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This chapter characterizes social groups and institutions in a way that meets the plausible objections of individualists, yet allows a social explanation of oppression. Topics discussed include explaining human behavior, social groups, institutionally structured constraints, oppression and social groups, social groups and group harm. It is argued that any account of oppression that distinguishes it from other types of harm that can come to individuals and locates it as a social injustice requires an account of social groups. Further, harms that accrue to members of voluntary and nonvoluntary groups must be treated separately in moral arguments.

This chapter is concerned with explaining how our cognitive psychology equips us for oppression, that is, what psychological mechanisms we have that allow and motivate us to oppress or suffer oppression. It addresses the question: what psychological mechanisms account for our tendency to form social groups and to invidiously discriminate among those groups? It argues that there are two main types of material forces of oppression — violence and economic deprivation — and that oppression cannot survive without being enforced by at least one of these material ways of harming persons. Violence is separated from economic deprivation to illustrate how different cases of oppression involve different kinds of reinforcements and argue that they will require different strategies of resistance.

This chapter argues that violence is and has always been a crucial component in the origin and maintenance of oppression. It explores how violence and the threat of violence constrain the actions of groups, harming the victims and benefiting the correlative privileged social groups. It argues that women as a group are oppressed materially through violence, and that there is a credible, psychologically effective threat of greater harm that is transmitted by the obvious material harm that they do suffer.

This chapter discusses three main forces of economic oppression: oppressive economic systems (capitalism and socialism), direct forces of economic oppression, and indirect forces of economic oppression. It is argued that while capitalism and socialism are not intrinsically oppressive, both systems lend themselves to oppression in characteristic ways, and therefore each sort of system must take certain steps to guard against their respective characteristic oppressions. Direct forces of economic oppression are restrictions on opportunities that are applied from the outside on the oppressed, including enslavement, segregation, employment discrimination, group-based harassment, opportunity inequality, neocolonialism, and governmental corruption. Direct forces may not always be clearly visible, either because they happen far from the reach of legal authorities or from the view of consumers, or because they are diffused in a large society, and only apparent from a statistical analysis and comparison among social groups. In indirect forces, or oppression by choice, the oppressed are co-opted into making individual choices that add to their own oppression. When this force is at work the oppressed are faced with options that rationally induce them to choose against the collective good of their social group, and in the long run, against their own good as well. But choosing otherwise requires choosing against their own immediate interests, and changing their beliefs or preferences in ways that they may resent.

In pursuit of a satisfactory theory of political obligation, a start is made towards the articulation of a particular conception of a political society, with a focus on social groups. These range from the enduring and relatively permanent to the small and transient: even two people out on a walk together constitute such a group by virtue of their joint activity. This chapter makes a number of observations on that case that may serve as tests of an account of joint activity generally. For instance, the parties are understood to have a special standing to rebuke each other for action that undermines the joint activity and upon which there has been no explicit or implicit concurrence between the parties. Various ways in which joint activity may come about, including initial agreements, are explored and an account of joint activity in terms of the parties’ joint commitment is sketched.

This chapter looks at the social brain hypothesis. The term social brain has come to stand for the argument that the human brain, and indeed that of some other animals, is specialized for a collective form of life. One part of this argument is evolutionary: that the size and complexity of the brains of primates, including humans, are related to the size and complexity of their characteristic social groups. However, the social brain hypothesis is more than a general account of the role of brain size: for in this thesis, the capacities for sociality are neurally located in a specific set of brain regions shaped by evolution, notably the amygdala, orbital frontal cortex, and temporal cortex—regions that have the function of facilitating an understanding of what one might call the “mental life” of others.

Having articulated an account of joint activity in terms of joint commitment, and hence of those social groups that arise through the joint activity of certain persons, this chapter returns to social groups in general, and societies in particular. Defining a plural subject as a set of persons who are jointly committed in some way, it argues for an account of social groups as plural subjects. It argues that plural subjects can be large and possess the features of anonymity, hierarchy, impersonality, and inclusiveness. These features are typically associated with a society as a special type of social group.

This chapter reviews theoretical and empirical work on self-regulation at the group level of analysis. We examine how groups exert control over their members and how members respond to these control efforts. The first section of the chapter focuses on groups as agents of control. Following a discussion of the functions that groups serve, we examine how groups use norms and roles to control their members. The second section of the chapter focuses on individuals as targets of control. Here we examine two opposing ways in which individuals respond to perceived group pressure: capitulation and resistance. We conclude by examining two implicit assumptions underlying our analysis of group control—that groups initiate control for their own ends and that members view such control as an unwelcome constraint. Using the example of social support groups, we discuss the relationship between self- and group-control when individuals seek group help in regulating their behavior.

