CAROL ROVANE

WHAT IS AN AGENT?

Isaac Levi and I agree that there can be group agents formed out of two or
more human beings.1 I’ve argued elsewhere that if we properly understand
the detailed philosophical grounds for the possibility of such group agents,
those very grounds offer up another possibility in quite the opposite direc-
tion, the possibility of two or more multiple agents within the same human
being.2 In this paper I want to address some of the natural reservations
that are likely to arise about both of these claims, by first articulating as
sympathetically as I can some of the reasons why it might seem, neverthe-
less, that human beings are basic agents – basic in a sense that does not
carry over to the group and multiple cases and, indeed, basic in a sense
that makes them the only bona fide cases of agency. In order to explain
why these reasons are unconvincing, I will have to provide a somewhat
more detailed account than Levi himself has given of how and why group
agents are possible, and to take up as well what makes for the possibility
of multiple agents, which he does not discuss. But this paper is intended as
a tribute to a philosopher who saw clearly from early on that human size
is not basic to agency and, among the very small number of philosophers
who saw this, is perhaps the only one who had right the general direction
of reasons why they are not. It’s a real pleasure to have this chance to
acknowledge not just his influence but the solidarity he showed during
my efforts to work out what is a manifestly unorthodox and unpopular
philosophical view.
Levi’s central philosophical project is to give a normative account of
rational choice. It is in the context of this project that he has important
things to say about agency. However, he keeps his metaphysical assump-
tions about agents to the bare minimum that are required for his normative
purposes, leaving any further metaphysical questions about their nature un-
touched. This is not merely because he lacks a taste for metaphysics, which
he does. It is a matter of policy. In his view, philosophers should, as far as
possible, leave substantive questions about the nature of things to science.
Accordingly, he never introduces a metaphysical assumption unless he is
absolutely driven to it by independent philosophical considerations.

Synthese 140: 181–198, 2004.

© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
182 CAROL ROVANE

As I understand him, the view is roughly this. If there is such a thing as

rational choice, then there is such a thing as an agent who is capable of de-
liberating from a first person point of view. Any such agent must make two
assumptions about itself in the context of deliberation: first, it must assume
that it faces a plurality of options from which to choose, all of which are
equally open to it; second, it must assume that what it chooses will be done.
The first assumption, about the plurality of available options, amounts to
an assumption of freedom, and it is obviously a necessary presupposition
of deliberation. For, clearly, if an agent did not think that it faced a plur-
ality of options all of which are equally open to it, then there wouldn’t be
anything for it to deliberate about. The second assumption amounts to an
assumption of intentional control. It too is crucial, since there would be no
point in choosing unless choices were efficacious. These two assumptions
that deliberating agents must make about themselves posit distinctive kinds
of causal powers – for free choice and action – which have been the subject
of familiar and longstanding philosophical dispute. Yet, however disputed
the assumptions might be, they are unavoidable in the context of rational
choice for the reasons I just rehearsed. This is a point on which Levi insists.
And for him, the point is a sufficient ground on which to embrace the two
assumptions as true. He doesn’t see why anything more should be required
in order to elevate these two assumptions into metaphysical theses about
the very nature of agency than that they are unavoidably assumed by agents
themselves in the context of deliberation.
He’s s right. Consider what would follow if we came to believe that the
assumptions are false. We would believe that we never face a plurality of
options from which to choose, and we would believe that we are incap-
able of carrying out what we take to be our choices. It wouldn’t follow
that agents can’t do these things – namely, choose or carry out choices.
All that would follow is that we – insofar as we lack such freedom and
intentional control – are not really agents (although we may have suffered
from the illusion of being such). And, so, the status of our deliberative
assumptions as metaphysical theses about the very nature of agency would
not be compromised at all.
The view might seem to be controversial at first sight, but a closer look
shows that Levi does not exaggerate the distinctive causal powers that he
attributes to agents. For example, he does not think that the sort of freedom
that agents must assume from the first person point of view of deliberation
precludes the possibility that others might be able to predict their choices
from a third person point of view. This makes the assumption about free-
dom less radical than it might at first appear to be. The assumption about
intentional control is even less radical. Although Levi holds that agents
 WHAT IS AN AGENT? 183

