De George - Social Reality and Social Relations

Social Reality and Social Relations
Author(s): Richard T. De George

Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Sep., 1983), pp. 3-20
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ARTICLES
SOCIAL REALITYAND SOCIAL RELATIONS*

RICHARD T. DE GEORGE
J. HE emphasis of modem
and contemporary philosophy on the
individual to finely
has ledhoned theories about knowledge, mo
rality, and being. These have produced a variety of insights, despite

the fact that the human individual is always and necessarily found
in a social context, and has no knowledge, morality, or being apart
from a larger whole. The emphasis on the individual, however, has
tended to overshadow concern with the social whole.
Despite the individualistic presuppositions of much of linguis

tic analysis, natural human languages are the creation of no in
dividual. Nor is culture the result of the activity of any given
individual. Individuals can add to it and share in it. But culture
is something that is said properly to belong to a people or to a
society, just as language belongs to a people or to a society. They

are social products and properly ascribable to societies. They are
improperly ascribable to individuals. Although English is my na

tive language, it is my language, not in an individual sense, but in
the sense that I am a member of the English speaking people or
of an English speaking society. To the extent that this is correct,
then, we can speak of social predicates (or S-predicates) which are
properly ascribed to societies and not to individuals.
S-predicates are a special sub-class of collective or C-predi

cates, and these are of two types. One type is used to refer to the
collectives?armies, corporations,
religions, nation states, philo
sophical associations, families, and so on?and applies as well to
the individuals forming the collective or acting as parts of it. The
*
The Presidential Address, delivered at the thirty-fourth annual
meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America, Yale University, March
11, 1983.
Review of Metaphysics 37 (September 1983): 3-20. Copyright ? 1983 by the Review of

Metaphysics

4 RICHARD T. DE GEORGE
other type of predicate describes the collective but not necessarily

those who make it up. What is the status of the referent of such
predicates? This question raises three types of issues. One is the
conceptual and
linguistic issue of the status of C-predicates if col
lectives are all reducible to individuals. There is littledebate, how
ever, about the legitimacy of using C-predicates, whatever the sta
tus of their referents.1 The second type of issue is that addressed
in the debate between methodological individualists and method
ological holists.2 The third issue concerns not the methodological
status of collectives, but their ontological status.3
What is the metaphysical status of society, of groups, orga
nizations, and other collectives? Are they reducible without res
idue to their members? Can they act? Can they be moral agents
or have moral responsibility? These are the questions to which I
shall in turn propose some answers in this paper.
That language and culture are said correctly to belong to so

cieties and are predicated of societies and not of individuals leads
us to suspect either that the use of supra-individualistic language
is a shorthand way of speaking about individuals taken collectively,
or that there is some reality in addition to the individuals who form
1
David-Hillel Ruben makes a similar point in "The Existence of So
cial Entities," Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 295-310.
2
There is a large body of literature on this issue. Among others, see
John O'Neill, ed., Modes of Individualism and Collectivism (London: Hei
nemann Educational, 1973), which contains articles by J. W. N. Watkins,
J. Agassi, K. J. Scott, and M. Mandelbaum; M. Brodbeck, "Methodological
Individualism: Definition and Reduction," Philosophy of Science 25 (1958);
and the article and bibliography on "Holism and Individualism in History
and Social Science," by W. H. Dray in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
by Paul Edwards, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. and The
Free Press, 1967), 3: 53-58.
3
Ruben argues for the existence of irreducible social substances.
Although he argues against various reductions, he does not pay much
attention to the notion of substance in "social substances." On my view
collectives are not substances. For two different approaches to this issue
see Martin Buber, / and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2nd
ed., 1958) and the chapter entitled "We" in Paul Weiss, You, Iy and the
Others (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).

SOCIAL REALITY AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 5
the collective at any particular time, which one implicitly includes

as part of the referent. The choice between these two, moreover,
does not depend on the question of causal efficacy. I shall separate
the question of the causal efficacy of the individuals who act in the
name of the collective and who produce actions that are properly
attributable to the collective, from the question of the reality of
the collective, and the predicates correctly attributable to it.
An adequate analysis either of society or of other human col
lectives cannot begin simply with human individuals. For such
individuals are already social, socialized beings. Society and the
human beings who make it up must be approached together. Nei
ther can be understood without an understanding of relations?
human and social relations. Such relations are not merely external.
The relations necessary to understand both human beings as hu
man, and society and human collectives, are constitutive relations.

