Volume 3, Issue 2

Christian List and Philip Pettit have recently argued for a performative theory of personhood in which all agents who manage to perform in the space of obligations are taken as persons. Based on this account they claim that group agents are also persons. This theory has been challenged on the grounds of its historical accuracy, lack of political relevance, and contestability of the concept of personhood. This paper aims to take a new perspective on the debate by approaching it through the Hegelian idea of recognition. The claim is that recognition theory provides a multi-dimensional view of personhood that gives a clearer account of what is at stake with collective personhood.

What are economic exchanges? The received view has it that exchanges are mutual transfers of goods motivated by inverse valuations thereof. As a corollary, the standard approach treats exchanges of services as a subspecies of exchanges of goods. We raise two objections against this standard approach. First, it is incomplete , as it fails to take into account, among other things, the offers and acceptances that lie at the core of even the simplest cases of exchanges. Second, it ultimately fails to generalize to exchanges of services, in which neither inverse preferences nor mutual transfers hold true. We propose an alternative definition of exchanges, which treats exchanges of goods as a special case of exchanges of services and which builds in offers and acceptances. According to this theory: (i) The valuations motivating exchanges are propositional and convergent rather than objectual and inverse ; (ii) All exchanges of goods involve exchanges of services/actions, but not the reverse; (iii) Offers and acceptances, together with the contractual obligations and claims they bring about, lie at the heart of all cases of exchange.

This paper addresses the way that social power and domination can be understood in terms of collective intentionality. I argue that the essence of stable forms of rational power and domination must be understood as the functional influence of material resource control and the power to control the norms and collective-intentional, constitutive rules that guide institutions. As a result, the routinization and internalization of these rules by subjects becomes the criterion of success for any system of social power and social domination. I then consider how this relates the phenomenon of reification, which I proceed to show is when consciousness has been shaped by constitutive rules and group collective intentionality that sustain relations of domination and control and accept them as basic social facts, as second nature. I then go on to show parallels between Searle and Lukács before outlining the distinction between descriptive and critical social ontology.

Are sexual orientations freely chosen? The idea that someone’s sexual orientation is not a choice is very influential in the mainstream LGBT political movement. But do we have good reasons to believe it is not a choice? Going against the orthodoxy, William Wilkerson has recently argued that sexual orientation is partly constituted by our interpretations of our own sexual desires, and we choose these interpretations, so sexual orientation is partly constituted by choice. In this paper I aim to examine the question of whether our interpretations of our own sexual desires are constitutive of our sexual orientations. I will argue that whereas Wilkerson’s argument for the claim that sexual orientations are in part constituted by our chosen interpretations of our sexual desires is not sound, there are good reasons for endorsing a weaker claim, namely, that there are different but equally apt descriptions of the same sexual desires, depending on which concepts we have.

Is there a choice in sexual orientation? [Wilkerson, William S. (2009): “Is It a Choice? Sexual Orientation as Interpretation”. In: Journal of Social Philosophy 40. No. 1, p. 97–116] argues that sexual desires require interpretation in order to be fully constituted, and therefore sexual orientation is at least partially constituted by choice. [Díaz-León, Esa (2017): “Sexual Orientation as Interpretation? Sexual Desires, Concepts, and Choice”; In: Journal of Social Ontology ] critically assesses Wilkerson’s argument, concluding that we still lack a good argument for the claim that choice plays a role in sexual orientation. Here I examine Díaz-León’s response to Wilkerson. I introduce what I call the conceptual act theory of sexual orientation, and argue that even if interpretation were not necessary to constitute sexual desires, it is a necessary element to constitute what we call sexual orientation. However, I conclude that even if we agree that interpretation is involved in sexual orientation, it does not follow that there is a choice involved.