In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...) grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be “vehicles” of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units.The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to “organs” of group-level “organisms.” Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals. (shrink)

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...) grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as "replicators" which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be "vehicles" of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units. The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to "organs" of group-level "organisms." Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to clarify what kind of normativity characterizes a convention. First, we argue that conventions have normative consequences because they always involve a form of trust and reliance. We contend that it is by reference to a moral principle impinging on these aspects (i.e. the principle of Reliability) that interpersonal obligations and rights originate from conventional regularities. Second, we argue that the system of mutual expectations presupposed by conventions is a source of agreements. Agreements stemming (...) from conventions are “tacit” in the sense that they are implicated by what agents do (or forbear from doing) and without that any communication between them is necessary. To justify this conclusion, we assume that: (1) there is a salient interpretation, in some contexts, of everyone’s silence as confirmatory of the others’ expectations (an epistemic assumption), and (2) the participating agents share a value of not being motivated by hostile attitudes (a motivational assumption). By clarifying the relation between conventions and agreements, the peculiar normativity of conventions is analyzed. (shrink)

The power to promise is morally fundamental and does not, at its foundation, derive from moral principles that govern our use of conventions. Of course, many features of promising have conventional components—including which words, gestures, or conditions of silence create commitments. What is really at issue between conventionalists and nonconventionalists is whether the basic moral relation of promissory commitment derives from the moral principles that govern our use of social conventions. Other nonconventionalist accounts make problematic concessions to the conventionalist's core (...) instincts, including embracing: the view that binding promises must involve the promisee's belief that performance will occur; the view that through the promise, the promisee and promisor create a shared end; and the tendency to take promises between strangers, rather than intimates, as the prototypes to which a satisfactory account must answer. I argue against these positions and then pursue an account that finds its motivation in their rejection. My main claim is: the power to make promises, and other related forms of commitment, is an integral part of the ability to engage in special relationships in a morally good way. The argument proceeds by examining what would be missing, morally, from intimate relationships if we lacked this power. (shrink)

The power to promise is morally fundamental and does not, at its foundation, derive from moral principles that govern our use of conventions. Of course, many features of promising have conventional components—including which words, gestures, or conditions of silence create commitments. What is really at issue between conventionalists and nonconventionalists is whether the basic moral relation of promissory commitment derives from the moral principles that govern our use of social conventions.Other nonconventionalist accounts make problematic concessions to the conventionalist's core instincts, (...) including embracing: the view that binding promises must involve the promisee's belief that performance will occur; the view that through the promise, the promisee and promisor create a shared end; and the tendency to take promises between strangers, rather than intimates, as the prototypes to which a satisfactory account must answer.I argue against these positions and then pursue an account that finds its motivation in their rejection. My main claim is: the power to make promises, and other related forms of commitment, is an integral part of the ability to engage in special relationships in a morally good way. The argument proceeds by examining what would be missing, morally, from intimate relationships if we lacked this power. (shrink)

My concern here is to motivate some theses in the philosophy of mind concerning the interpersonal character of intentions. I will do so by investigating aspects of shared agency. The main point will be that when acting together with others one must be able to act directly on the intention of another or others in a way that is relevantly similar to the manner in which an agent acts on his or her own intentions. What exactly this means will become (...) clearer once we understand what it is to act directly on one’s own intentions. But I take it to be a fundamental assumption of the prevailing individualism of the theory of action—one at the core of its conception of the separateness of individuals—that one person cannot act directly on another’s intention. I agree that there is an important way in which we are or can be separate and autonomous thinkers and agents. But the way the individualist tries to capture this separateness is misguided. (shrink)

My concern here is to motivate some theses in the philosophy of mind concerning the interpersonal character of intentions. I will do so by investigating aspects of shared agency. The main point will be that when acting together with others one must be able to act directly on the intention of another or others in a way that is relevantly similar to the manner in which an agent acts on his or her own intentions. What exactly this means will become (...) clearer once we understand what it is to act directly on one’s own intentions. But I take it to be a fundamental assumption of the prevailing individualism of the theory of action— one at the core of its conception of the separateness of individuals— that one person cannot act directly on another’s intention. I agree that there is an important way in which we are or can be separate and autonomous thinkers and agents. But the way the individualist tries to capture this separateness is misguided. (shrink)