The nature of these relations and the sense in which they are con
stitutive are what require investigation and analysis.
What does it mean for relations to constitute individuals or
society? Let me start first with the individual. A radical individ

ualism ignores the relations that constitute men as men and that
bind them to each other, focusing only on the individual terms of
these relations; a radical collectivism ignores the reality or impor
tance of the individual terms, focusing only on the relations and
the wholes that they form. Both the terms and the relations are
necessary to understand the individual.

An individual is always born into a context. He has a certain
mother and father and is related as offspring to parents,
to them
sharing their genetic makeup. To understand him genetically is

in part to see his relation to his parents. But as a human being
he matures and grows not only biologically but also socially. Just
as he receives his genes from his parents, so he receives language,
customs, ideas, education, knowledge?in short the social aspects
of his being from the broad context in which he is raised. He is
related to other members of his family, to friends, teachers, neigh
bors. He is related to the structures of his society. As he grows
he appropriates language, culture, customs, thoughts, traditional
ways of acting, religion, an outlook from others. He becomes a
member of a family, a country, possibly a church. In each instance
to be a member is not simply to be a part but to internalize aspects
of the whole. In this sense he is internally related to the wholes

and is partially constituted by them.4 They form part of his social

being. We cannot describe what he is without them. Each indi
vidual is potentially open to a wide variety of social relations, while
becoming a term only of particular relations. Each person is also
externally related to other aspects of his environment and society
that he does not interiorize, that he is not vitally connected with,
and which he either uses or with which he simply coexists. How
an individual appropriates, internalizes, and lives his relations, and
which ones he chooses, help constitute his human individuality.5
That I am in this chair at this moment is a definite description
but not an essential description of me. That I happen to be an
American is an internal non-essential quality. This is why it makes
sense both to say I happen to be an American and for others to
identify me as an American and to treat me well or badly or in
differently because of it. I am related to Americans in a way that

I am not and cannot be related to Chinese or Frenchmen or Mex
icans. Even were I to give up my citizenship, my American rela
tions have formed me and are internal to me. Spatial relations are
not internalized but external to me. External relations are typi
cally states of affairs and not processes. That one is to the right
of the table at a particular time is a state in which one is as the
term of a relation vis-a-vis the table. The state of affairs changes
as one moves. But there is no sense in which one appropriates,
lives, or interiorizes that relation and no sense in which it can be
lived or developed. Some social relations are internalized, some
are external. Internalized relations in part make me what and who
I am. Some of these relations are properly social relations, such
as being American. Although accidental and not essential, they
are still formative and correctly called internalized relations.
What of society? Society is a product of human activity. It
is a network of structures and relations, each of which was devel
oped consciously or unconsciously by human activity. But the net
41 shall refer to such relations as internalized rather than as internal

in order to avoid confusion with the idealist doctrine of internal relations.
Later, when I do speak of internal relations, I do not mean them in the
idealistic sense but I use the term "internal" simply to indicate that they
are constitutive of the relata in a sense that I hope will be clear from the
context.
5
This does not deny that his individual physical make-up also helps
constitute his individuality, nor does it deny the function and value of an
individual's interiority, however that is described.

work, patterns, and structures are not dependent on the individuals

who first gave rise to them. Society consists of human beings; but
it is not simply a conceptual set of individuals. Society includes
not only the individuals and their interaction?and hence their re
lations?but also the products of their interaction. These become
objectified in the material things they make and use, as well as in

the ideas they share, the customs they follow, and the other similar
non-material products of their intercourse. Although a society is
more than the sum of the individuals who make it up at any one
time or even over time, without any individuals it is simply an
empty abstraction. Since human beings can comprehend the so

ciety as a whole and can embody it, man's relation to society is not
merely that of part to whole.
Society, broadly speaking, is the repository of all social (re

lational) structures, together with the individuals who live together
in and with those structures. The structures are forms of relations
and the relata are either individuals, relations, or other
structures.
The individuals incorporate the structures into their lives in such
a way that the structures in turn structure, change, and constitute
in large part what the individuals are. The individuals are related
to the structures and are related by the structures to other indi
viduals, each of whom is also related to other structures, as well
as to individuals. Within this broad notion of society, clearly there
is a vast array of groups and organizations, as well as structures,
relations, and institutions. In some cases people are externally

