy. Like under functionalism, the organization’s decision-
making procedures, labour divisions, rules, and hierarchies loom large here:
these are the mechanisms that produce understandability and predictability
in the organization’s behaviour. Thanks to these mechanisms of organiza-
tions, we find that organizations behave in ways that make it rational for us
to adopt the intentional stance towards them on a very regular basis. If
interpretivism is true, this makes them agents. So we should view them
as real.

1.4 The Questions

Having introduced organizations, their wrongdoing, and their reality, the

stage is set for the book’s substantive argument. As mentioned above, the
book is divided into three parts: Part I is ‘Metaphysics’ (Chapters 1 to 3),
Part II is ‘Blameworthiness’ (Chapters 4 and 5), and Part III is ‘Members’
(Chapters 6 and 7). Parts I and II treat organizations as unified wholes—just
as this chapter has done in providing a philosophical characterization of
organizations and three reasons for including organizations in our social
ontology. Part III will consider the implications of organizations’ wrong-
doing for variously-placed members of organizations.
The rest of Part I is devoted to conceptualizing organizations as material
objects that are dependent upon members. I develop an account of
the organization-member relation that doesn’t reduce organizations to mem-
bers, but that also acknowledges that members are crucial to organizations’
performances. The aim is to produce an account that makes organizations
concrete material particulars, so that we can more readily incorporate their
causal powers into a naturalistic understanding of the world. We want a
     25

metaphysical account that will enable us to hold organizations blameworthy

in their own right, while producing the right kinds of moral implications for
members.
Chapter 2 will consider various ways of doing this that don’t quite work.
This will pave the way for Chapter 3’s positive proposal, which walks the
tightrope between the various pictures rejected in Chapter 2. On my pro-
posed account, organizations are material objects that have members as
material parts. Applied to the Banking Royal Commission, members of
financial corporations include directors, non-manager employees (such as
financial advisors), and shareholders; but excludes intermediaries such as
mortgage brokers (who offer products from more than one bank). Applied
to the liberal democracies at issue in the Polluter Pays Principle, members
include legislators, public servants, judges, and those with the right to vote in
legislative elections; but excludes residents who lack the right to vote. On my
picture, these individuals are the flesh-and-blood of organizations, even
though organizations are not reducible to them.
Part II, ‘Blameworthiness,’ begins in Chapter 4 by distinguishing recent
moral-philosophical lenses on blameworthiness: the volitionist lens, the
attributivist lens, and the aretaic lens. I explain how these lenses each
apply to organizations. Most who have written on collectives’ blameworthi-
ness have presumed the volitionist lens is the only relevant lens. I will argue
that social ontologists can draw more widely and liberally from moral
philosophers’ toolkits when it comes to our treatment of organizations.
We can use the attributivist and aretaic lenses, as well as the volitionist
lens. Drawing on Part I’s metaphysical picture, I will argue that organiza-
tions should be attributed both the ‘structural’ wrongs that inhere in the
organization as a whole and the ‘individual’ wrongs that are enacted by
members-qua-members.
Chapter 5 responds to an important objection to the idea that organiza-
tions can be wrongdoers, under any of the volitionist, attributivist, or
aretaic lenses. The objection is that organizations lack the capacity for
moral self-awareness, that is, awareness of their own wrongdoing. Unlike
other philosophers who have defended collective blameworthiness, I believe
the capacity for moral self-awareness is indeed presupposed by attributions
of blameworthiness—and that this undermines a simple functionalist-
interpretivist account of wrongdoers (even though I maintain that, as argued
in this chapter, the functionalist-interpretivist account works for mere
agents). I give a novel account of how organizations have the capacity for
moral self-awareness. This account relies on the metaphysical story of
26   

Chapter 3. To foreshadow: the key innovation is that when members are

performing their roles, certain pieces of their phenomenology are the organ-
ization’s phenomenology. The organization ‘inherits’ phenomenology from
its physical parts (members), just as a motorbike ‘inherits’ colour from its
physical parts (engine, wheels, and so on). This allows organizations to have
the phenomenology of moral self-awareness.
Part III, ‘Members’, explains the implications of organizations’ wrongs for
members. Chapter 6 catalogues three ways members can be implicated in
any given organizational wrong: a member can be an ‘enactor’, an ‘endorser’,
or an ‘omitter’. I explain how divisions of labour and hierarchical relation-
ships can affect the type and degree of an individual’s implication via each of
these three mechanisms.
Chapter 7 provides a justification for members’ reparative burdens when
organizations are blameworthy for wrong. Importantly, Chapter 7 develops
an account on which different members are liable to different shares of the
reparative costs of their organizations’ wrongs. Members who are implicated
in the wrong (in one of the ways analysed in Chapter 6) are liable to a larger
portion of the costs than non-implicated members. However, non-
implicated members—including all present-day members of organizations
that are blameworthy for historical injustice—can be liable to cost in virtue
of having the capacity to repair relationships that were damaged by the
organization’s wrongdoing, or in virtue of their having benefited from the
organization’s wrongdoing.
 2
Towards a Metaphysics
of Membership

2.1 Introduction

In Chapter 1, I characterized organizations as realized structures. I said

that structures become realized when enough of their roles are occupied.
Those roles are occupied by an organization’s members. This makes
organizations dependent, in some sense, on their members. Nonetheless,
if we are to hold a bank blameworthy for misconduct, then the bank
must not be identical to a mere collection of members. It must be
something we quantify over—as I argued we should over organizations
in Section 1.3.
If organizations at once depend upon, yet are distinct from, their mem-
bers, then this raises the question: just what is the metaphysical relation
between an organization and its members? We’ve seen that it cannot be a
relation of identity. So what relation is it? Options include supervenience,
causation, anchoring, grounding, and parthood. It matters which option we
choose: these options give different results for the extent to which, and way
in which, members are implicated in organizations’ wrongdoing. The
options also ‘pick out’ different individuals as members. As we’ll see, if
members are those upon whom organizations supervene, then this produces
an implausibly vast number of members. Conversely, if members are those
involved in an organization’s anchoring, then this will sometimes produce
an implausibly narrow range of members.
Getting the relation right matters for another reason. To incorporate
organizations into a naturalistic picture of the world, it’s preferable for
organizations to be material objects. If organizations are causally efficacious
and we fail to account for their materiality, then we’d have to explain how an
entirely nonmaterial entity can be causally efficacious. Even worse, we’d
have to explain how there can be entirely nonmaterial agents in our world.

