In this article I propose an original view of the nature of shared intention. In contrast to psychological views (Bratman, Searle, Tuomela) and normative views (Gilbert), I argue that both functional roles played by attitudes of individual participants and interpersonal obligations are factors of central and independent significance for explaining what shared intention is. It is widely agreed that shared intention (I) normally motivates participants to act, and (II) normally creates obligations between them. I argue that the view I propose (...) can explain why it is not a mere accident that both (I) and (II) are true of shared intention, while psychological and normative views cannot. The basic idea is that shared intention involves a structure of attitudes of individuals –including, most importantly, attitudes of reliance – which normally plays the relevant motivating roles and creates the relevant obligations. (shrink)

This essay discusses the nature of collective responsibility and explores various controversies associated with its possibility and normative value.

This paper uses the tools of experimental philosophy to examine the nature of interpersonal normativity in collective action, focusing on cases of immoral collective action and collective action by friends. The results of our two studies, which expand on recent empirical interventions into longstanding debates in social ontology, demonstrate that according to our everyday judgments there are interpersonal obligations in cases of collective action, even when immoral, and that, while friendship elicits judgments of togetherness, it does not affect the norms (...) of collective action. We also situate these results in the philosophical literature and discuss their consequences for a “pluralism” about sociality. (shrink)

The discussion of collective agency involves the reduction problem of the concept of a collective. Individualism and Cartesian internalism have long restricted orthodox theories and made them face the tension between an irreducible concept of a collective and ontological reductionism. Heterodox theories as functionalism and interpretationism reinterpret the concept of agency and accept it as realized on the level of a collective. In order to adequately explain social phenomena that have relations as their essence, in this paper we propose a (...) relational, holistic account of collective agency and argue that functionalism and interpretationism can be integrated into such an account. (shrink)

Prominent accounts of collective intentional activity explain the nature of social groups by virtue of a specific criterion: goal-directedness. In doing so, these accounts offer little in the way of determining whether there are any differences among social groups. In this paper, I propose a refined framework of collective intentional activity that can distinguish among social groups better than alternative accounts, and which has revisionary but nevertheless plausible implications for the nature of the family: specifically, that certain friendship relationships may (...) count as genuinely familial, and that we ought to count them as such. I argue that social groups are distinguished by what we can expect from one another within different kinds of social groups; specifically, that there is an important difference between reciprocity that is equivalent in performance and reciprocity that is equivalent in intention; familial groups are specifically guided by this latter kind of reciprocity. This more inclusive definition of familial groups may have important implications for how such groups are supported within a given society – for instance, by recognizing certain caring relations as essential for well-being and supporting them accordingly. (shrink)

Slightly modified excerpt from the section 13.4 Zusammenfassung und Ausblick (translated into englisch): This chapter is based on an analysis of ethical debates on epigenetics and genome editing, debates, in which ethical arguments relating to future generations and justice play a central role. The analysis aims to contextualize new developments in genetic engineering, such as genome and epigenome editing, ethically. At the beginning, the assumptions of "genetic determinism," on which "genetic essentialism" is based, of "epigenetic determinism" as well as "genetic" (...) and "epigenetic exceptionalism" are analyzed and critically discussed. The remarks on the ethical discourse on epigenetics show that the notion of "epigenetic determinism" can sometimes be discerned not only in popular scientific discourse but also in ethical discourse. Ethical debates on epigenetics, however, have distanced themselves from this deterministic understanding. As a result, the focus in the ethical discourse on epigenetics shifts from responsibility for one's own health and that of subsequent generations to justice. What is meant here is justice, for example, in terms of access to healthy environmental conditions, regardless of whether these contribute to health with or without epigenetic agency. An analysis of the discourse on genome editing reveals that it is primarily germline interventions that are being ethically examined, with a concentration on the aspect of inheritance. The question is whether this is accompanied by an implicit "genetic determinism" or even a "genetic essentialism": the determinism could lie in the centrality of the aspect of heritability, since only genetic information is inherited. Does the aspect of heritability and genome modification play a more decisive role in debates on genome editing than the safety issue? Is the problem of embryos and their potential offspring not being able to consent to germline intervention given such a high priority because it is a genetic intervention? Under such a premise of "strong genetic determinism" supplemented by "epigenetic determinism," not only genome editing but also epigenome editing would be ethically relevant precisely because it too would have an influence on the genome. How this influence of genome editing and epigenome editing is ethically evaluated in each case therefore depends initially on whether the assumptions of "genetic" and "epigenetic determinism" are advocated. These assumptions are increasingly viewed critically in ethical discourse because they cannot be confirmed from a scientific perspective. In popular scientific debates in particular, however, they seem to persist, which ultimately also influences the public discussion. Since a broad public discussion is required especially on genome editing, a reflective approach to the various "-isms" analyzed in this chapter is central. DOI: 10.5771/9783748927242. (shrink)