related to organizations and institutions. An organization is not
theirs, even if it serves their needs, as a bank might. They do not
relate to it in such a way as to interiorize the relation. It does not
constitute or form them, even
if they interact with it. For some
people the relation to an organized church or religion is an internal

one; for others it is external. Similarly for one's relation to one's
employment, one's professional organization, and so on. Relations
that are constitutive of people are internalized and form part of
one. Relations that are not are external. Undoubtedly many are
ambiguously one or the other.

The distinction
drawn by T?nnies between Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft might be taken to represent on the one hand collectives
constituted by internalized relations (communities) and on the
other those constituted by external relations (society). But these
are ideal types and extremes and useful only as such.

Marriage, to take a specific example, is a social institution into

which two people can enter. Once married they are the terms of
a special relation between the two of them. The institution rep
resents the socially developed general pattern of the relation which
they may choose. They cannot enter into that relation without the
existence of the institution. For marriage is not merely a relation
between two people, but a socially recognized relation with certain
definite structures.
Marriage, moreover, is a relation that is both a state and a
process.6 Marriage is a state into which one enters, i.e., a definite

formal relationship. But within that state one can develop the
relationship, live it, deepen it. If both parties do not, then the
relation as a living relation may wither, even if as a formal state
it continues. Thus one can remain married, i.e., be in a married
state, even
though one's marriage in its vital, process sense is dead.
The relation of marriage as general is a social institution, a rec
ognized form of relation for the people of a society. The form has
the reality of a universal. The institution has embodied reality or
matter in documents, laws, customs, and so on. The relation as
lived is existentially constitutive of the people who live it. A re
lation of love might be constitutive of two people but might not be
socially recognized and lack the relation to society that constitutes
the institution and the relation of marriage.
Marriage is a social institution but not a unit.7 An army is

an institution. But a particular army is also a unit, though not a
physical entity. It is originally organized and formed by individ

uals, whom it may well outlast. Once its structures and its for
malized relations?ranks, branches, types of operations, division
of labor, rules?are set, individual persons who become members
of it fill positions in which many of the relations are predetermined.
The relations are relations among offices, slots, structures, and are
not personal relations. The members of an army may be externally
related to it, filling a slot temporarily and under duress. Others,
e.g., the stereotypical career officers, make the army theirs; it is
their life, and it is constitutive in part of them. They interiorize
6
The same is true for many of the other Christian sacraments, and
the distinction between state and process can be used to reconcile some
traditional with some existential approaches to the sacraments.
7
Of course, the family that results from the marriage is a unit.

its aims, customs, traditions, and relations. A particular army is

clearly a complex unit. It is a combination of people, materials,
relations, and structures, and is not reducible simply to the people
who fill its ranks.
Relations are necessary both to understand individuals as so
cial, that is, human, beings, and to understand collectives and so
ciety in general.
The reality of a collective is determined not only by the reality
of the members who make it up either at one time or over time,
but also by the relations, either external or internal, that make it
up and that relate the individuals to it. Societies and peoples are
collectives that are internally constituted by the relations among
their members, just as are families. Because of the internal con
nections, they are frequently seen as natural collectives. Formal

organizations, corporations, states, clubs, and associations, are the
result of conscious human design. They are formed for a purpose
or end, and structured to achieve that end. The structures include
positions, related to one another and arranged so as to achieve an
end. The positions are filled by people who act for the organization,
either in the sense representing of and committing it, or in the
sense of doing work for it.
Society is not organized by external relations in the way formal
organizations are. Although society can be said to produce lan
guage and culture, a society does not act in the same sense that
formal organizations do. Society does not have an end?at least
not an explicit end formulated to achieve certain conscious, explicit
purposes. A social contract makes no sense for a society; it makes
sense only for the establishment of a state.
When we speak of the Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur
that was Rome we correctly use C-predicates that are not reducible
to individual characteristics. We certainly do not mean that each
Greek had glory or each Roman grandeur. Nor do we only mean
that some Greeks attained glory or that Roman soldiers occupied
vast territories. We speak of the Greek and Roman societies or
states, and attribute predicates to them that are not properly re