Organizations as Wrongdoers: From Ontology to Morality. Stephanie Collins, Oxford University Press.
© Stephanie Collins 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192870438.003.0002
28   

That’s a large task, and one it’d be best to avoid—or so I will assume.¹ As
Kendy Hess puts it, ‘[w]ithout this justified claim to material existence, the
corporate agent would be exactly the ghostly, mysterious, incorporeal,
bizarre, hovering entity mocked by the critics’ (Hess 2018a, 51, emphasis
added). For an organization to be a material object, it must be an ‘individual
entity with a unity of form and causal capacity through which it can be
individuated and located in terms of its spatio-temporal coordinates’ (Sheehy
2006, 138). But where is an organization’s location? And what is its materiality?
How can we draw lines around organizations as objects in the world?
In this chapter and the next, I aim to answer these questions by analysing
the relation between organizations and their members. The goal of this
chapter and the next, then, is to answer two related questions. First, given
that organizations are real yet dependent on members, just how do they
relate to their members? Second, how can we account for organizations’
existence as material objects? As we’ll see, my answer to the second question
will fall out of my answer to the first question.
In this chapter, I argue that we should view members as material parts of
an organization. In Chapter 3, I’ll provide a more specific analysis, using
Kathrin Koslicki’s (2008) theory of parthood. Koslicki develops her theory
in order to account for ordinary objects like motorcycles.² I will apply
Koslicki’s theory to organizations in general, and then to corporations and
liberal-democratic states specifically.
Before Chapter 3 provides that positive proposal, the present chapter
rules out various alternative proposals. Section 2.2 argues that the relations
of supervenience, causation, and anchoring cannot capture the relation
between an organization and its members. I examine these relations closely
before rejecting them, for two reasons. First, they feature prominently in
debates about individualism versus holism in the social sciences. From
reading the literature on ontological individualism versus holism, one
might get the impression that causation and supervenience are all that

¹ Some philosophers might find nonmaterial agents entirely acceptable. My aim in this
chapter and the next is to give an account of organizations’ materiality, rather than to convince
these philosophers.
² On Koslicki’s theory, an object’s material parts together constitute the object. So Koslicki’s
theory—and my application of it to organizations—uses the notion of constitution, as well as
that of parthood. But I emphasize the ‘parthood’ aspect, because parthood captures the thought
that an organization’s members are themselves individualizable material objects, in the manner
just quoted from Sheehy. Chapter 3’s use of Koslicki explains why I exclude ‘constitution’ from
the above list of relations: on Koslicki’s view, which I follow, constitution is a kind of parthood;
specifically, constitution is material parthood.
      29

matter for capturing the way in which social phenomena relate to individual
phenomena. These relations therefore deserve to be taken seriously. Second,
these relations hold between organizations and various entities, where those
entities are blameworthy in virtue of that relation. That is: we hold often
hold various individual and collective agents blameworthy, for the fact that
they subvene under, cause, or anchor organizations. Thus, these relations
should be included with our full picture of blameworthiness when organ-
izations do wrong. The relations simply do not capture how organizations
are themselves material objects that do wrong, or how organizations relate to
their members—or so Section 2.2 will argue.
Section 2.3 turns to grounding and parthood. I argue that members are
most centrally parts of organizations, even though it’s true that some facts
about members ground some facts about organizations. This is important
for organizational wrongdoing: Part II will argue that various properties of
individuals are (under certain circumstances) also properties of the organ-
ization of which they are members. The ‘transfer’ of these properties from
members to organizations will be important for incorporating wrongful
organizations into our socio-political blame practices. The ‘transfer’ of
members’ relevant properties will not work if individuals are merely causes,
or supervenience bases, or anchors, or grounds, of organizations. The
transfer will rely on the idea that members are parts of organizations.
Once we know that members are parts of organizations, we are left with
the question: how do we pick out who the members are? In Section 2.4, I’ll
consider other social ontologists’ answers to this question, where those social
ontologists take members to be parts of organizations, as I do. As we’ll see,
none of their answers quite work. But consideration of their views will
produce several desiderata on a full account of the organization–member
relation. These desiderata will guide my own full account of the relation,
which I will present in Chapter 3.
In this way, the arguments of this chapter are largely negative. I will
proceed by examining various possible characterizations of the relation
between organizations and their members. I will argue that none of those
characterizations is satisfactory. But these negative arguments will have
important payoffs, since they will guide and constrain my positive proposal
in Chapter 3.
Before beginning, I should admit that the ‘realized structures’ view of
organizations is not the only game in town, though it is the picture
I presume in this book. Perhaps organizations are instead pluralities, fusions,
or sets (Uzquiano 2018; Wilhelm 2020; Horden and López de Sa 2020;
30   

Effingham 2010). If so, then the relation between organizations and

members might not be one of parthood. My arguments for the parthood
view (in this chapter) and for my specific version of the parthood view (in
the next chapter) will assume that organizations are realized structures.
I favour this view because it emphasizes the importance of roles and
intra-organization relations in the make-up of an organization. Roles
and intra-organization relations are crucial to organizations’ explanatory
and normative power. What’s more, as Parts II and III will show, the idea
that ‘organizations as concrete material particulars are realized structures of
which members are material parts’ can do useful work in moral and political
philosophy. For that reason alone, it is a view worth defending.

2.2 Causation, Supervenience, Anchoring

2.2.1 Causation

In Section 1.3, I alluded to two prominent theories of causation—the

‘counterfactual’ and ‘process’ theories. I emphasized that, on both theories,
causation can hold in the organization-to-components direction (facts
internal to organizations causally depend on facts about organizations)
and in the organization-to-world direction (facts external to organizations
causally depend on facts about organizations). Causation also holds between
members and organizations: facts about an organization sometimes causally
depend on facts about members; and facts about members sometimes
causally depend on facts about organizations. This seems true on both the
counterfactual and process theories. So you might think causation captures
how organizations relate to their members.
The most obvious examples of member-to-organization causation are
cases where members cause organizations’ decisions. For example, what
caused Australian banks to approve loans that customers were clearly unable
to service? Many factors had a causal influence, but a key factor was
individuals’ actions. As one informant of the Banking Royal Commission
put it, ‘mortgage brokers were more likely to say to a client “this is the
estimate monthly expenditure for a family your size; does that sound right to
you” than ask open-ended questions designed to identify actual expenses or
consider bills and bank statements to test the reality of the client’s estimates’
(Royal Commission 2018, 53). Here, the words of mortgage brokers made a
causal difference to the bank’s decision about whether to grant a loan—
      31

according to both the process and counterfactual theories of causation. This

causal influence isn’t diminished even if we also acknowledge that causal
influence was wielded by the customer (in giving the answer they did) or by
banks’ norms and expectations (for example, that brokers receive higher
commission if the customer borrows more money). Things are more obvi-
ous in the other direction: organizations can cause their members to behave,
think, and even feel certain ways. Organizations’ formal policies of remu-
neration, promotion, and misconduct can constrain and guide members’
behaviour. Harder to track, but no less important, is how organizations’
cultural norms, implicit expectations, and on-the-ground practices of subtle
reward and punishment can affect what members do. Causation runs both
ways between organizations and members.
Yet to view causation as the essence of the member–organization relation
is to understate the internality of the relation between an organization and
its members. The example just used demonstrates this: brokers are not
usually taken to be members of banks, partly because they usually offer
products from several different banks.³ Causation can hold between an
organization and just about any individual or object. Causation is not
particular to members. Causation can hold between entities that are wholly
separate from one another. So, to construe the member–organization rela-
tion as one of mere causation misses the internality of the member–
organization relation. While causation often holds between an organization
and its members (in both the organization-to-member direction and the
member-to-organization direction), the same is true of numerous non-
members. Causation cannot not the heart of the matter.

