How to Tell if a Group Is an Agent

Abstract

There are two ways of telling if a system is an agent: by evidence of interaction with the impersonal environment and by evidence of interpersonal interaction with others. Both forms of evidence may be relevant with natural persons but in practice it is only evidence of interpersonal interaction, direct or indirect, that can establish the agency of a group. The group agents we recognize, then, are universally capable, like natural persons, of contract and commitment with others. Such group agents are not mere fictions � fronts for individual agents � but agents in their own right. If individuals are to construct a group that has the rationality required in any agent, then they have to give it an agential identity and integrity of its own.