ducible to individuals within them, even if the glory is built on
actions or accomplishments of individuals. Similarly when we
speak of a large corporation, we are speaking of the size of the

corporation, not of the members of the corporation. The corpo
ration may be great in number of employees or in number of dollars

of revenue generated or in some other respect. But the size is the

size of the corporation, not of its members.
We can properly speak of the development of nations or of
countries or of organizations, corporations, and so on. But to speak
of them is not to speak of the development of individuals within
them. A developed nation in ordinary parlance is an industrialized
nation. An underdeveloped nation is one that is not industrialized.
But a nation may be developed without its citizens either as a whole
or individually being personally developed. Development of one's
capacities is not the same as the development of a nation. A highly

developed nation must have a certain number of people capable of
carrying on the activities that go to make up industrialization. But

a highly developed industrialized nation may have nothing but par
tially developed individuals, each of whom does his or her own
specialized task. The development of people is different from the
development of nations. The latter is a C-predicate that is not
reducible to predicates descriptive of individuals.
We can conclude that real relations plus the members of a
collective constitute its metaphysical being. The collective has a
metaphysical status of its own and is not reducible simply to the

members who make it up. It is this feature that makes it a proper
object of predication, and it is for this reason that the predicates

that apply to it are not always reducible to predicates that apply
to individuals. We should not, however, draw more than is war
ranted from this conclusion.
II
The notion of a society or a state as a super-entity that acts

has a tradition in idealist thought. But the consequence frequently
drawn from such statements is that the individuals who are mem
bers of the society or state are in some important ways inferior to
it. And this result, it is claimed, undercuts the importance of the
individual person in society, the notion of democracy, and the au
tonomy of the individual in the ethical realm. If these conse
quences followed from what is the case, the fact that they are
unpalatable would not be adequate reason for denying the view.

The reason for rejecting the view, however, is that it does not rep

resent the real world. For society does not form a super-being of
which the
individual human beings form a part. at Nor can the
tribution of S-predicates be validly used to arrive at such a being.
Bodily actions can be described in a great many different ways.

The bodily actions of soldiers requires the context of an army to
which they belong for the actions to be actions of soldiers. We can
describe thousands of German soldiers and tanks moving across
the border from Germany into Poland in 1939. We might equally
well say about that event that the German army moved into Poland.
An alternate and equally accurate description would be that the
German army invaded Poland. We might also and equally correctly
say that Germany invaded Poland. Germany invaded Poland by
moving its army into Poland, or by its soldiers crossing the border?
which they did either by marching or by riding in vehicles. We
just as properly say that the soldiers invaded Poland, the army
invaded Poland, or Germany invaded Poland. We can
intelligibly
speak of nations, armies, and other collectives
acting, and, as I shall
argue later, we can properly speak of their moral responsibility for
their actions. But the actions of collectives have as a necessary
ingredient the actions of human individuals, and it is the actions

of those individuals that
produce whateverproduced. results are
When we speak of the army acting or of the country acting, we do
not mean that the army, the country, or any other collective has a
super-mind or super-will of its own. The notion of action at the

level of collectives does not involve either intentions or bodily move
ments at the collective level, even though the notion of action at
the individual level does involve bodily movements and intentions
at the individual level. The language of the actions of collectives,
therefore, requires a different
analysis from the action of individuals.
To take the simplest approach and adopt the more complex
explanation only when forced, assume initially that the efficacious
agents are always and only human beings. Human beings act with
intention and will, and in this sense their actions can be taken to
be basic actions. Clearly, this does not preclude human beings
acting together and jointly producing something that none of them
individually could produce. Nor does this preclude the notion of
agency, whether that means one individual acting for another or
a chain of command that transfers orders and coordinates actions.
When a nation signs a treaty, some individual acting for the
nation actually holds pen in hand and scratches marks on paper,

thereby obligating all the official organs of the nation in certain

ways, which in turn carries obligations for individuals. The act of
signing treaties is only possible because there

