ABSTRACT
One way to frame the complaint is that the discussion of the second-person has not properly registered enough differences among possible forms of relation of agent which are necessary to human life, and in that sense fundamental. Agents may fall into at least three basic forms of practical relation: we have agents in merely strategic relations, and agents linked in a collective agent, agents joined in relations of right (i.e. persons). Insofar as agents are joined by merely strategic relations of the sort described by, say, game theory they exhibit only the ‘instrumental’ normativity that is put in place by their respective further ends. The complexity of the game – theoretical-practical relations – arises from the inner complexity of the thing each single agent is interacting with, another agent. Insofar as wills are joined in a collective agent they are also under only instrumental reasons, but here these derive from their shared collective goals. The agents in a collective agent constitute a limited whole. In the first case, the agents are represented as too distant to be persons in relation to one another. In the second case, they are described as too close for these relations. The concept of agents in mutually recognitive relations is somehow intermediate between these two poles. Like agents merely strategically related, they are pursuing independent not common objectives. But like these, they do not constitute a limited whole. On the other hand, like agents linked in a collective agent, they exhibit some form of practical unity: pairs of distinct agents joined and opposed in a formally distinctive practical connection.