This concluding chapter discusses how scholars have established the utility of different types of representation for disadvantaged groups. Descriptive representation refers to the physical presence of a social group in the setting of decision making. Substantive representation occurs when the concerns, values, sensibilities, or interests of that group are expressed, acted upon, and ultimately influence the outcome in some way. Symbolic representation is defined as the notion that the group is capable of governing, that its exercise of power is legitimate. The book's findings suggest an additional type of representation. In order to obtain substantive and symbolic representation, a subordinate group requires that the conditions of discussion provide the group with authoritative representation.

Issues of social group autarky are addressed, with particular reference to their economic costs. The different sections of the chapter address the social interests of such groups, give some American examples (the Lubavitch Jewish community of Brooklyn, and American farmers—the need for which has declined as agricultural productivity has risen dramatically), individual versus group economic benefits, special status for social groups, conflict between special‐status social groups (exemplified by professional, religious, status, linguistic, and ethnic groups), and conflict within special‐status groups.

Scheffler's main aim in this essay is to explore the nature of ‘associative duties’—the special duties that participants in close personal relationships and members of significant social groups are thought to have to one another. These duties occupy a central position in common‐sense moral thinking, even though their precise content is often unclear. Scheffler considers two objections to associative duties: the voluntarist objection, rooted in an ideal of freedom and autonomy; and the distributive objection, rooted in a principle of equality. Like associative duties themselves, the values of freedom and equality exert genuine authority within common‐sense moral thought, and so there are deep internal conflicts in our thinking about the extent of our responsibilities to different individuals and groups.

This chapter introduces many of the ideas that will run through this book. It presents two accounts — or two groups of accounts — of the state. The first, set out by Weber and Green, focuses on the institutions of the state and the type of claims those institutions made over individuals. The second, set out by Aristotle and forming the basis of much of the rest of this book, presents the state as a particular type of social group.

This chapter sketches a map of the ground to be covered in education for virtue, organized around a progression of three types of tasks of moral education. It is argued that society is pretty effective inelementarytasks of initiation into the use of ethical concepts andmodularor domain-specific tasks of teaching people how to cooperate in particular institutions and roles.Integrativetasks — more difficult but indispensable for the formation of a clearly good moral character — seem to demand more individual autonomy, and to lie less within the power of social groups. In opposition to some situationist arguments, the last section of the chapter defends the desirability of teaching virtue to the extent that it can be taught.

This chapter develops an account of rules, an account which has been directed towards illuminating the part that rules play in the existence and operation of social groups. It brings forward some of the ambiguities of rule-governed behaviour: in particular, the difficulties of distinguishing between action guided by rules and action undertaken for other reasons, and the possibility of quite fundamental disagreements within a social group over the existence and content of rules.

This chapter argues that when we talk of states possessing intentions and acting, we use these terms in an analogous sense to their primary use in the context of individuals. To talk of a state intending a thing amounts to a claim that it shares sufficient features in common with a person intending a thing to make the statement sensible; it does not amount to a claim that the state intends things in the same sense as a person intends things. The chapter begins by considering two collections of rival approaches to this issue: individualism and holism. Individualists contend that it is inappropriate to attribute mental states to groups: it confuses rather than assists our understanding of the world. Holists, in sharp contrast, contend that groups can possess some mental states in the same sense as individuals. It is argued that there is something to be learned from each of these traditions. An account of the intentions and actions of social groups based on the rules which constitute those groups is advanced; it is contended that it is plausible to talk of groups acting and intending, even if they do not exhibit these features in precisely the same sense as individuals. The chapter concludes by exploring the limits to which the attribution of mental qualities to social groups in general and states in particular can usefully be pushed.

The three central topics of interest in this chapter — religion, emotion, and late modern society — are all the subject of extensive academic debate, but have not been brought together. This chapter shows how the approach developed in the preceding chapters can shed light on religious emotion in the late modern context. A key theme of the analysis is that relations between social groups, their participants, and symbols are typically out of balance, and that this has destabilizing consequences for some religious emotional regimes, particularly those of historic forms of once ‘mainstream’ religion, most notably Christianity. The widespread destabilization and deregulation of religious emotion does not, however, mean that the late modern environment is inhospitable for religion: while it renders certain forms of emotional regime unsustainable, it opens up new possibilities for others.