This essay is part of a larger project aimed at making sense of rational thought and agency as part of the natural world. It provides a semantic framework for thinking about the contents of: 1) descriptive thoughts and sentences having a representational or mind-to-world direction of fit, and which manifest our capacity for theoretical rationality; and 2) prescriptive and intentional sentences having an expressive or world-to-mind direction of fit, and which manifest our capacity for practical rationality. I use a modified (...) version of Allan Gibbard’s hyperstate semantics, employing both maximally determinate possible worlds and maximally determinate plans of action, as a basis for providing a unified understanding of moral judgments and expressions of individual and collective intentionality – they one and all give voice to our ability as rational agents to adopt the perspectives of various individuals within a community and consider how we would behave were we in their positions. In the course of spelling out the view I draw on and criticize ideas that Wilfrid Sellars advanced in the middle of the 20th century, while employing the tools of contemporary modal logic and model-theoretic semantics to give perspicuous formulation to his thought that the moral judgment ‘one ought to do A’ should be understood in terms of the collective intention ‘we shall do A’, where the pronoun denotes the unrestricted class of rational agents and the ‘ought’ is in some sense unconditionally binding. (shrink)

What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package of mutual obligations associated with collective action according to (...) our everyday understanding. However, our results cast doubt on a proposed obligation to seek the permission of co-actors before exiting a collective action, and suggest instead that this obligation is a function of explicit promising. We then discuss how our results pave the path for a new normativism, a theory that neither under- nor overshoots the target given by our common conception of the interpersonal obligations present in collective action.*. (shrink)

The leading reductive approaches to shared agency model that phenomenon in terms of complexes of individual intentions, understood as plan-laden commitments. Yet not all agents have such intentions, and non-planning agents such as small children and some non-human animals are clearly capable of sophisticated social interactions. But just how robust are their social capacities? Are non-planning agents capable of shared agency? Existing theories of shared agency have little to say about these important questions. I address this lacuna by developing a (...) reductive account of the social capacities of non-planning agents, which I argue supports the conclusion that they can enjoy shared agency. The resulting discussion offers a fine-grained account of the psychological capacities that can underlie shared agency, and produces a recipe for generating novel hypotheses concerning why some agents do not engage in shared agency. (shrink)

Narrative is rarely mentioned in philosophical discussions of collective intentionality and group identity despite the fact that narratives are often thought important for the formation of action intentions and self-identity in individuals. We argue that the concept of the ‘we-narrative’ can solve several problems in regard to defining the status of the we. It provides the typical format for the attribution of joint agency; it contributes to the formation of group identity; and it generates group stability.