Mobs, are nations.
by contrast, are spontaneous collectives, lacking permanent struc

tures or formal organization.8
When an army wins a battle, it is not any individual soldier
that wins the battle; nor is it necessarily all those who belong to
the army who win it. The soldier who refused to fire his rifle, the
one who froze in the face of the enemy, and the one who deserted
were all members of the army. It was not their actions that won
the battle. The army is said to have won the battle because it was
not just the generals, plans or their
and tactics, just the front nor
line soldiers and their weapons, but all of them together and acting
together. The army is more than just the individual soldiers mak
ing it up. It is the soldiers acting together in a certain organized,
structured way with arms and munitions. The organization and
structure cannot be ignored in describing the individual activities.
But whatever the army did required that individuals do certain
things in certain ways. To this extent the actions of the army can
be described as the actions taken by individuals. But if the de
scription of the army acting is inaccurate because it was the in
dividual soldiers who acted, the description of the individual sol
diers acting is inaccurate if it ignores the structures and organi
zation that informed their actions, and the fact that they acted
together.
We cannotspeak of certain bodily movements as actions of
soldiers unless there is an army of which they are members. The
reality of the army is a necessary condition for the physical move

ments of soldiers to be counted as actions of the army.
When we use the example of an army we tend to think of the
army as the individuals together and can translate the actions of

the army into the actions of the individuals acting together within
an organized structure. Is this true of society when we say that
it has a language and culture, or that it produced a language or
culture? We are less sure how language and culture are produced
8 a different
For and extended discussion of relations and collectives,
including an analysis of queues, mobs, etc., see Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique
of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso/NLB,
1976), Book 1, 4.

than how armies win battles. But the fact that the origins of
language and culture are not available to us is no reason for our
denying that somehow over time, what we call language and culture
evolved through the actions of human individuals. What they pro
duced collectively is passed down and helps form us. We use what
we have received.
Only entities that have bodies can produce physical changes

in the world. Corporations, nations, societies may own land, fac
tories, machines, and so on, but they do not have physical bodies
comparable to the physical bodies of the individual human beings
who make them up or act for them. Yet collectives of the type we
have been considering have relations that are formative of actions
of individuals and the relations often make the actions of the in
dividuals the kinds of actions they are and not just bodily move
ments. Without the relations of the collective, the actions of the
individuals would not be actions, for their conscious intentions
make sense only because of the organization and its reality. In
this sense the organization and the relations are efficacious even
though they do not act. They constrain and inform action in human
interaction, channel it, and give it meaning. Just as the banks of
a river channel the water of the river, so the organization of col
lectives channels the actions of individuals. Without the banks of
the river there would be no river, even though it is the water that
moves, not the banks. Without the social relations or organization
there would be no actions of a certain type, even though it is the
individuals who act.
My second conclusion is that the attribution of actions to col
lectives can be correct in that collectives can produce results and
in that the actions of the collective can be the resultant of other
actions, even though collectives act only through the actions of
individuals.
Ill
If the above analysis is correct, then the question of the meta

physical primacy of the individual or society is a bogus question.
Champions of individualism argue the primacy of the individual;
champions of collectivism argue the primacy of society. But just

as there is no human society without human individuals, there is

no human individual without society. Man is indeed a social ani
mal. This has meaning not only for politics but also for meta
physics.
Society as well as individuals
real; society are
is not, however,
a thing. Society is not an organism or a super-individual. Since
it has neither super-intellect nor super-will, it is in no sense an
individual for-itself. It has no aims, interests, desires, or goals of
its own. Nor does it have any good of its own. Only the life and
consciousness of the human beings who make it up have value; it
is only individual human beings who exist for-themselves and who
deserve respect as ends-in-themselves. Therefore a member of
human society, as an end-for-himself, is not subordinated to society.
As a universal being his good is representative of the good of all,
and so should not be considered as opposed to the good of society.
To speak of the good of society is to speak of the good of each of
the members of society. The common
good consists in each person's
being able to pursue his own good, which is at least partially in
dividual; for not all of any individual's good is the same as any
other person's good. If all members of society wish to achieve as
much of their desires as possible, then the good of most can be
maximized when their interests coordinate rather than conflict.
Society is composed of individual members, plus their inter
relations, and the objective residue left by earlier members of the
society. The organization and organizational structures form part

of the society, just as do language and culture. These are shared
by the members of the society, who can individually (to a minimal
extent) and collectively modify them. The language and culture
are the residual development of previous generations of that so
ciety, but they are also dynamically lived. The culture includes the
history of the society; and its structures, patterns of action, lan
guage are all living, shared components of the society.
The relation of the members of society to society is both in
ternal and external. Since society is constituted by the members,
they are not external to it. Since society constitutes the individ
uals, it is not external to them. The wolf boy raised by animals