must assume that their choices will be efficacious, he also allows that
their assumption may on occasion prove to be false. When the time for
action comes an agent may find, for example, that it had overestimated its
capacities, or that it suffers from weakness of will. But, all the same, these
exceptions stand against a general background of effective capacities and
strength of will without which an agent would cease to be an agent.
Most of the other claims that Levi makes about the nature of agency
are explicitly normative in character. Insofar as an agent is something that
deliberates and chooses from a first person point of view, it is something
that is committed to meeting certain normative requirements of rationality.
Here are some examples of such specific requirements: to be consistent
in one’s beliefs; to rank one’s preferences transitively; to accept the de-
ductive and inductive consequences of one’s attitudes; to evaluate one’s
ends by reference to the means that must employed in order to achieve
them; to evaluate one’s ends by reference to the foreseeable consequences
of achieving them. There may be some question about what, precisely,
the list of requirements should include and how the requirements should
be understood – a controversy in which Levi has taken some explicit and
firm stands. But my purposes in this paper don’t require me to take that
question up. What I want to stress instead are some rudimentary points
about agency that are implied here: that what makes an agent an agent
is that it chooses on the basis of deliberation, that choosing of this sort
involves making all things considered judgements, and those judgements
must meet the demands of rationality specified along roughly the lines
mentioned above.
I want now to draw attention to one last quasi-metaphysical element in
this picture of agency. It is a point seemingly of the most utter banality,
but it is worth registering all the same. I call it quasi-metaphysical because
it could just as easily be seen as a conceptual matter. It concerns the way
in which an agent’s identity is presupposed by these normative dimensions
of agency. To begin with, a deliberating agent is really addressing a ques-
tion about itself, namely, what would it be best for me to think and do,
all things considered. It should be clear, moreover, that the scope of the
“all” in an agent’s all-things-considered judgments is determined by its
identity. For an agent is not required to take into account all the things
that lie outside it, but only its own attitudes. Thus the question before a
deliberating agent is, what would it be best for me to think and do in the
light of all that I believe, want, etc. As I said above, an agent proceeds
to answer this question by striving to meet various specific requirements
of rationality, such as consistency in belief and transitivity of preferences.
And here too we find that the identity of the agent is centrally at issue.
184 CAROL ROVANE

Taken together, these various normative requirements serve to define what

it is for an individual agent to be fully or ideally rational. This is shown
by the fact that there is no failure of rationality if you think p is true and I
think not-p is true, or if you think p is better than q and I think q is better
than p. Such inconsistencies and intransitivities are failures of rationality
only when they occur within a single agent. And this is really just a way
of getting at the same point I just made about how the scope of the “all” in
all-things-considered judgments is determined by the agent’s identity. Just
as rationality requires me to take all of my own attitudes into account when
I deliberate, so also, rationality does not require me to take anyone else’s
attitudes as the basis of my deliberation. Thus rationality, in the sense that
is most centrally at issue in Levi’s work, is an individual affair.
Although the notion of agent identity is implicit in the whole set of
normative concepts with which he is primarily engaged, he has relatively
little to say about what the condition of agent identity is. He certainly
does not attempt to give an analysis of agent identity in terms of necessary
and sufficient conditions. This is to be expected. Such an analysis would
constitute the sort of high metaphysics of which he takes a low view. In
fact, there is very little more that he could say about the nature of agents
than what I’ve already conveyed without transgressing his policy of leaving
metaphysics to the scientists whenever possible. But, as it turns out, there
is just a bit more that he can say consistently with his policy, and this
bit more does bear on the issue of agent identity. It has to do with why
groups and parts of human beings, as well as human beings themselves,
can qualify as individual agents.
Levi remarks with some firmness that his normative orientation does
not entail anything about the ‘inner’ metaphysical nature of agents. This
point is essential to his countenancing group agency. Let me quote from
him at some length:

Recall that even students of market economies attribute beliefs, desires, goals, values and
choices to families, firms and, of course, government agencies (which are bureaus rather
than bureaucrats) as well as to persons. No doubt the mechanism whereby the decisions
made by social agents are to be explained typically involve reference to the behaviors of
and, indeed, sometimes the decisions of individual and other social agents. Perhaps, group
choices are redescribable as complex processes involving no choices other than those of
persons. Even if this is true, it need not detract from the reality of such group choices
any more than the redescribability of individual choices as complex neurophysiological
processes detracts from the reality of individual choices. Nor should redescribability and
explainability suffice to preclude the propriety of subjecting social choice to canons of
rationality any more than it should preclude the propriety of subjecting individual choice
to the very same canons.
When examining the beliefs, goals, choices and other propositional attitudes of social
groups, we need not be concerned at all with the underlying mechanisms any more than we
 WHAT IS AN AGENT? 185

need worry about the underlying mechanisms when examining the propositional attitudes
of humans or, for that matter, automata. Perhaps, differences in the “hardware” should
make a difference to the view we take of principles of rational preference, belief, valuation
and choice. But unless a decisive case is advanced that this should be so, it seems sensible
to seek an account of rational choice that is indifferent as to whether the agent is human,
automaton, animal, angelic, or social.
Speaking of groups as agents may offend some ontological sensibilities. But anyone
prepared to attribute beliefs, values, and choices to groups as well as to individual humans
and to think that such values, beliefs and choices ought to be regulatable by the same
principles of rationality as are applicable to human agents recognizes such social entities
as agents in the only sense that matters here.3