Solidarity is a significant but poorly understood feature of political life. It is typically conceived, in “associative and teleological” terms, as working together for common political aims. But this conception misses the fact that solidarity requires individuals to will collective ends despite incompletely shared interests. Careful consideration of these elements reveals four “dynamics of solidarity”: its characteristic duties, the durability of commitments made in solidarity, the deference it involves, and its effects over time on agents’ habits and capacities. In this (...) article I describe these dynamics, first contrasting solidarity-given duties with duties of beneficence, justice, and loyalty. These contrasts lay bare the distinctive durability of solidarity, which differs from both the liberal’s commitment to justice and the loyalist’s commitment to the group. I then discuss deference, a feature of solidarity that has implications for individual engagement in political life more generally. Finally, I discuss the effects of solidarity on agents’ intellectual and physical capacities. I conclude by drawing out implications of these dynamics, challenging Tommie Shelby’s influential conception and justification of black solidarity and buttressing Philip Soper’s rejection of the Principle of Autonomy. (shrink)

Consequentialist and Kantian theories differ over the ethical relevance of consequences of actions. I investigate how they might differ too over the relevance of what actions are consequence of. Focusing on the case of group action and collective responsibility, I argue that there's a kind of analog to the problem of aggregating the value of consequencesthat Kantian theories will not confront and consequentialist theories will. The issue provides a useful way to characterize a deep difference between Kantian and consequentialist theories (...) and points, ironically, toward a way of making those views compatible. (shrink)

Theories of collective intentionality and theories of relational autonomy share a common interest in analyzing the social dynamics of agency. However, whereas theories of collective intentionality conceive of social groups primarily as intentional and voluntarily willed, theories of relational autonomy claim that autonomous agency is both scaffolded and constrained by social forces and structures, including the constraints imposed by nonvoluntary group membership. The question raised by this difference in view is whether social theorizing that overlooks the effects of nonvoluntary social (...) group membership on individual and joint agency overlooks crucial aspects of the social dynamics of agency. To explore this question, this article first evaluates Michael Bratman's planning analysis of individual agency from the perspective of relational autonomy theory and compares it with a narrative self‐constitution account of temporally extended agency. It then evaluates Bratman's analysis of shared agency and discusses Shaun Gallagher and Deborah Tollefsen's concept of we‐narratives, which extends the notion of narrative construction to shared agency. Overall, the argument aims to show that if we are interested in understanding the social dynamics of agency, it is critical to attend to the way that agents exercise their intentional agency in relation to internalized and external social constraints. (shrink)

This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasi-psychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by participants in experimental research about the interpersonal normativity of collective (...) action. I then explore the possibilities open to quasi-psychologists for responding to this research. (shrink)

This paper disputes the widespread assumption that beliefs and desires may be attributed as theoretical entities in the service of the explanation and predic- tion of human behavior. The literature contains no clear account of how beliefs and desires might generate actions, and there is good reason to deny that principles of rationality generate a choice on the basis of an agent’s beliefs and desires. An alter- native conception of beliefs and desires is here introduced, according to which an attribution (...) of belief is, in a certain sense, an assertion on the believer’s behalf and an attribution of desire is, in a certain sense, a command on the desirer’s behalf. In terms of this conception of the attribution of beliefs and desires, we can begin to understand how attributions of beliefs and desires can be explanatory, although we still cannot expect the attribution of beliefs and desires to generate predictions based on an assumption of rationality. Finally, the reality of beliefs and desires is likened to the reality of money; it is the reality of things governed by objective norms. (shrink)

Recent discussions of rational deliberation in science present us with two extremes: unbounded optimism and sober pessimism. Helen Longino (1990) sees rational deliberation as the foundation of scientific objectivity. Miriam Solomon (1991) thinks it is overrated. Indeed, she has recently argued (2006) that group deliberation is detrimental to empirical success because it often involves groupthink and the suppression of dissent. But we need not embrace either extreme. To determine the value of rational deliberation we need to look more closely at (...) the practice and practitioners of science. I offer a closer look here by exploring the joint agency of small research teams. Although there are factors that contribute to the suppression of dissent in group contexts, a closer look at the literature on group dynamics suggests that there are ways to mitigate the effects of groupthink. Thus, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic about the value of rational deliberation within certain scientific contexts. (shrink)