is biologically related to its parents, but it is not a human being
except morphologically. Lacking human language, knowledge of
human customs, it has not internalized human society, culture, and
language, and hence it is biologically but not socially internally

related to any human society in the sense that human society is

not constitutive of it.
Society is external to its members in that it includes others

and in that it encompasses a multiplicity of relations and struc
tures, only a small portion of which
individualany internalizes.
This overflow of relations, structures, and possibilities provides an
objectified meeting ground where the members of a society can
carry on impersonal transactions.

The metaphysical priority of either society or of individuals
is often used to claim value priority. Those who champion human
rights place the individual good above that of the general welfare,
if they conflict. The collectivist does the opposite, sacrificing the
individual's good to the common good. What is the result if the
two?individual and society?are seen as correlatives? As correl
atives, sometimes the individual will predominate, sometimes the
collective. How this is to be decided is the issue.
To decide this question, the relation of the individual and so
ciety must be more fully analyzed. One figure often used is that
the individual participates in the society. The doctrine of partic
ipation, however, though useful for emphasizing the active role of

the members, has its limitations. For participation often is taken
to imply that one is a part or forms a part of the whole, that the
whole is more important than the part, and that the individual may
be sacrificed for the whole. To the notion of participation, if that
figure is used, the notion of representation can usefully be added.

Since the relation of individual and society is partially internal,
and since each is constitutive of the other, the individual not only
participates in the life of the society but also represents that life
through his actions. It is because the members of society represent
it in fact that any of them can represent it in various social forms.
The torture of any individual, the violation of the rights of any
individual, is evil not only because of the harm done to that indi
vidual, but because of the harm done to all members of society, and
to society in general, through him. Such violence to any one does
violence to all, and threatens all. The ground for respecting the
rights of the individual is not only his individuality but the fact
that he
represents all of human reality. Each is a representative
of the whole.
In acknowledging human rights a society acknowledges that
sometimes the individual's good is to be preferred, even though it

may appear to result in less good for others or even for the society
in general. The implicit acknowledgement is that by protecting
the human rights of each individual the rights of all, and so the
good of all, are best preserved.
Participation and representation, however, are often used with
out the proper distinction for different kinds of collectives. But if
it is true that some collectives are formed
by internal relations and
some by external relations, the meaning of participation and rep
resentation are different in the two cases. And if the different
kinds of relations are metaphysical, then the kind of metaphysical
relations makes a difference. This view, of course, denies that all
relations are internal, just as it denies that the social whole or state
is a super-entity above the individuals who are its members.
IV
The reductionist and the radical individualist both have dif

ficulty explaining the feeling of pride and the feeling of shame that
members of a family have for the honors or disgraces of individual
members of those families. Why should a mother feel proud of a
successful child's accomplishments, when it is the child that de
serves the praise? Why should a brother or sister feel shame at
the actions of a sibling who is a criminal, when it is the sibling's
doing not theirs? Why should members of a country take pride
in the accomplishments of some fellow citizens
arts, in the
sports,
or other endeavors, either within that
country or in international
competitions? Why should the members of a defeated country feel

shame if their leaders fostered an unjust war?
The hard-headed reductionist and the radical individualist ex
plain all such feelings as perhaps natural but misplaced. Individ
uals are only responsible for their own actions. To feel either pride
or shame for the actions of another is to take upon oneself what
does not properly belong to one. The feelings may be truly felt,
but they are not properly defensible on rational grounds.
The view we have suggested of the relation of an individual
and collectives, however, makes these feelings perfectly natural,
understandable, and proper. Since we are internally related to
members of our family and form a union with them, and since we
each are representative of the family, it is proper for the members
to feel both pride and shame with respect to the activities of all

its members. This is different from moral responsibility for the

actions of its members. The pride and shame are not moral pride
and moral shame. they But are proper because of the internalized
relations binding the members together.
When two American astronauts set foot on the moon it was
truly an achievement for mankind, since all members of the human
race as members of the same species are internally related, and the
achievement was built on human knowledge to which no one and
no nation has rightful, exclusive claim. But the achievement is
also a source of pride for Americans, since the astronauts were
Americans and internally related in a special way to Americans.
Their achievement was the product of a national effort, and their
being American was not simply an accident. They were trained