The sound analogy Levi makes here is that to be distracted from the
idea of group agents who are fulfilling the requirements of deliberative
rationality by some misguided commitment to the basicness of human size
agents would be as bad as being distracted from the idea of individual
human rationality by a misguided commitment to the basicness of mech-
anisms of various kinds internal to the human agent (homunculi, as they
are called). The important thing from which one should not get distracted
is that rationality is central, and should determine the metaphysics – and
ideas about human size or ideas about internal mechanisms are traditional
philosophical distractions from this.
If the normative element is central in this way, then the important point
for me is that an exactly similar form of reasoning applies to the sorts of
alter personalities that appear in dissociative identity disorder, a disorder
that used to be known as multiple personality disorder. It is possible and,
indeed, it is effective to address and engage such alter personalities separ-
ately. When we do so, we attribute to them beliefs, values and choices. And
we may subject them to the same principles of rationality that we apply to
human beings. We may, for example, point out their inconsistencies and
non sequiturs to them, fully and legitimately expecting appropriate uptake
and self-critical response. Whenever we do this, we are recognizing the
possibility of alters as agents in the only sense that matters – and human
size is once again a traditional and tempting distraction to be resisted.
Levi himself was slower to recognize the possibility of multiple agents
within a single human being than he was to recognize the group case.
When I first presented my ideas to him, and in particular the idea that
alters might be agents, he pointed out that his own position had the re-
sources with which to interpret alters in either of two ways – either in
the way I was proposing, as individual agents, or in the more usual way, as
manifestations of irrationality within a single human-size agent. Given that
both interpretations are possible on his view, he claimed an indifference
between them. I think he is right that both interpretations are possible on
186 CAROL ROVANE

his view, but I don’t think he was right to be indifferent between them -
and I think he now agrees.
It might not be obvious from what I’ve said so far just how Levi’s
position does permit this second interpretation. In the passage I cited he
talks of attributing rational choice and agency to subjects. This requires
communication with them and interpreting them. Insofar as it is possible to
engage and communicate with alter personalities separately, it would seem
to be impossible to engage and communicate with their human host in the
same way. Although we would be face to face with that human host, what
issued from its mouth would not reflect a human-size deliberative point
of view but, rather, the narrower point of view of one or another of the
alter personalities within it. So the question arises, why should we suppose
that a human being who houses such alter personalities might nevertheless
qualify as one agent with one overarching deliberative point of view? In
order to have such an overarching point of view, a human being need
not, in Levi’s view, display very much actual conformity to the normative
requirements of rationality. All that is necessary is that the human being
be committed to meeting those requirements. And this is consistent with
all sorts of rational failures, so long as the failures are regarded by the
human being as sources of regret and, also, occasions for self-criticism and
efforts at self-change. Such self-critical responses are enough to signal the
requisite commitment to rationality that is necessary for being one agent
with one point of view. It follows, I think, that the mere fact that a human
being seeks therapy might suffice to show that it is one agent with one
overarching deliberative point of view. And this may be so even if the
therapist initially finds it impossible to engage that overarching human-
size point of view, but instead finds itself always confronted with one or
another alter personality. The therapist would still be licensed to adopt the
second interpretation according to which it is confronted with one human-
size individual, so long as it finds the faintest signs of a commitment on
the part of that individual to deliberating and functioning as one – such
as the resort to therapy or, perhaps, even just manifest frustration and
unhappiness.
Since the data of dissociative identity disorder are typically compatible
with both interpretations – one positing multiple agents, the other posit-
ing a single agent – it might seem warranted to be indifferent between
them. But such indifference does not sit well with Levi’s own normative
orientation. For there is a vitally important normative difference between
the two interpretations. To put this difference somewhat dramatically, the
first interpretation would entail that the integrative cure of dissociative
 WHAT IS AN AGENT? 187

identity disorder would amount to a sort of homicide, while the second

interpretation would make integrative cure a kind of rational imperative.
I should say for the record that it is not Levi’s view that we would have
to adopt the same moral attitude toward multiple agents that we take toward
human beings. So also in the case of group agents; he does not think that
such agents are likely to be objects of moral concern in the same sense
that human beings are. In consequence, it may be permissible to harm
and destroy them. He has even mused aloud about the merits of enslaving
corporations. However, I do want to emphasize that these moral distinc-
tions that he is prepared to draw among rational agents do not track any
metaphysical differences among them in respect of their status as agents.
Multiple and group agents are agents in exactly the same sense that human
agents are. All of them have first person points of view from which they
deliberate and act in accordance with the same normative requirements of
rationality that by definition apply to all individual agents.
The assumption that human beings are the only bona fide agents is
central and pervasive in our tradition. In fact, it is so central and so per-
vasive that it has not really needed much elaboration or defense. This puts
me in the awkward position of having to supply such an elaboration and
defense myself, since that’s the only way I’ll be able to gain an adequate
understanding of the nature of the resistance that I expect to find to the
thesis that group and multiple agents are agents in the very same sense that
human beings are.
I’ll begin with two obvious facts about human beings that clearly dis-
tinguish them from groups and parts of them: each human being has a
separate body and each has a separate consciousness.
Why should having a separate body make human beings basic agents
in a sense that doesn’t carry over to the group and multiple cases? Well, no
body, including the human body, can move in two directions at once. And,
so, insofar as human action involves bodily movement, it would seem to
follow that there are also significant restrictions on how many independent
actions the human body can carry out at the same time. Of course, some
of us can tap our heads and rub our stomachs at the same time, and some
of us can play contrapuntal music. But, nevertheless the body does enforce
a kind of practical unity within the human being. This enforced practical
unity is visible even in cases of dissociative identity disorder, in which a
human being is host to a multiplicity of distinct alter personalities, each
of whom acts more or less independently of the others. Because these
alters must act through the same body, they cannot all act at once; each
must wait for its turn to be “out”, in order to use their shared body for its
particular purposes. Just as the body enforces practical unity in the multiple
188 CAROL ROVANE