2.2.2 Supervenience

Many social ontologists focus on supervenience (e.g., Macdonald and Pettit

1981; Kincaid 1986; Sawyer 2002; List and Spiekermann 2013). This is
understandable, since many social ontologists are concerned to show that
we should be realists about collective phenomena, while at the same time
showing that realism does not make collective phenomena into mysterious
forces in the world. One popular way to achieve non-mysterious realism is to
say that organizations supervene on individuals (more precisely, to say that

³ Chapter 3’s account of membership will explain in more detail why brokers should be
excluded.
32   

facts about organizations supervene on facts about individuals: supervenience

is usually taken to hold between facts or properties, not objects).
In general, facts about A supervene on facts about B if and only if any
change in any fact about A implies a change in facts about B. Another way to
put this is: once we have settled the B-facts, we have settled the A-facts; or,
two worlds that are indiscernible with regards to B-facts are also indiscern-
ible with regards to A-facts. In philosophy of mind and philosophy of social
science, if B-phenomena (such as individuals) are not mysterious, then the
A-phenomena (such as organizations) are usually also taken to be (in some
sense) not mysterious. Yet supervenience is compatible with realism about
the A-phenomena, since A-facts’ supervenience on B-facts is compatible
with the A-phenomena being multiply realizable, causally efficacious, and
agential (as discussed in Section 1.3). Because the supervenience of organ-
izations on members can produce non-mysterious realism about organiza-
tions, supervenience is often taken to be an important component of the
organization-member relation.
But is supervenience the core of the organization–member relation? Are
an organization’s members exactly those entities such that any change in any
fact about an organization implies a change in facts about the entities? The
most plausible route to a ‘yes’ answer would focus on global supervenience
(on which see Currie 1984). According to this possible view, any change in
any fact about the organization implies a change in some fact or other about
members, not necessarily a change in facts about members where those
member-facts are somehow ‘about’ or ‘related to’ the changed organization-
fact. That is, the most plausible supervenience view would say that if we have
settled all the facts about members—including all facts about their behav-
iours, mental states, histories, dispositions, and so on—then this will deter-
mine all facts about the organization.
Yet even if we take in as many facts about members as we possibly can,
these facts will not be enough to fill in the supervenience base of facts about
organizations. That is: the supervenience base of facts about organizations
clearly includes facts about entities that are not members. Indeed, Epstein
(2015, esp. 46) compellingly argues that even individuals-at-large are not the
entirety of the supervenience base for facts about organizations. He gives
the example of a coffee company that goes insolvent overnight because all
the fridges break. Here, there has been a change in the facts about the
company—the company has gone from being solvent to insolvent—without
any changes in facts about any individuals, let alone members. Individuals
(let alone members) might not know, believe, or suspect that the company
      33

has gone insolvent: the company can go from solvent to insolvent while all
individuals in the world sleep.
Now, one might object that for a coffee company to go insolvent over-
night, there needs to be a background of social principles that determine
what it means for a company to be or become insolvent. These ‘insolvency
principles’ are, perhaps, set up or underpinned by individuals. But this
doesn’t mean individuals—let alone members—are the entirety of the super-
venience base of the insolvency: we can imagine two possible worlds, in
which all the insolvency principles and all the facts about the company’s
members are exactly the same, yet in one world the company’s fridges break
and in the other the fridges keep working. There is a difference in the
company-level facts of these two worlds (a difference in the solvency
facts), without any difference in any facts about individuals—let alone a
difference about members specifically.
In this way, supervenience is too broad for analysing the relationship
between organizations and their members. Just like with causation, a huge
number of individuals and objects are within the supervenience base for
facts about organizations. Of course, this may prove useful for real-world
blame practices: if an agent (individual or collective) is such that changes in
certain facts about them would change certain facts about an organization,
then that agent may well be blameworthy for certain facts about the organ-
ization. In a way, then, supervenience may turn out to be extremely useful
for responding to the world at large when organizations do wrong. It’s just
not useful for understanding the internal composition (or material reality)
of the organization itself as a wrongdoer.
This obvious point is worth stressing, for two reasons. The first is the
prevalence of supervenience in social ontological debates. It’s been prevalent
for a good reason (namely, its role in establishing the non-mysterious
irreducibility of social facts and properties)—but that doesn’t mean it
captures the most interesting and important relations between individuals
and organizations, such as the relation of membership. The second reason
for discussing supervenience is that the limits of supervenience are more
apparent for organizations specifically, rather than for collective agents or
human groups at large. For some human groups—such as two individuals
painting a house together or two individuals going for a walk (examples
discussed by Bratman (2014) and Gilbert (1989), respectively)—it might be
plausible that facts about members are the entirety of the supervenience base
for facts about the group. Those groups are fairly small, self-contained,
short-lived, simple, and unregulated by outsiders. But supervenience fails
34   

to capture the relation members stand in to organizations, even if it captures

the relation members stand in to other kinds of groups or collective agents.