and supported and their equipment developed with funds supplied
by the American people through a complex of institutions through
which we share benefits and burdens.
Not only internalized relations, but also some external rela
tions provide ground for pride and shame. An organization to
which one is related externally, say as an employee occupying a
certain position, can do something for which one is proud or
ashamed. For each member contributes to the final outcome of an
organization. But one
dissociate can oneself from one's employ
ment in a way that one cannot dissociate oneself from one's family
or one's society, despite attempts to do so.
Internalized relations provide the basis, moreover, not only for
pride and shame but also for moral obligation. As internally re
lated to all other human beings we have obligations to them that
we do not have to other entities. Our obligations to members of
our own society, with whom we share our institutions,
and
history,
culture are greater than to those of other societies. Because of our
special relations with our families our obligations to members of
our family are greater yet than to others. An appreciation of our
real relations helps us understand our moral relations and obli
gations.
This leads to the question

finally of collective versus individual
moral responsibility. Can one properly speak of the moral re
sponsibility of an organization, of a nation, or a society, or is moral

responsibility always individually assigned and assumed? Only

individuals are sent to heaven or to hell. Only individuals are
autonomous persons in the Kantian sense. Does it follow that it
is a category mistake to speak of the moral responsibility of cor
porations, or of nations, or of people, or of societies?9 Is this simply

a shorthand way of speaking of the moral responsibility of the
members of the corporation or nation, people or society, or of par
ticular individuals within those collectives? Put differently, can
moral language properly contain C- or S-predicates?
The answer seems to follow from our previous analysis of both
actions and of C- and S-predicates. To the extent and in the ways
that collectives are properly said to act, their actions are properly
evaluated from a moral point of view. Since collectives are real,
but are not physical things or super-persons, what it means to
evaluate them from a moral point of view may be and is in fact
different from what it means to evaluate the actions of individuals
from a moral point of view. Similarly, the C and S attribution of
moral predicates may be and usually is different from the individual
attribution of moral predicates.
Some simple distinctions are in order. We have already seen
that we can properly speak of the actions of collectives. To that
extent we can evaluate them from a moral
point of view, saying
that they were morally good because they produced more good than
harm or morally bad because they violated the rights of individ
uals.10 Whether we take a utilitarian or a deontological point of
view, we can and do evaluate actions. Murder by a collective is
immoral, just as murder by an individual is. What we cannot eval

uate in the same way is the internal aspect of the morality of an
action. In the case of an individual, an action done by an individual
is constituted in part by the intention of the individual, which we
can evaluate from
point a moral
of view. Hence we can evaluate
both the results and the motive and intention, and both are properly
attributable to the same agent. This may not be the case in the
9
This seems to be the position of John Ladd in "Morality and the
Ideal of Rationality in Formal Organizations," Monist 54 (1970): 488-516.
10
Strictly speaking this stems not from the fact that they act, since
animals and machines may be said in some sense to act as well, but from
the fact that their actions, since produced by human beings, are seen as
social products involving at some stage and in some sense intention and
will.

instance of evaluating the action of a collective. A collective's ac

tion can be evaluated without knowing the motive or intention of
the people who carried out the action. The action may have many
parts and the intentions may be as varied as the parts.
In evaluating the actions of a collective we may be satisfied
simply to make that evaluation. When one nation is unjustly at
tacked by
another, the members of the attacked nation use the
injustice of the attack to spur each other on to defense, or the
leaders use that to mobilize the people as a whole. That judgment
is different from the judgment that certain individuals within the
aggressor nation are to blame for starting the war, or for atrocities
committed.
The actions of collectives are sometimes properly attributed
to all the members of the collective distributively, sometimes not.
Sometimes only certain members are individually culpable. But
that judgment is one that is made internally to the collective, while
the action of the collective that is initially judged is one that is
made external to the collective.
Moral judgments about the goodness or badness of nations,
corporations, professional societies
may judgments be about the
actions of those collectives as a whole, judgments about the actions
of all the members or most of the members of those
collectives,
judgments about the actions of the leaders of those collectives, and
so on. It is possible to speak over time of the character or spirit
of those collectives, just as over time it is possible to speak about
the characteristic behavior of individuals. In this sense collectives
might be judged good or bad, trustworthy or untrustworthy, fair
or unfair, and so on.
To the extent that organizations have structures, constitutions,
institutionalized relations, we can also make moral judgments
about these. Rawls's Theory of Justice is in fact discourse about the
fairness of institutions and societies, not about the justice of in
dividuals or of individual actions, except insofar as they are part
of a practice that is just or unjust. To speak of the justice of
institutions, constitutions, societies is to speak about structures
that exist, that are the result of human design, that have been
intentionally or unintentionally adopted, that can be changed. But
we can speak of all this without making moral judgments about
the persons involved in setting up the structures or adopting them,
and so on, though we may also do that. The structures have no