case, the lack of a common body would seem to make practical unity that
much harder to achieve in the group case. For, whereas the members of
the human body (arms, legs, torso) cannot withdraw from it in order to act
on their own, the human members of a group agent can do this. They can
literally walk away from any group they join, thereby undermining or, at
least, reducing the practical unity of the group.
If the body enforces a certain practical unity at the level of action,
consciousness facilitates deliberative unity at the level of thought. To say
that each human being has a separate consciousness is to say that each has
its own distinct phenomenological point of view from which it is able to
apprehend thoughts in consciousness. To have such a phenomenological
point of view is to have a first person point of view from which a hu-
man being is able to recognize its thoughts as its own – as mine. Now,
prima facie, it would seem that to recognize one’s thoughts in this first
person mode, as one’s own, is eo ipso to recognize them as the proper
basis of one’s deliberations – or, to put the point more tendentiously, it
is to recognize normative pressure to take them all into account in one’s
all-things-considered judgments, in conformity with the various specific
normative requirements of rationality. But to do all this just is to be an
individual agent. And, so, it would appear that we have a virtual guaran-
tee that any normal human being will qualify as an individual agent in
Levi’s sense, just by virtue of the fact that it has a unified consciousness
that provides it with a distinct first person point of view. What’s more,
it would appear that multiple agents within a single human being could
not sustain distinct deliberative points of view unless they had distinct
consciousnesses of their own. If that is so, then multiple agents can exist
only in the highly abnormal condition in which their human host fails to
have the sort of unified consciousness that is characteristic of the human
individual. Equally, such unity of consciousness can never characterize a
group of human beings – either by nature or by effort. This means that a
group will never have a first person point of view in the sense that human
individuals do. And it is unclear whether there is any other sort of first
person point of view to have. Since having such a point of view is an
absolutely necessary condition on agency, the presumption would seem
to have to be that groups of human beings do not qualify as agents after all
– and this is so even though we may find it feasible and useful to interpret
them to be such.
So far, the metaphysical differences I’ve pointed out between human
beings on the one hand, and groups and parts of them on the other, are
normatively flat in the following sense: they do not criticize the efforts that
human beings might make to achieve rational unity within groups and parts
 WHAT IS AN AGENT? 189

of themselves as being irrational, but only unrealistic. The metaphysical

separateness and wholeness of human beings, as given by their bodily and
phenomenological boundaries, simply make group and multiple agency
unfeasible. This is a claim I’ll directly challenge further on. But first, I want
to complete my attempt to defend the idea that human beings are basic
agents in a sense that doesn’t carry over to the group and multiple cases,
by introducing some specifically normative considerations that might be
taken to support the idea.
There can be no doubt that the rational capacities by which one charac-
terizes agency – the capacities to deliberate and to choose – are part of the
natural endowment of human beings. And, so, it might reasonably be said
that it is part of the natural and, therefore, the ‘proper’ function of a human
being both to have and to exercise these rational capacities. But, of course,
their exercise is directed at achieving the very sort of unity of thought
and action that is summed up in all-things-considered judgments and that
characterizes individual rationality. It would seem to follow that the natural
and ‘proper’ function of a human being is to be an individual agent in
this normative sense. Correlatively, it would seem to follow that group and
multiple agents are unnatural and improper. This is especially clear in cases
of dissociative identity disorder in which we find distinct alter personalities
who might be interpreted to be individual agents in their own rights. For the
very existence of these agents necessarily serves to undermine the rational
unity of their human host. It is, perhaps, less immediately obvious that
the existence of group agents would serve to undermine the rational unity
of their individual human members. But it doesn’t take much reflection
to see that this will often be so. For general experience shows that the
will of a group will not typically be in full accord with the will of any
given human individual – with highly effective dictatorships providing an
improbable exception. Otherwise, group efforts typically require human
beings to make compromises away from what they, as individuals, would
have judged to be the best way for the group to proceed. In such cases, it
would seem that human beings can continue to make their contributions to
a group effort only at the cost of their rational unity as individuals. And,
for this reason, group agency serves, in much the way that multiple agency
does, to undermine what seems to be the natural and proper function of the
human being - which is to be an individual rational agent in its own right.
The foregoing remarks complete my attempt to provide an explicit de-
fense of the idea that human beings are agents in a basic sense that does
not carry over to the cases of group and multiple agents. Their burden
with respect to my own view is as follows: We might grant for the sake
of argument that it is sometimes feasible and useful to interpret human
190 CAROL ROVANE

