Do Group Persons have Emotions - or Should They?

Group person, if there are any, are not made of flesh and blood. Can they, nonetheless, have an emotional life of their own? But why should they in the first place? And what if they cannot? Are, then, group persons 'fictional' entities or some robotic 'artificial' person? Finally, do corporate entities that lack certain affective abilities necessary for moral conduct, moral address or accountability, such as fellow-feelings or sympathy, exhibit psychopathic behaviour, as some have indeed argued? These are the questions I wish to address in this article. I will do so by, first, outlining the main positions in the contemporary socio-ontological and moral-philosophical discussion on group personhood, and showing how, surprisingly, almost none of the available accounts pay any attention to the question of whether emotions, of some sort, may be attributed to group persons (section 2). I will, then, explore four central reasons that could motivate to pursue the task of attributing emotions to GP in the first place (section 3). Next, I will reply to the two most apparent reasons that could militate against such an attribution (section 4). I shall conclude that there seems to be no principled reason to repudiate the possibility of group persons who may in fact exhibit some form of sensibility-whatever emotional reasons there may well be for being afraid of them.