2.2.3 Anchoring

Epstein (2015) develops the concept of ‘anchoring’ to capture one way in

which social facts are set up. It’s a way that was alluded to in my discussion
of supervenience. Roughly, X anchors Y just in case X sets up the principles
that state the conditions under which some Z grounds some Y. (I’ll discuss
grounding soon.)
Epstein explains anchoring via John Searle’s view of money. According to
Searle, certain pieces of paper ‘count as’ money (or, in Epstein’s framework,
‘ground’ money) when those pieces of paper are printed by a relevant
authority. So, we have a ‘money’ principle: under the conditions of being
printed by a relevant authority, pieces of paper ground money.⁴ But what
underpins this principle? This is the question: what anchors money?
According to Searle, the anchor of money is collective acceptance: collective
acceptance sets up the money principle. Epstein problematizes Searle’s
‘collective acceptance’ theory, but Epstein is agnostic on whether facts
about individuals (different from or in addition to facts about individuals’
collective acceptance) anchor social facts (2015, 106). So, organizations
might be anchored by facts about individuals. And one might think that
they are anchored by their members specifically, not by individuals at large.
It’s important not to confuse anchoring with causation. To illustrate via
Searle’s view of money: in Searle’s view, it’s not that collective acceptance
causes the money principle to hold. That is, it’s not that collective acceptance
causes it to be the case that, under the conditions of being printed by a
relevant authority, pieces of paper ground money. The relationship is more
intimate than that: on the Searlean picture, collective acceptance is the
constant or ongoing metaphysical explanation for the money principle. In
Epstein’s terms, the anchors ‘put in place’ or ‘set up’ principles that state the
conditions under which social phenomena are grounded (2015, esp. 81).
On the Searlean picture, money is anchored in collective acceptance because

⁴ Strictly speaking, this is the ‘paper money’ principle. Electronic money has grounds other
than paper, so electronic money will require a different principle, which will in turn be anchored
by potentially different agents or phenomena. I use the money example simply to introduce the
anchoring relation. I don’t take a stand on how money in general is grounded or anchored.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing the importance of electronic money.
      35

the money principle depends upon collective acceptance in an ongoing

way—much as a boat’s location depends upon its anchor in an ongoing way.
The ongoing nature of anchoring makes anchoring different from causation.
The illustrative metaphor of an ‘anchor’ might seem apt for the member–
organization relation. But it isn’t. The anchors of organizations are numer-
ous, varied, and complex—they include much else in addition to facts about
members. The anchors include facts about laws, norms, practices, physical
infrastructure, and so on. As Epstein says, ‘[t]hings like corporations and
money are devilishly complicated, much more so than Searle and others
suggest. They are anchored by elaborate social structures, and their ground-
ing conditions alone would fill books’ (2015, 130). Take a bank, for example.
What is it that ‘sets up’ or ‘underpins’ the principles that state the conditions
under which a bank exists or is grounded? Foremost amongst these is surely
the law. But laws about banks are not facts about, nor are they set up by,
banks’ members.
I mention anchoring primarily to acknowledge, again, that things other
than members have a crucial role to play in underpinning organizations’
existence and in determining specific facts about organizations. Things other
than members are an organization’s anchors, and we cannot lose sight of the
anchors when fitting organizations into our social, political, and legal
practices—including practices of blame. Sometimes, the anchors will be
blameworthy for the principles that govern the existence of organizations.
But precisely because anchors include phenomena as diverse as laws and
physical infrastructure, this role does not pick out the way in which organ-
izations relate to their members.
There is another reason for mentioning anchoring, which is that it helps
to further distinguish organizations from other types of collective agent. As
with supervenience, anchoring might capture the relation between members
and simple, small, short-term collective agents—such as two people painting
a house or going for a walk. I am neutral on whether this is correct. Whether
it is or not, the anchors for organizations are far more complex, historically
protracted, and socially extended. The anchors for organizations go well
beyond members. So anchoring won’t work for capturing the relation
between members and organizations, even if it does capture the relation
between members and some other groups.
Two themes emerge from my discussion of causation, supervenience, and
anchoring. First, these relations are candidates for capturing (what’s import-
ant about) the member–collective relation in simple, small, short-term
collective agents. But they don’t work for organizations. So, these relations
36   

demonstrate one way in which organizations are worth handling on their

own terms, separate from simple, small, short-term collective agents.
Second, causation, supervenience, and anchoring help to explain how social
phenomena exist. These social phenomena include organizations. What’s
more, these relations are plausibly sometimes a basis for wrongdoing.
Perhaps we should sometimes blame the causes, subveners, or anchors of
organizations—instead of, or additionally to, organizations themselves. But
this book is about how to conceptualize organizations themselves as
wrongdoers.