behavior as the behavior of group and multiple agents. And we might even
grant that to so interpret them is to view them as striving to meet the very
same normative requirements of rationality that apply to human agents.
But, all the same, human beings are basic agents in a sense that doesn’t
carry over to the group and multiple cases. For individual human beings
stand under an obligation to meet the normative requirements of rational-
ity, whereas groups and parts of them never stand under that obligation.
Furthermore, the former obligation of human individuals actually entails
that group and multiple agents ought not, in general, be allowed to exist
even if they are possible. For, in general, group and multiple agents could
exist only as forms of irrationality on the part of the human beings who
constituted them.
In response, I’ll be arguing that human beings don’t actually stand un-
der any rational obligation that would preclude group and multiple agency;
and any rational obligation to which human beings are subject is one to
which group and multiple agents would be subject as well.
I’ll take as my starting point two facts about human beings that no
one could reasonably dispute. The first is that human beings sometimes
coordinate their efforts in joint endeavors. The second is that human be-
ings sometimes compartmentalize their efforts into relatively autonomous
pursuits.
Here is an example of the first sort of fact: Two philosophers write a
paper together. In order to do this, they needn’t become a group agent,
in the sense of becoming one dual-bodied individual. But they do need
to accomplish some of the same sorts of things that individuals do when
they deliberate and act. They need to resolve their disagreements about
the relevant philosophical matters; they need to rank their preferences con-
cerning various desiderata for philosophical writing; they need to work
out the implications of the shared beliefs and desires from which they are
proceeding; they need to work out what the available means are to their
common end; etc. By doing these things, the philosophers would realize
together in degree the sort of deliberative unity that an individual achieves
by arriving at all-things-considered judgments about what it would be best
to do in the light of all that it believes and wants.
Here is an example of the second sort of fact: A human being is devoted
to a life that combines academic work, family and community. But every
once in a while it goes off on its own to pursue the sport of surfing in a
quite serious way. This latter pursuit requires the human being to achieve
a significant degree of deliberative unity with respect to the issues that are
directly relevant to surfing. But on the whole surfing is quite orthogonal to
everything else that this human being is “about”. So when the human being
 WHAT IS AN AGENT? 191

is pursuing this sport it can more or less disregard the sorts of deliberative
issues that bear on its other more central pursuits. And vice versa. When
the human being is pursuing its other more central pursuits it can more or
less disregard the deliberative issues that arise in connection with surfing.
The result is a kind of compartmentalization of effort by which the human
being is able to realize in degree, in two different parts of itself, the sort of
independence and autonomy that characterize the individual agent.
I’ve been careful to spell out these examples without introducing any
group or multiple agents, but only human-size agents. I’m envisaging that
the two philosophers are separate agents who act together so as to achieve
something like the unity of an individual agent in the context of their
joint endeavor. But, nevertheless, I’m also envisaging that each retains
its individual deliberative perspective on the merits and feasibility of this
endeavor. This means that whenever one of them makes its particular con-
tribution to the endeavor, it is committed to evaluating whether making
that contribution would be best, all things considered, from its own dis-
tinct deliberative point of view. Similarly, I’m envisaging that the sort of
compartmentalization that the surfing academic manages to achieve leaves
its status as a unified agent intact. In other words, I’m envisaging that
this human being is committed to arriving at and acting upon all-things-
considered judgments that reflect its whole point of view. So, no matter
how compartmentalized the activity of surfing might be from its other
pursuits, I’m envisaging that this human being will not deem it acceptable
to go off to surf unless it judges that doing so is compatible with the other
pursuits.
I want to make several observations about these examples. First,
although the human beings involved retain their distinct deliberative per-
spectives, nevertheless, their coordinated and compartmentalized activities
do resemble in degree the activities of separate individuals - which is
to say, they resemble in degree the cases of group and multiple agency.
Second, the bodily and phenomenological boundaries that divide indi-
vidual human beings do not pose obstacles to achieving these degrees
of rational unity within quite different boundaries. And, finally, there is
nothing irrational about these ways in which human beings transcend the
bodily and phenomenological boundaries that distinguish them as distinct
animals. Coordination and compartmentalization of effort are not irra-
tional, so long as the human beings who make these efforts judge that
there are things worth doing for the sake of which such coordination and
compartmentalization are warranted.
These observations suggest the following more extreme claims. First,
the forms of coordination and compartmentalization that can hold in lim-
192 CAROL ROVANE

