Group Delegation and Responsibility

The act of delegating a task by one agent to another can be carried out by the performance of one or more communicative acts. Such acts may not only be directed to another individual, but also to a group of agents. In this paper, the semantics of imperatives are explored with reference to extant logics of agentative action, and in the context of the referent of an imperative being either an action or a state of affairs. The particular case of issuing of an imperative to a group of individuals is then discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives, and the importance of distinguishing between groups with differing characteristics emphasised by analysis of an extended real-world example.