2.3 Grounding and Parthood

2.3.1 Grounding

Given the foregoing discussion of anchoring, it might seem natural to turn

to grounding. In the Searlean picture, grounding is the relation that holds
between facts about certain pieces of paper and facts about money. In the
most general terms, grounding is the ‘in virtue of ’ relation. One thing
grounds another when it is ‘the metaphysical reason’ for the other or that
‘in virtue of which’ the other holds. Grounding is generally taken to be
irreflexive (nothing grounds itself), asymmetric (if A grounds B, then
B doesn’t ground A), and transitive (if A grounds B and B grounds C,
then A grounds C). In its most straightforward application, grounding is a
relation between facts—not objects, properties, events, etc. For example, the
fact that there is $10 in my wallet is grounded in the fact that a certain kind
of piece of paper is in my wallet. $10 is in my wallet in virtue of a certain kind
of piece of paper being in my wallet.
Grounding gives us the following way of understanding the organization–
member relation: certain facts about members are the metaphysical reason
why certain facts about organizations obtain (and perhaps vice versa). Of
course, facts about all sorts of things ground facts about all sorts of other
things. And we can ask ‘what are the grounds?’ for specific social facts (such
as ‘this bank lied to customers’) or more general social facts (such as
‘organizations exist’). For grounding to give us a substantive proposal
about organizations’ relation to their members, we need to know which
facts about members ground which facts about organizations (and vice
versa). Only then will grounding enable us to distinguish the members
from the non-members. We might then be able to draw lines around
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temper. I was proud and sullen, and—ungrateful.”
“Not always that.”
“I think I hated almost everybody. I did not want to be governed or
counseled. And Stephen was so—rigid and prompt. He treated me
like a little boy—”
“Oh, hush!” I interrupted.
“Some of it is true. He admits it. And when that awful affair
happened I expected he would disown me. He is so proud, then he
never did anything bad in all his life. So I felt that I had no mercy to
expect from him.”
“But you were mistaken,” I said eagerly.
“I couldn’t have gone there and in that way but for you. Perhaps he
has told you—” and his eyes questioned mine.
“No,” I answered, glad that we had not discussed it.
“I went to him. I believe it was the first manly step of my life. But,
oh, I felt so forlorn and miserable—I can’t tell you! If he had been
cold and cross I believe I should have gone and thrown myself in the
river.”
“He was not.”
“Oh, Rose, it was like the story of the prodigal son. ‘Fell upon his
neck and kissed him.’ I remember his kissing me the day father was
buried, and I do not believe any one ever did since till then. It melted
all my soul. Somehow I think he is wonderfully changed. His
goodness is so tender.”
“And you love him?”
“Love isn’t any word. I absolutely adore him! I did not think it was
in me, or in him. And all through the weeks that followed, for I was
very ill and miserable, he was so good. I never talked to any one
before, except you, somehow I could not. But he found his way to my
heart and said he would help me, that we would both try together, for
he had many faults to correct, that God had given us the tie of
brotherhood for a high and holy purpose, that we were to help and
strengthen each other; as if, Rose—as if I could do anything for him!”
“Yes, you can,” I replied. “You can keep him tender and cordial and
brotherly.”
“So he said. We did not come to this all at once, and Mrs.
Whitcomb’s cheerfulness helped. I had to try hard to be patient. I
was so used to flying out at everything. You see, at uncle’s they all
knew that I had a bad temper, they expected me to explode or sulk
on the slightest provocation, and only laughed or tormented me. If I
had been taught to control myself, it would never have been so
dreadful.”
“It is good to have the lesson learned now.”
“I never can forget it, never! I am not an angel yet, Rose, cherubim
or seraphim, I suppose Miss Fanny would say;” and he smiled oddly,
“but I am trying. I do not disdain the helps as I used to. I do not feel
that patience and self-control are exclusively girlish virtues.”
“No,” I returned, “we girls will not rob you of them.”
“You are generous. But then you always were. I am beginning to
learn that the grand corner-stones for the human soul are truth and
love, the truth that leads us to be fair and just to others, and the love
to our neighbor.”
“Here we are,” I said. “Do you want to come in?”
He followed me and we did our errand.
“I could not understand last summer why you loved to do these
things;” he began when we were homeward-bound.
“You considered it an evidence of a depraved taste?”
He smiled rather sadly.
“I supposed people consulted their own pleasure first. Doing any
rather distasteful deed and hunting around until you found a bright
side to it was like so much Sanscrit to me.”
“He came not to please—Himself;” I said solemnly.
 “I understand a little now. Yet when He had redeemed the world
there must have been a great joy in His own mind, as well as in
heaven.”
“We cannot do anything like that,” I said. “But as He loved us, so
we are to love the brethren, the whole world.”
“To be willing to do for them. To seek not our own pleasure
altogether. It is very hard, Rose, and sometimes I get discouraged.
Then Stephen tells me of his failures. It doesn’t go on continually. It
is a little doing all the time, work and healing, and he says it will have
to be so in this world.”
“Yes,” I answered. “We cannot hinder nor change. God sets the
work before us, and though the pleasant fields are all about us, we
have no right to choose our own paths. He knows best in what ways
He wants us to walk.”
“I talked to your father yesterday. I did not think I could talk to
anybody but you and Stephen. I was sorry for all the pain and
anxiety I had caused him—and—it was almost like having a father of
one’s own. I don’t wonder that you all have such sweet pleasant
natures.”
We met Lily and Tim taking a walk, their hands full of grasses and
wild flowers, so we turned them about and all went home together.
The visit proved a very delightful one. We went to the Cascade
one day, taking a lunch with us, and on another day the Churchills
sent their family carriage over and we had a royal time, crowding it
full, and taking turns in driving.
We all noticed the great change in Louis. Not that he was perfect
or saintly. In fact I think he was more of a boy, when it came to that,
than the summer before. He still had a dangerous tendency to
quickness of temper, sometimes he would flush deeply when
annoyed, but he always spoke afterward in a low, even tone of voice,
as if he had gained the mastery within. His feelings were more
healthy-toned, he had a heartsomeness that was genuine. You never
mistrusted it as you did Stuart’s.
 We ended the festivities with a croquet and tea-party on Saturday
afternoon, asking in a half dozen young people who all enjoyed
themselves amazingly. To the surprise of everybody, right in the
midst of the gayety who should drop down upon us but Stephen
Duncan.
“I was homesick to see you all,” he began, with a comically
lugubrious face.