ited degree are conceivable in greater degree and, in the extreme, they
would amount to instances of group and multiple agency. Second, the
bodily and phenomenological boundaries that divide human beings do not
preclude this – though they would obviously place constraints on the sorts
of things that group and multiple agents can do. And, finally, these sorts
of things that group and multiple agents can do generally can’t be done be
human agents. Insofar as such things are worth doing, they may provide
human beings with reasons to integrate into group agents or fragment
into multiple agents. And, because this is so, it is misguided to suppose
that group and multiple agency would necessarily involve transgressions
against the normative requirements of rationality.
Let me now try to support these more extreme claims by elaborating
their meaning – first with the help of some artificial examples and, then, in
connection with a real case.
Suppose that two human beings decide that they are not very interesting
or effective as individuals, but always work better as a team. They appre-
hend that it would be feasible for them, if they so chose, to function this
way all the time – that is, always to deliberate together and always with an
eye to what it would be best, all things considered, for them to do as a team.
Each of the human beings reflects on this option from its own point of view,
and each concludes that what would issue from such joint deliberations
and activities would be more interesting and more worthwhile than what
it could do individually. They communicate this to each other and decide
to go for it – to end their lives as the individuals they are and to become
instead one dual-bodied agent. Is this outcome irrational? Certainly, the
route to it was not irrational: each of the human beings who were initially
involved judged from its own point of view that the outcome would be best,
all things considered. What about the rationality of the outcome itself? It
might be argued, in the way I did above, that any such group agent can
exist only at the expense of the rational unity of its human participants.
There is, perhaps, a sense in which this is true in the case at hand. If we
could identify all of the thoughts that occurred in one of the human being’s
heads, we might well find that they are not, by themselves, a sufficient
rational ground for the ‘activities’ of that human being’s body. For those
activities are, by hypothesis, the deliverances of a joint deliberation on the
part of both of the human beings. But then again, by the same hypothesis,
those activities are not the actions of a human-size agent. They are, rather,
components of a larger endeavor carried out by a group agent. And, by
hypothesis, that larger endeavor is the outcome of a deliberation on the
part of the group agent. So there is no irrationality at that level either.
The only question is whether the group’s rationality has come at too high a
 WHAT IS AN AGENT? 193

price in terms of the independent rational unity of each of the human beings
involved. But this is a question that the human beings had already answered
for themselves when each decided that what they could do together as a
group agent would be more worthwhile than what they could do separately
as human-size agents.
Now consider a case drawn from the film Donny Brasco. Brasco is
a police officer who goes very deep undercover in order to infiltrate a
crime organization. He is well suited to police work and is professionally
committed to it. Furthermore, his professional life sits well with personal
commitments to family and friends. But when he goes under cover he
discovers that he finds criminal activity exciting. He even enjoys being
ruthless in the ways required. But, most importantly, he finds it gratifying
and meaningful to be governed by the code of loyalty and honor that pre-
vails in the crime organization. Because this is so, he forms friendships to
which he is just as committed as he has ever been to anything or anybody.
Hollywood normally requires that such a character retain his integrity as
an individual, by making a choice (often tragic) between the two “lives” he
is leading. But interestingly, for a good portion of this film, the character
simply gives up on the project of a unified life. He knows that there is
no hope of reconciling his different pursuits, because neither can be re-
garded as justified from the point of view of the other. And yet, by living
in a sufficiently fragmented way, he comes to learn that both are worth
pursuing. On this ground, he decides that neither should be abandoned
in favor of the other. He also recognizes that both can be pursued only
by ending his life as one unified agent, leaving in his stead two multiple
agents who can, from their separate perspectives, coherently pursue lives
in the two separate social worlds. Of course, this is feasible only insofar
as each social world will accept a participant who can offer only half the
time and energies of a single human being. But if he judged that this were
so, there would be nothing irrational in the choice to fragment. On the
contrary. It would be rationally mandated by his overall view.
I expect that this example of fragmentation into multiple agents will
be less convincing than the example of integration into a group agent. If a
given human being can appreciate the desirability of two forms of life from
within what is initially a unified perspective, then it would seem that the
decision to pursue both forms of life in a compartmentalized way needn’t
ever undermine the unity of that initial perspective – just as I supposed
in the case of the surfing academic. I agree that this is often so. But with
Donny Brasco I’ve introduced a case in which there are forces outside the
human being that mandate a fragmentation of perspective. My thought is
that if the circumstances of a human being are sufficiently fragmented, that
194 CAROL ROVANE

