Love it

 I love Anderson's idea of the principle of a collective agent on pg 29 "that whatever you can count as a reason for action for one member of the collective must count as a reason for all." Like prof. Hurley said in the email and what Anderson says in the paper, this is a kind of economic model that gravitates toward Kantian ethics and I love it. This idea of acting in only a way that is justifiable to everyone and for everybody to act which builds up the Kingdom of ends that Anderson invokes is exemplified through the voting thought experiment (with voting as the action and democracy as the kingdom of ends.) If everybody adopts a maxim of no voting when my marginalized utility is ~ 0 (aka only voting if its in my self-interested utility) then no very many people will have reason to vote and all power will rest in a few... the very thing that democracy is aiming to stop. If these citizens were rather to choose a maxim of voting because it is collectively beneficial to fulfill their obligations, then they would vote even if their individual self-centered utility is ~ 0 which will cause them to vote and fulfill the goal of democracy. Adopting such maxims allows one to enter this kingdom of ends where action is constrained by reason in the same way that preferences are constrained by commitments making you part of this community of collective agents. 

This idea reminds me of the African virtue of ubuntu which translates to "I am what I am because of who we all are." In other words, in some sense your individual is defined as part of the group- this would be the group of humanity. In the same way one can conceive of themselves in the group of the citizen and the group of the family down to the group of 1. In each of standings, one reasons from the standpoint of the human, citizen, family, 1 group with the commitments through the group of humanity that superseded all the groups. 

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