What are economic exchanges? The received view has it that exchanges are mutual transfers of goods motivated by inverse valuations thereof. As a corollary, the standard approach treats exchanges of services as a subspecies of exchanges of goods. We raise two objections against this standard approach. First, it is incomplete, as it fails to take into account, among other things, the offers and acceptances that lie at the core of even the simplest cases of exchanges. Second, it ultimately fails to (...) generalize to exchanges of services, in which neither inverse preferences nor mutual transfers hold true. We propose an alternative definition of exchanges, which treats exchanges of goods as a special case of exchanges of services and which builds in offers and acceptances. According to this theory: (i) The valuations motivating exchanges are propositional and convergent rather than objectual and inverse; (ii) All exchanges of goods involve exchanges of services/actions, but not the reverse; (iii) Offers and acceptances, together with the contractual obligations and claims they bring about, lie at the heart of all cases of exchange. (shrink)

Margaret Gilbert has argued that an agreement is not exchange of promises, since no such exchange plays all the roles she claims are distinctive of agreements. After briefly discussing the notion of intention and the principles governing intentions, I argue that a certain type of exchange of intentions — in which one person forms a conditional intention to act if the other does, and the other forms an unconditional intention to act on the presumption that the first will do what (...) they have said — plays all these roles, and so conclude that an agreement is in fact an exchange of intentions. (shrink)

The work tends to point out the deficiency of some opinions claiming simplified presentation of the promise as the act that directly rise obligation for the promisor. Promises, either in the moral or legal sphere, are based on communication and so form an order of dependent steps that indicates their procedural nature. These characteristics may differ to a lesser extent, depending on the legal systems, moral norms of the society and its technical level and its needs. In all these cases, (...) however, the procedural characteristics of promises, especially in conditional promises, as well as the promises in contractual relations, persists. In our analysis we wish to show that the consistent conception of promise has to take into account a step of acceptance. The outcome of this approach relativizes a strong distinction between promise and offer. (shrink)

I admire Wilson & Sober's (W & S's) aim, to alert social scientists that group selection has risen from the ashqs, and to explicate its relevance to the behavioral sciences. Group selection has beenwidely misunderstood; furthermore, both authors have been instrumental in illuminating conceptual problems surrounding higher-level selection. Still, I find that this target article muddies the waters, primarily through its shifting and confused definition of a "vehicle" of selection. The fundamental problem is an ambiguity in the definition of "adaptation." (...) On the one hand, any evolutionary change that results from a selection process could be called an adaptation, by definition; I call this the "weak" view of adaptation. A "strong" view of adaptation, on the other hand, includes some notion of design - the evolution of a specific complex trait understood, in an engineering sense, to provide a mechanism favoring its owner's success in contributing to the evolutionary lineage. (shrink)

Abraham Roth argues that to accept a promise is to intend the performance of the promised action. I argue that this proposal runs into trouble because it makes it hard to explain how promises provide reasons for the performance of the promised action. Then, I ask whether we might fill the gap by saying that a promisor becomes entitled to the reasons for which her promise is accepted. I argue that this fix would implausibly shrink the class of binding promises (...) and suggest that similar difficulties may arise for any theory that casts promises as an exercise of shared agency. (shrink)

This paper argues that promises are proposals in joint practical deliberation, the activity of deciding together what to do. More precisely: to promise to ϕ is to propose (in a particular way) to decide together with your addressee(s) that you will ϕ. I defend this deliberative theory by showing that the activity of joint practical deliberation naturally gives rise to a speech act with exactly the same properties as promises. A certain kind of proposal to make a joint decision regarding (...) one's own actions turns out to have the very same normative effects, under the very same conditions, as a promise. I submit that this cannot be a coincidence: we should conclude that promises and the relevant kind of proposals in joint practical deliberation are one and the same. (shrink)

I first characterize a moral mistake in coercion. The principle of independence with which I criticize coercion seems also to condemn exchange. I propose an account of exchange from which it follows that exchange upholds independence after all. In support of that account I argue that, of the accounts of exchange that occur to me, only this one has the consequence that, on general assumptions, a person can take part in exchange while acting, intending, and believing with sufficient reason. I (...) argue that the hiring of very poor people by very rich people for labor from which the rich draw a substantial surplus does not give rise to an exchange of this kind. These instances of the wage labor relation resemble coercion insofar as they violate independence. (shrink)

Does the content of a physically dangerous job affect the moral permissibility of hiring for that job? To what extent may employers consider costs in choosing workplace safety measures? Drawing on Kantian ethical theory, this article defends two strong ethical standards of workplace safety. First, the content of a hazardous job does indeed affect the moral permissibility of offering it. Unless employees need hazard pay to meet basic needs, it is permissible to offer a dangerous job only if prospective employees (...) have a reason other than hazard pay to choose this job instead of safer alternatives. Second, employers typically cannot justify omitting expensive safety measures by paying employees more, even if employees prefer higher pay to greater safety. Employers offering dangerous jobs must meet these two standards to avoid treating their employees merely as means. (shrink)

What is a social rule? This paper first notes three important problems for H.L.A. Hart's famous answer in the Concept of Law. An alternative account that avoids the problems is then sketched. It is less individualistic than Hart's and related accounts. This alternative account can explain a phenomenon observed but downplayed by Hart: the parties to a social rule feel that they are in some sense 'bound' to conform to it.