will make it less feasible for the human being to retain a unified deliber-
ative perspective as it moves from one circumstance to another. In fact,
striving to do so will simply underscore for the human being the ways
in which its two lives don’t and can’t make rational sense together. That
is why it may be rational for the human being to forego the project of
leading a unified human life and to opt instead for fragmentation into two
independent agents, each of whom can coherently pursue a life of its own.
I think some human beings really are faced with such fragmented social
circumstances that the project of leading a unified human life is not feasible
and, for that reason, not warranted. Consider, for example, young immig-
rants who wish not to abandon the old ways of their parents but who also
wish to embrace the new ways they have been brought to. This might be
regarded by some as a regrettable and contingent social circumstance that
we can and should strive to prevent, precisely so as to facilitate rational
unity within each individual human life. But I don’t think this attitude
should prevail. And this is not just because I am enamoured of the idea
of a multi-cultural existence. It is rather because I think that most cases of
group agency also produce such fragmentation. Most actual group agents
don’t absorb the entirety of their human constituents in the way that occurs
in my contrived example of the duo who think and act as one. Most of
them absorb only some of the energies of their human constituents, leaving
behind another agent of significant, but not fully human-sized, proportions.
Here is a real-life example of what I have in mind: the Manhatten Pro-
ject. There is no doubt that virtually all of the scientists involved in the
project believed that the atom bomb was worth making. Those who had
doubts still judged that the project of trying to harness atomic energy for
human purposes was worth pursuing. So all were, in one way or another,
committed to the Manhatten Project. They all also believed that it was,
necessarily, a group project. No one scientist had the requisite range of
knowledge. But even if one did, it could not have applied that knowledge
in order to build the bomb on its own. It was clear that nothing short of an
intensive group effort would suffice. And, at least for some of the war-time
period of the project, I believe that a group agent came to be. The military
would have preferred to have a collection of group agents, none of whom
knew what the other was doing. But Oppenheimer insisted on the free
flow of ideas. Sometimes these scientists behaved as separate individuals,
advocating their ideas to the rest. But, very often, their discussions took
the form of a joint deliberation about what to think and do in the light
of their combined and coordinated efforts. Oppenheimer, apparently, was
very good at facilitating such joint deliberation. Rather than viewing unre-
solved issues as disagreements among individuals, he viewed them instead
 WHAT IS AN AGENT? 195

as issues to be resolved by finding the “all-things-considered” significance

of what the whole had so far produced. Now, if the Manhatten Project truly
was the work of a group agent, it is equally true that it left behind parts
of human lives to be conducted independently of it. This often produced
internal conflicts within the human beings involved, in which personal and
political commitments clashed with commitment to the project. But I don’t
think we should necessarily interpret these conflicts as rational failures. To
interpret them so would be to insist, more or less as I described earlier,
that each human being stands under an obligation to achieve rational unity
within itself. But here is an alternative interpretation: a number of roughly
human-sized individuals found that there was something worth doing for
the sake of which it was warranted to fragment their lives, giving over
a portion to the Manhatten Project and leaving the other portion for other
independent pursuits. Each should have been able to recognize that the res-
ulting group effort would not faithfully reflect its own, roughly human-size
point of view on things. The whole point of the group effort was precisely
to produce a larger point of view that would bring more experience and
expertise to bear on the project than each could bring to bear by itself. As
this group effort took on a life of its own, it left behind smaller points of
view from which the group effort could be re-evaluated and, sometimes,
criticized and even opposed. When we view human agents as basic, we
have to view these critical responses as involving self-criticism. That is, we
have to regard each of the smaller points of view as including the portion of
the human life that was given over to the project and as mandating rational
unity within that human life overall – if necessary, by leaving the project.
I think this view is doubly misguided. It’s false to the facts, at least with
respect to the scientists who did not withdraw from the project. And, more
importantly, it overlooks something of real normative significance.
Let’s look at the facts. I take it to be a fact that many human lives
were, literally, fragmented by the Manhatten Project. These human lives
housed genuine scientific commitment, sometimes combined with patriotic
feeling, which led to joining the project. But there was simply no way for
most human beings to bring “all” of themselves to the project. That could
happen only in the case of those who lived only for science. Anyone who
had additional commitments - say, to family or friends – would find that
they had no place in the project. As before, this may seem to be like the
case of the surfing academic who finds that various pursuits can and should
be compartmentalized from one another, but who nevertheless retains a
unified perspective on all of them. Some participants in the Manhatten
Project may have been lucky enough to be able to do this. But others, I
196 CAROL ROVANE