“If you think you are going to be purely ornamental you are much
mistaken;” declared Fanny. “Here is a mallet and here is a place.”
“If you will excuse me—”
“But I will not. No running away to the study to talk with papa, or to
play with Edith. If you will come uninvited to a party you must take
the consequences.”
“Can I not soften your heart, if like the old man I should ‘sit on the
stile and continue to smile?’”
“Not any smiles. I am obdurate.”
He pretended to be much aggrieved, but in reality he was very
gay. I had never seen him so amusing and entertaining.
“I don’t see how you get acquainted with such loads of nice
people;” said Allie West. “And you always have such good times
here.”
The good times came without any trying. There are numberless
gates called Beautiful all along life, at which you give such as you
have, and find it more precious than silver or gold.
It was a lovely moonlight night, so after supper we walked part of
the way with the merry crowd. It did not seem to me that I had ever
been so happy in my life. I could not tell why but I felt as if I must
have wings somewhere that were lifting me off the ground at every
step.
We rambled around under the trees and by the way side. Louis
came back to my vicinity and we fell into a rather grave talk about
the future.
 “I never thought I should want to stay here so much,” he said. “I
was glad enough to get away last summer. I cannot forgive myself
for being such a boor! Now I shall want to come again and again.”
“Well why not?” I returned.
“I am afraid you will become tired of me.”
“Try us and see. We are not easily wearied.”
“You are all so generous with yourselves.”
I smiled a little. “Why not give of your best?”
“True.” Then there was a silence. We reached the gate presently.
“Do not go in just yet;” he pleaded, so we remained in the silvery
light that was flooding the whole earth. Moonlight always stirs the
tender and thoughtful side of one’s soul.
“I am glad that to-morrow will be Sunday. I can just think how I
shall enjoy going to church and hearing your father preach.”
This from him who had despised religion and sneered at sermons.
It did startle me.
“And to have Stephen here.”
“I am rejoiced that you feel so kindly toward one another,” I replied.
“You are getting to be brothers indeed.”
“And then will come weeks and weeks of study,” he went on in a
musing tone. “I like it. Books seem to me—well, better than some
people. Only—if you could all come down in the winter. Stephen and
Mrs. Whitcomb were planning for it, but there! it was a secret and I
have betrayed it.”
“I can keep secrets;” and I smiled up into his remorseful face.
“Yes; I have proved that. Rose”—after a pause—“I have half a
mind to tell you another, to ask some—advice; at least, I would like
to know how it appears to you.”
“Will it be of any real avail?” I asked, noting the perplexed lines on
his countenance. “I am not as wise as you think. Because I just
happened to stumble into one matter without making a mess of it—”
 “This is only an idea. I cannot ask Stephen. I think it would please
him and he might judge wrongfully.”
“If I can help you;” I replied encouragingly.
“It is about the future. It may never come to anything to be sure,
and perhaps I never can be good enough. Stuart will go into
business. He does not love study and he needs an active life. He
wanted Stephen to put him in a store this Autumn. But I—”
I knew then what he meant. Somehow I could not help laying my
hand on his arm with a touch of confidence.
“Whether I ever could so govern my temper and my impatient
desires;” bowing his head humbly. “But if I had some guard about
me, if I felt that I must try continually—would it be wrong to think of
it?”
“Surely not;” I returned warmly. “Nor to do it if God gives the
strength and the grace.”
“I like to think of that grand, earnest Saint Paul, with his ‘thorn in
the flesh.’ Perhaps it was some giant temper or desire. I fancy it
must have been, for you know how he persecuted the Christians
unto death. And though God would not take it away, there was the
promise of His grace being sufficient.”
“As it is, always.”
“There are some years to live before I decide positively. But if they
were spent in a worthy manner, and I mean them to be, with God’s
help.”
“Oh, you could, surely. And papa would be your best friend;” I
rejoined eagerly.
“Keep my secret—I have your promise,” he said in a hurried
manner, for a step sounded on the walk.
“It is sacred to me until you wish to take others into your
confidence.”
Stephen spoke and we turned, walking slowly up to the house.
Louis sat down on the step beside papa. I stood undecided whether
to go in or not, when Stephen took my arm and drew me around the
corner of the porch. There was a long grape arbor whose gloom was
made a pleasant twilight by the silver sifted through the openings
between the leaves, and we took a turn up and down.
“I want to tell you,” he began almost abruptly, and his voice had a
hard, strained sound, “that I heard—the last of what you said. I could
not help it. And I know your secret.”
I was a trifle annoyed, but I controlled myself.
“Oh,” I said, “then you will be tender and helpful and do all in your
power to strengthen Louis. He feels so humble. I would hardly have
thought it of him. And there are so few young men who have any
desire to take such a life upon them. With his means and his talents
he can do so much good.”
He stopped suddenly. “Rose, what are you talking about?” he
asked. “Did not Louis—”
“He confessed to me his desire—no, it was hardly that, as he is
afraid he can never be good enough for a clergyman. But you will
assist him—you do not disapprove of it?”
“Louis! Ah, I understand. It would be the delight of my heart. But I
thought—I knew he liked you so much. Oh, my little darling!”
He turned and gathered me in his arms. My heart beat and my
cheeks were in a blaze as the whole story came to me, dazing me
with its strange, sweet suddenness. I believe I cried and then I
laughed hysterically, but somehow the cool, steady voice quieted me
and made me feel the truth and earnestness of what he was saying,
so presently I grew still with a great awe.
“You will come,” he was saying. “We both need you. We want just
this steady, cheerful, loving influence. I think I have a tendency to be
impatient when people cannot see my ways, perhaps requiring a
little too much, and your sweetness will temper this. Then we can
both help him.”
Could I? How strange that any one should care for me alone. Not
for mamma, or Fanny, but to want me!
 “Mr. Duncan,” I began as we were going back to the porch—“have
you forgotten that my hair is—red?”
“Well, what of that?” in a gay tone.
“I do not believe you—like it.”
“You foolish little girl, set your heart at rest. Do you remember
when I came upon you suddenly last summer? You were standing on
the porch in a tiny glint of sunshine, and looked like some of the old
pictures! Why, I believe it was your hair that I fell in love with first of
all.”
“I am glad it was, for I am not half as good as you imagine I am.”
“Children,” mamma said, standing on the porch step. “Do you
realize how late it is?”
I felt that she knew all, perhaps had known it long before, indeed.
But I was glad that the knowledge had come to me so suddenly, and
not any sooner. Even now I was half afraid of it. Her kiss and tender
clasp re-assured me.
“Mother!” Stephen Duncan said with reverent sweetness.
 CHAPTER XVII.