intentions of their own, though they may embody the intentions

of those who instituted the structures. Structures do, however,
produce or tend to produce results by constraining the actions of
individuals and channeling them in certain directions.
Since human beings are social beings, they cannot be under
stood without understanding society. society Since of is composed
human beings, it cannot be understood without understanding
them. Both must be understood together, and to do this they must
be understood in their relations. Understanding their relations?
and in general understanding the nature of social relations?is
necessary in order to handle the complex questions of the rights
of individuals against society, while at the same time admitting
the importance of the society vis-a-vis individuals. Neither a rad
ical individualistic nor a radical collectivist view does justice to
both the individual and society. The typical failure of both has
been a failure adequately to take account of and give an account
of the reality of social relations.
The University of Kansas


De George - Social Reality and Social Relations

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Social Reality and Social Relations

Author(s): Richard T. De George

This content downloaded from 205.133.226.104 on Mon, 16 Sep 2013 23:58:08 PM

SOCIAL REALITYAND SOCIAL RELATIONS*

rality, and being. These have produced a variety of insights, despite

Despite the individualistic presuppositions of much of linguis

society, just as language belongs to a people or to a society. They

improperly ascribable to individuals. Although English is my na

properly ascribed to societies and not to individuals.

S-predicates are a special sub-class of collective or C-predi

Review of Metaphysics 37 (September 1983): 3-20. Copyright ? 1983 by the Review of

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other type of predicate describes the collective but not necessarily

That language and culture are said correctly to belong to so

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the collective at any particular time, which one implicitly includes

man, and society and human collectives, are constitutive relations.

society? Let me start first with the individual. A radical individ

necessary to understand the individual.

sharing their genetic makeup. To understand him genetically is

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and is partially constituted by them.4 They form part of his social

differently because of it. I am related to Americans in a way that

41 shall refer to such relations as internalized rather than as internal

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work, patterns, and structures are not dependent on the individuals

objectified in the material things they make and use, as well as in

empty abstraction. Since human beings can comprehend the so

merely that of part to whole.

Society, broadly speaking, is the repository of all social (re

relations, and institutions. In some cases people are externally

people the relation to an organized church or religion is an internal

ambiguously one or the other.

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Marriage, to take a specific example, is a social institution into

Marriage, moreover, is a relation that is both a state and a

process.6 Marriage is a state into which one enters, i.e., a definite

Marriage is a social institution but not a unit.7 An army is

physical entity. It is originally organized and formed by individ

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its aims, customs, traditions, and relations. A particular army is

cial, that is, human, beings, and to understand collectives and so

nections, they are frequently seen as natural collectives. Formal

states, and attribute predicates to them that are not properly re

speak of a large corporation, we are speaking of the size of the

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of revenue generated or in some other respect. But the size is the

capacities is not the same as the development of a nation. A highly

carrying on the activities that go to make up industrialization. But

metaphysical status of its own and is not reducible simply to the

object of predication, and it is for this reason that the predicates

The notion of a society or a state as a super-entity that acts

tonomy of the individual in the ethical realm. If these conse

unpalatable would not be adequate reason for denying the view.

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Bodily actions can be described in a great many different ways.

ingredient the actions of human individuals, and it is the actions

super-mind or super-will of its own. The notion of action at the

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thereby obligating all the official organs of the nation in certain

signing treaties is only possible because there

by contrast, are spontaneous collectives, lacking permanent struc

reality of the army is a necessary condition for the physical move

army as the individuals together and can translate the actions of