Agents are commonly conceived as indivisible entities; every action made, and every belief held may be attributed to their totalities. Despite this typical notion, humans often extend this manner of judgement to multiple individuals, considered in unity as a collective, or a group.

This philosophy, however, contains ramifications for Justice. The perception of many individuals as a singular agent allows individuals to receive punishments or privileges which they have not earned if the collective they are perceived to belong to is computed to have earned such punishments or privileges. This injustice reveals the judgement of humanity by groups to be immoral at worst, and expedient at best. Even when there is sufficient ability to be precise in the judgements of individuals, however, is this method used. The ambiguous use of terms to refer to groups further complicates this issue. Consider that:

Dogs are smart.

What does this statement mean, exactly? A tool which may be useful for this inquiry is identifying the method by which we might prove such a statement. In this case, we may identify immediately that this is a comparative statement—that dogs are smarter than some other thing, whose intelligence is less than or equal to what is expected. Let us take this other thing to be cats, as an example. Information which is presumably equivalent with the statement “dogs are smart” is now “the average dog is smarter than the average cat.”

This raises two questions: 1) What use is this information, and 2) Why do we not just say the precise statement?

For the first question, unless we are even more specific, the answer is little. We have not specified the difference in the mean intelligence between the two animals, and we must assume the distribution of both exist such that a significant difference is useful for a particular goal (viz. picking an animal for a pet).

The second question has no real answer. We may defend this paradigm by identifying it as “shorthand,” but the mere fact that the meaning is not immediately obvious, and its utility is still contingent on more precision evinces that the statement is ambiguous—a characteristic we must eschew for any deliberation in concreto.

This issue is problematic also in the discussion of events. Consider:

Grecians executed Socrates when he had done no wrong.

This statement is anodyne. But consider the following statement:

Because Grecians executed a truly innocent man, Grecians are morally wrong.

Had this line of reasoning been because a man executed a truly innocent person, the man is morally wrong, it would be acceptable. But because we have replaced the man with a group, we have introduced an ambiguous entity, so among the multiple interpretations, some are unacceptable:

1) Every Grecian is morally wrong.

2) A significant number of Grecians are morally wrong.

3) Every Grecian coexistent with Socrates is morally wrong.

4) A significant number of Grecians coexistent with Socrates are morally wrong.

5) Every person who participated in Socrates execution was morally wrong, and all of them were Greek.

6) Every person who participated in Socrates execution was morally wrong.

The removal of time is the most significant reason the original statement is unacceptable. To say that “Grecians are morally wrong” merely because every person who executed Socrates was Greek suggests that Grecians today who have participated in no way in this execution are culpable for it. As such, it is toward the interest of not being misconstrued that the idea is expressed as one of the statements after 3), as they are sufficiently precise and leave no room for any casually unjust claims.

Even if we adjust the statement to Grecians coexistent with Socrates are morally wrong, however, we allow the ambiguity of all Socrates-contemporary Grecians, even those who did not participate or believe in Socrates’ execution, to be considered as morally wrong, a claim which is unjust. Therefore, again, in the interest of not being misconstrued, the statements after 3) are the optimal expressions of the idea.

Being left with the last three options, we may ask what the advantage of one is over another. Let us think about the purpose of the statement Grecians are morally wrong. Describing the immorality as done by a group as opposed to individuals has the intent of making a comment about the group, as opposed to merely the individuals. That is to say, we can use the statement to make other claims about Grecians. That if we take the most common Grecian, we would be justified in attributing immorality to them, or that the proportion of immoral Grecians is significantly higher than the proportion of immoral people of another nationality.

If we suppose that the proportion of individuals in ancient Greece who supported Socrates’ execution was 60%, the second claim (in the reality where other nations were not barbaric) is true, but the first is not. If we considered the first statement acceptable, we would unjustly attribute a characteristic to 40% of the population. If instead 95% of individuals supported Socrates’ execution, we may accept the first statement.

The problem is that these two different ideas are expressed in the same way. That it is possible to describe a group as having some characteristic, but it not being clear whether this is a claim on the common member of the group, or simply a significant difference in comparison to other groups of the same type.

This ambiguity, along with an unstated probability and that the description does not apply to some members of the group, indicate that this group-description phraseology is deeply troubled. To avoid this ambiguity altogether, a direct statement of the original facts which lead to a group description is most attuned to the interests of perspicuity, and by consequence, Justice.

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