WISHED there could be no such thing as breakfast the

next morning, but there was, and I had to go through
with it, feeling that I was no longer I, that Rosalind
Endicott was some dream-girl of the past. Stephen was
very good and did not notice me much, and Fan
appeared wonderfully pre-occupied. Mamma helped me over the
trying places, and papa just said with his tender morning kiss,—“And
this little girl, too.”
When I was all dressed for church I opened a little drawer to get
my gloves. There lay the box containing Stephen’s gift. I had never
worn it, but it seemed to me as if I ought to put it on now. He liked
me and the misunderstandings were at an end. I had accepted a
share of his burthens, his crosses, whatever they might be, so I
clasped it around my neck. It was so beautiful. I did not envy the
queen her diadem.
We walked to church together. Louis glanced back now and then. I
believe he began to suspect.
It was quite different from the Sunday when I had gone to church
with that strange sense of Fan’s new love. I felt quiet and restful, yet
it was such a great thing to have another’s heart in one’s keeping, to
take in a new life beside the old.
They both left us on Monday. Stephen was to come up soon
again. In the meanwhile, letters.
“I have one of yours to begin with,” he whispered.
It was a silent day for us. No one appeared to care about talking,
yet we were not gloomy. Indeed, I think mother, Fan and I
understood as we never had before, how much we loved one
another.
 I went on wearing my cross. In the first letter there came a pearl
ring for me. Fan had a handsome diamond but she seldom wore it
except when she was going to the Churchills. I slipped mine on my
finger with a slight presentiment that I should turn the pearl inside if
any one looked at me.
Richard Fairlie and Jennie came home bright and happy as birds.
They took possession of the great house, altered a little, re-arranged
to their liking and had Mrs. Ryder in their midst. There was no grand
party, but some pleasant tea-drinkings and hosts of calls. No one
could afford to slight Mrs. Fairlie, and people began to realize what a
noble girl Jennie Ryder had always been.
I am almost ashamed to confess how much talking it took to settle
our affairs. Stephen wanted to be married in the Spring. That was
too soon, mamma and I thought. But there were so many good
reasons.
Miss Churchill heard of it presently and came over to have a
consultation with mamma.
“It will have to be sometime,” she said. “It will make a little
confusion, a break, and no end of strangeness in adapting
yourselves to the new order. But here are Nellie and Daisy right
behind.”
“I don’t want to lose all my girls in this fashion,” said mamma.
Miss Churchill smiled and then admitted that she had a plan to
propose.
They wanted Fanny. The murder was out then.
“Kenton and I have discussed the matter a good while. Winthrop
will have the farm when we are done with it—he is the only nephew.
Kenton has been sorry for some years that we did not take him when
his father died. He is very fond of country life, and surely there are
enough to toil and moil in the cities. Then, although Lucy was
improved by her summer trip, we can understand that it is not
permanent. She wears out slowly. I should like her to have a happy
year or two with Fanny, and I should like the marriage well out of the
way of any sad memories.”
 “You are very thoughtful,” returned mamma.
“And it will hardly be like parting with Fanny, for you—as you can
see her every day. One thing and another has brought us so near
together. Kenton and I are growing old and the presence of these
young people will keep us from getting too queer and whimsical.”
It was settled some time in January.
“We shall have to do the best we can,” said mamma. “The
wardrobes must be simple. It is our station that they go out of, and
we never have been ashamed of our poverty.”
“What does a few clothes signify,” commented papa. “If the young
men are not satisfied we will give them a double portion of dry-goods
and keep our girls.”
Fan laughed over the idea.
So it was arranged that she and Fanny should go to New York. I
did not desire to accompany them, and I was sure they could choose
as well for me as if I hunted the whole town over. Besides, I wanted
the nice quiet time with papa, since I was the one who would have to
go away.
“Isn’t it funny!” said Fan. “I feel like the heroine of some hundred
year old novel, going up to town to buy wedding clothes, instead of a
girl of the period of puffs, paniers, chignons, Grecian bends, and all
that! Why Rose, think of it! We have never had a silk dress in all our
lives, except that once we had one ruffled with an old one of
mamma’s; and we have been very tolerably happy.”
“Yes, just as happy as one need be. All that could be crowded into
our small lives.”
“I dare say we should be absolute curiosities to some people.
Everybody now-a-days has a silk walking-suit, and some handsome
thread lace, and I don’t believe there are any poor people but just us.
But then we have had the love and comfort and enjoyment and no
time to worry about our rich neighbors. It has been a life full of
pleasantness and peace.”
 That was true enough. There were many, many things beside
raiment, if one could only get at the real completeness and harmony,
the secret of soul life.
Jennie Fairlie would help us sew. With their good servant she
declared she had nothing to do. Miss Churchill sent us both an
elegant poplin suit, or at least the materials. It was a simple
wardrobe to be sure. One pretty light silk dress, one dark silk with a
walking-jacket. We made morning robes and some inexpensive
house garments. Then it would be summer so soon, and there was
nothing equal to fresh, cool white. We were not used to crying for the
moon, we had found early in life that it was quite a useless
proceeding.
Altogether we kept our secrets pretty well, and when the truth
leaked out at last, everybody was so surprised that they could only
exclaim. Aunt Letty Perkins was brave enough to come and see if it
was really so.
“Well, I am beat!” she declared. “And doing well, too! I always said
there never was anyone like Mis’ Endicott for luck. Girls often do
hang on so where there is a lot, and you’ve enough left. Fanny is the
flower of the family to be sure, but she is making a big step to get in
with the Churchills. Ain’t afraid she’ll be puffed up with pride and
vanity, are you?”
“I think I can trust her,” replied mamma with a funny smile in the
corners of her mouth.
I remember the morning as one recalls a half dream, the misty
impression between sleeping and waking. The peculiar confusion
pervading the house, the strange mislaying of handkerchiefs and
gloves, the voices that were so full of tears and gay little laughs, the
half sentences, the clasp of hands as one went in or out of a room,
the long, loving glances as if each would fain garner all the past into
one sweet remembrance. Winthrop and Stephen, one rather grave
but very tender to mamma and the little ones, the other full of life and
vivacity, the happiest of the happy.
Fan had one little say though her eyes were bright with tears.
 “I hope I can be as good and sweet in my life as mamma has been
in hers. And I will not ask any higher happiness.”
We walked up the church aisle. The children stood around, back of
them Louis, Nelly and mamma, and then a host of eager parish
faces. Does any one take it all in then, the solemn questions, the still
more solemn promises?
Mr. Churchill gave us both away. Papa’s voice had a little falter in
it, and I dared not look up. “For better, for worse,” “till death do us
part,” rang clearly in heart and brain. The forever of human love,
when it is love and no base counterfeit.
A little kissing, a few tears, some tremulous whispers and sad, sad
good-byes. We whose farthest journey had been the brief sojourn at
Martha’s Vineyard, took up the great pilgrimage of a new life.

I cannot tell you anything about it, or Stephen. It was a happy

confusion of strange places and watchful care, bits of affection
shining out of the tiniest rift. Honeymoons, I suppose, are much
alike, but it is right for each to think his and hers the best and most
delightful.
One afternoon the carriage set us down in so quiet a street that I
could hardly believe it was New York. And when I entered the house,
my new house, I doubted more than ever, for everybody was there.
One kissed me until I thought the breath of life was surely gone, then
another took me up. I have a dim suspicion that my sleeves were
worn threadbare, and if my hair had not been all fast in my head, I
am afraid the difference would have been discoverable.
“Why you are rounder and rosier than ever!” declared Fan,
inspecting me.
She was elegant as a princess, and had her light silk dress
trimmed with applique lace.
 It seemed as if I never could get done looking at mamma, and
papa hovered around me as if I was indeed an unusual sight.
Somehow I managed to get up-stairs to my own pretty room, to
wash my face, what there was left of it, and straighten my gown. And
there was Beauty, my lovely half-grown kitten that some one had
brought from the old home.
I heard Stuart’s voice outside the door and called him in.
“Stuart,” I said with much dignity, “this is Miss Beauty Endicott, a
nice, orderly, well brought-up kitten, and mine. I want you to respect
her and treat her with the courtesy of a gentleman.”
“Oh, fudge!” he returned. “What are you doing with a kitten when
you are married? I thought it was only old maids who were death on
cats.”
“It is boys who are death on cats,” I replied severely. “And then—I
never did expect to be married. I always supposed—”
“Oh, you couldn’t have been an old maid! your nose never can be
sharp, and your chin has that great dimple in it, and you are such a
funny little dumpling altogether! If you say much I’ll put you in my
pocket and carry you off. No doubt Stephen would feel immensely
relieved, but what could the cat do?”
“You are an incorrigible boy!”
“But we will have jolly times for all that,” and he whistled to Tim,
who put her head within the door.
“Fan,” I exclaimed with remorseful tenderness as I was going
down stairs with her arm over my shoulder; “I have Mrs. Whitcomb.
But you know you half gave her to Stephen. And as you are not to
keep house—”
“I will lend her to you a little while longer.”
We had such a merry, enjoyable supper, such a lovely long
evening, and were brimfull of happiness.
But the next morning papa gathered up his flock, “what there was
left of them,” he said with a certain comical grimace.
 “I don’t know as you need lament,” answered Stephen. “I think the
sons are coming in pretty rapidly.”
“And if there should be seven! Mother what would we do with them
all?”
Mamma smiled a little as Stephen went around and kissed her.
“Remember that I am the first one; I will never be crowded out of
my place.”
“No,” she answered softly.
They all went away that noon, and left us to begin our home life.
We had talked it over, what we were to do for the boys, what for
ourselves, and what for the world outside. For the true life is not
bounded with a narrow—thou and I. The world takes us in, and over
and above all, God takes us in. His vineyard, His day, and first and
always His everlasting love.
 Young Folks’ Heroes of the Rebellion.
By Rev. P. C. HEADLEY.