According to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' epistemological and (...) ontological foundations. Unfortunately, these two research trends have often not communicated systematically enough to understand the specific ontology of collective aims. It is still unclear whether some irreducible social goods exist and how the answer to this question can set up a consistent understanding of cooperative actions. This dissertation addresses this issue, drawing on philosophical investigations about collective intentionality. It claims that a coherent ontological taxonomy of irreducible and reducible social goods is theoretically viable and can reframe prevailing approaches to collective action dilemmas influenced by the traditional economic categorisation of goods. The research begins by analysing how the influential theory of public goods has paved the way for some social and moral impasses. Furthermore, some theoretical proposals suggesting the existence of relational goods and common-pool resources are scrutinised. Hence, a refutation of the ontological reduction of all social goods to individual ones is developed, arguing that a specific form of cooperation, grounded in we-intentions and we-reasoning, shows the plausibility of the existence of some kinds of irreducible collective goods. Expanding on that view, a refinement of this categorisation of social goods is put forward by underlying the function of some relational entities, such as trust and shared sensemaking processes, in making cooperation robust in uncertain environments. Finally, by applying the taxonomy to collective action gridlocks regarding climate change, digital information, and public education, the consistency of this hypothesis is tested, showing that a pluralistic ontological account of social goods might improve the moral understanding of current social dilemmas. (shrink)

Margaret Gilbert has long defended the view that, roughly speaking, agents share the intention to perform an action if and only if they jointly commit to performing that action. This view has proven both influential and controversial. While some authors have raised concerns over the joint commitment view of shared intention, including at times offering purported counterexamples to certain aspects of the view, straightforward counterexamples to the view as a whole have yet to appear in the literature. Here we provide (...) such counterexamples to show that joint commitment is neither necessary nor sufficient for shared intention. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to be concerned with the capacity of human beings to act jointly. In particular, I will focus on the phenomenal aspect of collective action. I shall suggest that the experience of being jointly engaged with another is complex: it comprises both a practical grasp of oneself and of the other person as single agents participating in the joint pursuit, and an experience of collective immersion in the activity, which includes a sense of joint control. (...) This suggestion gives rise to a number of puzzles: firstly, what is the relation between jointly engaged agents' awareness of self and other and their sense of a joint engagement? Secondly, how are we to substantiate the idea of a sense of joint control if it is also obviously true that I don't, however close our psychological and bodily attunements, have control over your doings? I shall argue that a satisfactory solution to these puzzles is possible only if we take seriously the notion of a perceptually constituted “intersubjective perspective” that is shared by the participants in joint activities and gives rise to an attitude of mutual trust. (shrink)

In regard to the explanation of actions that are governed by institutional rules, John R. Searle introduces the notion of a mental “background” that is supposed to explain how persons can acquire the capacity of following such rules. I argue that Searle’s internalism about the mind and the resulting poverty of his conception of the background keep him from putting forward a convincing explanation of the normative features of institutional action. Drawing on competing conceptions of the background of Heidegger and (...) Wittgenstein, I propose to revise Searle’s conception. The background of institutional agency can only provide a convincing explanation if it includes the context of actions and intersubjective structures of a shared life-world. I suggest that a further development of this idea would lead to the identification of the background with a web of social recognition. (shrink)

The basic approach to understanding shared agency has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have some reason for (...) continuing to participate in the joint action in the face of conflicting reasons? This is particularly pressing in cases of joint actions that unfold over long periods of time. There are a variety of ways that the problem of stability and depth of shared intention might be addressed. We review some of those ways in section 1. We do not intend to challenge these approaches. Instead, in this article, we want to suggest that narrative is an additional, perhaps in some cases a predominant, way in which stability and depth are achieved. According to some theories, narrative plays a crucial role in the development of the self. Our suggestion is that the narratives we tell about our joint projects contribute to the development of a stable and deep “we.”. (shrink)