think, found – especially as the project proceeded – that they could not
coherently retain such a unified perspective.
So let’s turn to the normative question, what did rationality require of
these human beings? I’ve tried to emphasize that, once the project was
underway, it took on a life of its own that could not be controlled by any
human individual. It could not be controlled by Oppenheimer, who had the
good sense not to see his role of scientific director as requiring this. And it
could not be controlled by the US General who bore military responsibility
for the project either – though, unlike Oppenheimer, he did see his role as
requiring this. So consider what it must have been like for anyone else who
took a roughly human-size perspective on the project. Clearly, it would be
much more like an inter-personal relation than an intra-personal relation.
For an intrapersonal relation would presuppose a form of intentional con-
trol that simply isn’t in place here. This, I think, makes manifest the kind
of multiplicity that group agency generally brings in train in fact.
The normative question remains to be answered. Is such multiplicity
necessarily irrational? Those who view human beings as basic agents will
remind us that each human being has motor control over its own body. So,
if a roughly human-size agent were to take a critical view of the Manhatten
Project, it would at least have the power to withdraw the human body over
which it has motor control. That’s true. And someone who took the view
that human agents are basic would approve of the way in which this human
being had taken responsibility for itself by restoring rational unity within
itself. But it deserves mention that this would still leave the group agent
more or less intact and able to complete the project anyway. And, so, it
would leave what I just characterized as an interpersonal relation still in
place, and barely changed. The only change would be a slight alteration in
the boundaries of the struggle, brought about by the withdrawal of what
one human being had formerly given to the group agent and now taken
back for more human-sized concerns. Taking this back would not absolve
the resulting human-size agent of responsibility to take further action –
where this would not be responsibility for itself, exactly, but responsibility
to follow through on its view about what, objectively, should and should
not be done by anyone. I think the view of human agents as basic may
incline us –wrongly – to overlook this other responsibility. This is a point
to which I’ll return shortly. But let’s continue to ponder the question about
irrationality. I’m prepared to grant that if a roughly – on my interpretation,
a slightly smaller than – human-size agent did strongly oppose a group
effort like the Manhatten Project, and if that agent could deprive that group
agent of some of its power by withdrawing the resources of the particular
human body over which it has motor control, then it would indeed be irra-
 WHAT IS AN AGENT? 197

tional for that agent not to do so. But, equally, it would be irrational for the
agent to fail to do any of the things that would serve its goal of impeding
the Manhatten Project. So the irrationality does not consist in the failure to
achieve rational unity within a human life; the irrationality consists in not
doing what one can to implement the goals that one deems most important.
What I want to insist upon, however, is that sometimes the pursuit of these
goals mandates both fragmentation within the individual human being and
integration with other human beings (or, rather, parts of them). That’s what
happened in the Manhatten Project. And, most often, the resulting frag-
mentation did not produce the dramatic sort of conflict I just described. It
simply produced two spheres of intentional activity within a human life in
which the aim was no longer to achieve overall rational unity by arriving at
and acting upon all-things-considered judgments that reflected everything
the human being believed and desired. One sphere of intentional activity
was just a part of a larger group point of view that took into account the
specifically scientific thoughts and actions of many human beings. And the
other sphere of intentional activity was devoted to achieving rational unity
within what was left over, so to speak, from the scientific endeavor. There
is nothing essentially irrational about such multiplicity, as far as I can see.
I promised to argue that human beings do not stand under a rational
obligation to achieve unity within themselves – at least not in any sense
that doesn’t also apply to group and multiple agents as well. Here is the
sense in which they all stand under this rational obligation: they are all
obliged to deliberate from their own points of view about what it would
be best to think and do, all things considered. But, if I’m right, their de-
liberations should include the effort to identify potential agents that they
might help to bring into existence through fragmentation or integration.
Their deliberations should also include an evaluation of the relative worth
of what such smaller and larger agents could accomplish, as compared with
what these deliberating agents can do as the size agents they presently are.
The result may well be a decision on the part of an agent to end its life
through fragmentation or integration. If the decision is justified, then, at
the moment of decision the agent does achieve the sort of rational unity
within itself that it is the proper aim of all agents to achieve. And yet, the
implementation of this decision will serve to undermine that very unity.
That is the sense in which human beings do not stand under a rational ob-
ligation to achieve unity within themselves. They can reason their way out
of existence, by deciding to fragment into multiple agents or to integrate
into group agents – or, as I think it usually comes to pass – they can decide
to go in for a combination of both.
198 CAROL ROVANE

The picture of group and multiple agency I’ve developed is very much
in harmony with Levi’s pragmatist outlook and value pluralism. It refuses
to see rational activity as undertaken for its own sake – that is, just for
the sake of being rational. It is undertaken, rather, because there are other,
more substantive values worth pursing and other things worth doing. Liv-
ing a unified human life is certainly among these substantive values. But
this does not mean that human beings are agents in a basic sense that group
and multiple agents are not. They are not more basic because the very
sorts of substantive values which for the most part encourage us to live
a unified human life, may sometimes encourage us to incorporate into an
agent larger than human size or fragment into an agent which is smaller.

NOTES

1 See his discussion in Hard Choices, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1985).
2 See The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, Princeton University
Press, Princeton (1998).
3 Hard Choices, op. cit. pp. 151–152.

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