SIX VOLUMES. ILLUSTRATED. PER VOL. $1.25.

FIGHT IT OUT ON THIS LINE. The Life and Deeds of General U. S.

Grant.
A life of the great Union General from his boyhood, written for boys. Full of
anecdotes and illustrations, and including his famous trip around the world.
FACING THE ENEMY. The Life and Military Career of General
William Tecumseh Sherman.
The Glorious March to the Sea by the brave Sherman and his boys will never be
forgotten. This is a graphic story of his career from boyhood.
FIGHTING PHIL. The Life and Military Career of Lieut-Gen. Philip
Henry Sheridan.
The story of the dashing Cavalry General of the army of the United States.—A
fighting Irishman.—Full of pluck and patriotism for his adopted country. The book is
full of adventure.
OLD SALAMANDER. The Life and Naval Career of Admiral David
Glascoe Farragut.
The Naval History of the great civil war is exceedingly interesting, and the life of
Admiral Farragut is rich in brave deeds and heroic example.
THE MINER BOY AND HIS MONITOR. The Career and
Achievements of John Ericsson, Engineer.
One of the most thrilling incidents of the war was the sudden appearance of the
Little Monitor in Hampton Roads to beat back the Merrimac. The life of the inventor
is crowded with his wonderful inventions, and the story of his boyhood in the coal
mines of Sweden is particularly interesting.
OLD STARS. The Life and Military Career of Major-Gen. Ormsby
McKnight Mitchel.
 “Old Stars” was the pet name given the brave general by his soldiers, who
remembered his career as an astronomer before he became a soldier. His story is
full of stirring events and heroic deeds.

☞Sold by all booksellers, or sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of

price.

LEE AND SHEPARD, Publishers, Boston.

 YOUNG FOLKS’ HEROES OF HISTORY.
By GEORGE MAKEPEACE TOWLE.
Handsomely Illustrated. Price per vol., $1.25. Sets in neat boxes.

VASCO DA GAMA:
HIS VOYAGES AND ADVENTURES.
“Da Gama’s history is full of striking adventures, thrilling incidents, and perilous
situations; and Mr. Towle, while not sacrificing historical accuracy, has so skilfully
used his materials, that we have a charmingly romantic tale.”—Rural New-Yorker.

PIZARRO:
HIS ADVENTURES AND CONQUESTS.
“No hero of romance possesses greater power to charm the youthful reader than
the conqueror of Peru. Not even King Arthur, or Thaddeus of Warsaw, has the
power to captivate the imagination of the growing boy. Mr. Towle has handled his
subject in a glowing but truthful manner; and we venture the assertion, that, were
our children led to read such books as this, the taste for unwholesome, exciting,
wrong-teaching boys’ books—dime novels in books’ clothing—would be greatly
diminished, to the great gain of mental force and moral purpose in the rising
generation.”—Chicago Alliance.

MAGELLAN;
OR, THE FIRST VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD.
“What more of romantic and spirited adventures any bright boy could want than
is to be found in this series of historical biography, it is difficult to imagine. This
volume is written in a most sprightly manner; and the life of its hero, Fernan
Magellan, with its rapid stride from the softness of a petted youth to the sturdy
courage and persevering fortitude of manhood, makes a tale of marvellous
fascination.”—Christian Union.

MARCO POLO:
HIS TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES.
“The story of the adventurous Venetian, who six hundred years ago penetrated
into India and Cathay and Thibet and Abyssinia, is pleasantly and clearly told; and
nothing better can be put into the hands of the school boy or girl than this series of
the records of noted travellers. The heroism displayed by these men was certainly
as great as that ever shown by conquering warrior; and it was exercised in a far
nobler cause,—the cause of knowledge and discovery, which has made the
nineteenth century what it is.”—Graphic.

RALEGH:
HIS EXPLOITS AND VOYAGES.
“This belongs to the ‘Young Folks’ Heroes of History’ series, and deals with a
greater and more interesting man than any of its predecessors. With all the black
spots on his fame, there are few more brilliant and striking figures in English
history than the soldier, sailor, courtier, author, and explorer, Sir Walter Ralegh.
Even at this distance of time, more than two hundred and fifty years after his head
fell on the scaffold, we cannot read his story without emotion. It is graphically
written, and is pleasant reading, not only for young folks, but for old folks with
young hearts.”—Woman’s Journal.

DRAKE:
THE SEA-LION OF DEVON.
Drake was the foremost sea-captain of his age, the first English admiral to send
a ship completely round the world, the hero of the magnificent victory which the
English won over the Invincible Armada. His career was stirring, bold, and
adventurous, from early youth to old age.

Sold by all Booksellers, and sent by mail, postpaid, on receipt of

price.

LEE & SHEPARD, Publishers BOSTON.

 Transcriber’s Notes

pg 64 Changed: She smiled in her irresistable fashion,

to: She smiled in her irresistible fashion,
pg 128 Changed: papa would say,” was my rejoiner
to: papa would say,” was my rejoinder
pg 150 Changed: And she enjoys everything so thorougly.
to: And she enjoys everything so thoroughly.
pg 168 Changed: our engagements and geting everything
to: our engagements and getting everything
pg 183 Changed: Here were sandwitches dripping with jelly
to: Here were sandwiches dripping with jelly
pg 185 Changed: great double lucious blossoms
to: great double luscious blossoms
pg 208 Changed: with a certain funny lugubriouness
to: with a certain funny lugubriousness
pg 238 Changed: Dosn’t she take care of sick people
to: Doesn’t she take care of sick people
pg 264 Changed: nothing but complaint and discouragment
to: nothing but complaint and discouragement
pg 264 Changed: went to neigboring towns
to: went to neighboring towns
pg 274 Changed: I struck out blindy
to: I struck out blindly
pg 284 Changed: I have gussed
to: I have guessed
pg 285 Changed: It is not—Winthop Ogden.
to: It is not—Winthrop Ogden.
pg 287 Changed: bound by a promise of secresy
to: bound by a promise of secrecy
pg 300 Changed: no expensive trosseau
to: no expensive trousseau
pg 317 Changed: spoken of the probabilty
to: spoken of the probability
pg 337 Changed: It was the begining
to: It was the beginning