I argue that obligations of an important type inhere in what I call 'joint commitments'. I propose a joint commitment account of everyday agreements. This could explain why some philosophers believe that we know of the obligating nature of agreements a priori. I compare and contrast obligations of joint commitment with obligations in the relatively narrow sense recommended by H. L. A. Hart, a recommendation that has been influential. Some central contexts in which Hart takes there to be obligations in (...) his sense are contexts in which there are obligations of joint commitment. Nonetheless, different senses of 'obligation' appear to be at issue. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss the various ways in which intentions can be said to be conditional, with particular attention to the internal conditions on the intentions’ content. I will first consider what it takes to carry out a conditional intention. I will then discuss how the distinctive norms of intention apply to conditional intentions and whether conditional intentions are a weaker sort of commitments than the unconditional ones. This discussion will lead to the idea of what I call (...) the ‘deep structure’ of intentions. Roughly, this is the idea that the conditional nature of our intentions is only partially made explicit in the expressions we use to communicate our intentions and in the explicit form of our thinking about and reasoning with them. Most conditions that qualify our intentions are part of a deep functional structure that can be evinced by observing the actual psychological functioning of intentions and by considering the rational requirements that they engage. I will argue that the deep structure of intentions is characteristically conditional. Genuinely unconditional intentions are only limiting instances of conditional intentions and their contribution to agency can only be understood in light of this fact. I will conclude by showing that the characteristic conditional structure of intentions is intimately related to distinctive features of human agency, especially to its unity over time. (shrink)

On some popular accounts of promissory obligation, a promise creates an obligation to the person to whom the promise is made . On such accounts, the wrong involved in breaking a promise is a wrong committed against a promisee. I will call such accounts ‘directed obligation’ accounts of promissory obligation. While I concede that directed obligation accounts make good sense of many of our promissory obligations, I aim to show that directed obligation accounts, at least in their current forms, cannot (...) accommodate an obligation to keep deathbed promises. While the term 'deathbed promise' refers to any promise made to a person who is dying, I focus specifically on deathbed promises which will not, or even cannot, be fulfilled until after the promisee's death. In what follows, I examine two prominent types of directed obligation account: rights-based accounts, which argue that a promissory obligation is a directed obligation because a promise gives the promisee certain rights, and harm accounts, which argue that a promissory obligation is a directed obligation because a promise puts the promisee in a special position to be harmed. I argue that neither version can accommodate an obligation to keep deathbed promises. (shrink)

W&S correctly ask if groups can be like individuals in the harmony and cooperation of their parts, but in their answer, they ignore the importance of the difference between genetically related and unrelated components, and also misconstrue the import of the Hutterites.

If I promise to pick you up at the airport, I thereby become obligated to do so. But this is not the only way I could undertake this obligation. If I offer to pick you up, and you accept my offer, I become obligated to pick you up in much the same way. I would also undertake similar obligations if you asked me to pick you up and I accepted your request, or if we made an agreement that I will (...) pick you up at the airport and in exchange you’ll buy me dinner. Why are the normative effects of accepted offers, accepted requests, and agreements so similar to those of promises? I argue that theorists of promising need to answer this question, and so they need to pay attention to offers, requests, and agreements. On the theory I defend, promises, offers, requests, and agreements have such similar normative effects because they all result in joint decisions between the relevant parties. I argue that this ‘joint decision view’ provides an attractive explanation of the similarities and differences between promises, offers, requests, and agreements. (shrink)

There are two distinct ways for someone to place conditions on their morally valid consent. The first is to place conditions on the moral scope of their consent—whereby they waive some moral claim rights but not others. The second is to conditionally token consent—whereby the condition affects whether they waive any moral claim rights at all. Understanding this distinction helps make progress with debates about so-called “conditional consent” to sexual intercourse in English law, and with understanding how individuals place conditions (...) on their morally valid consent in other contexts. (shrink)