This paper reappraises the idea, traceable to Adam Smith, of a fundamental distinction between market transactions and genuinely social relationships. On Smith's account, each party to a market transaction pursues his own interests, subject only to the law of contract. Using the work of Smith's contemporary Antonio Genovesi as our starting point, we reconstruct an alternative understanding of market interactions as instances of a wider class of reciprocal relationships in civil society, characterized by joint intentions for mutual assistance. We consider (...) the implications of our arguments for current debates about whether marketed personal care services can be genuinely caring. (shrink)

Do responsibility voids exist? That is, are there situations in which the group is collectively morally responsible for some outcome although no member can be held individually morally responsible for it? To answer these questions, I draw a distinction between competitive and cooperative decision contexts based on the team-reasoning account of cooperation. Accordingly, I provide a reasoning-based analysis of cooperation, competition, moral responsibility, and, last, potential responsibility voids. I then argue that competitive decision contexts are free of responsibility voids. The (...) conditions for the existence of responsibility voids in cooperative decision contexts depend on the type of uncertainty the group faces, either external or coordination uncertainty. (shrink)

This is a survey article on reductive views of shared intention.

A particular problem of traditional Rational Choice Theory is that it cannot explain equilibrium selection in simple coordination games. In this paper we analyze and discuss the solution concept for common coordination problems as incorporated in the theory of Team Reasoning (TR). Special consideration is given to TR’s concept of opportunistic choice and to the resulting restrictions in using private information. We report results from a laboratory experiment in which teams were given a chance to coordinate on a particular pattern (...) of behavior in a sequence of HiLo games. A modification of the stage game offered opportunities to improve on the team goal through changing this accustomed pattern of behavior. Our observations throw considerable doubt on the idea of opportunistic team reasoning as a guide to coordination. Contrary to what TR would predict, individuals tend to stick to accustomed behavioral patterns. Moreover, we find that individual decisions are at least partly determined by private information not accessible to all members of a team. Alternative theories of choice, in particular cognitive hierarchy theory may be more suitable to explain the observed pattern of behavior. (shrink)

This paper argues that group attitudes can be assessed in terms of standards of rationality and that group-level rationality need not be due to individual-level rationality. But it also argues that groups cannot be collective epistemic agents and are not collectively responsible for collective irrationality. I show that we do not need the concept of collective epistemic agency to explain how group-level irrationality can arise. Group-level irrationality arises because even rational individuals can fail to reason about how their attitudes will (...) combine with those of others. In some cases they are morally responsible for this failure, in others they are not. Moreover, the argument for collective epistemic agency is incoherent because reasons-for-groups are ipso facto reasons-for-individual. Instead of talking about reasons-for-groups, we should therefore distinguish between self-regarding reasons and group-regarding reasons. Both kinds of reasons are reasons-for-individuals. These conceptual considerations in favour of moderate individualism are strengthened by an analysis of our moral practice of responding to collective shortfalls of rationality and by the unpalatable moral implications of collectivism about epistemic agency. There is no need to change the subject. Groups can be rational or irrational, but they do not reason. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe jus ad bellum criterion of right intention is a central guiding principle of just war theory. It asserts that a country’s resort to war is just only if that country resorts to war for the right reasons. However, there is significant confusion, and little consensus, about how to specify the CRI. We seek to clear up this confusion by evaluating several distinct ways of understanding the criterion. On one understanding, a state’s resort to war is just only if it (...) plans to adhere to the principles of just war while achieving its just cause. We argue that the first understanding makes the CRI superfluous, because it can be subsumed under the probability of success criterion. On a second understanding, a resort to war is just only if a state’s motives, which explain its resort to war, are of the right kind. We argue that this second understanding of the CRI makes it a significant further obstacle to justifying war. However, this second understanding faces a possible infinite regress problem, wh... (shrink)

In this paper, we evaluate the proposal that a central function of commitments within joint action is to reduce various kinds of uncertainty, and that this accounts for the prevalence of commitments in joint action. While this idea is prima facie attractive, we argue that it faces two serious problems. First, commitments can only reduce uncertainty if they are credible, and accounting for the credibility of commitments proves not to be straightforward. Second, there are many other ways in which uncertainty (...) is commonly reduced within joint actions, which raises the possibility that commitments may be superfluous. Nevertheless, we argue that the existence of these alternative uncertainty reduction processes does not make commitments superfluous after all but, rather, helps to explain how commitments may contribute in various ways to uncertainty reduction. (shrink)

Cases of modest sociality are cases of small scale shared intentional agency in the absence of asymmetric authority relations. I seek a conceptual framework that adequately supports our theorizing about such modest sociality. I want to understand what in the world constitutes such modest sociality. I seek an understanding of the kinds of normativity that are central to modest sociality. And throughout we need to keep track of the relations—conceptual, metaphysical, normative—between individual agency and modest sociality. In pursuit of these (...) theoretical aims, I propose that a central phenomenon is shared intention. I argue that an adequate understanding of the distinctiveness of the intentions of individuals allows us to provide a construction of attitudes of the participants, and of relevant inter-relations and contexts that constitutes shared intention. I explain how shared intention, so understood, differs from a simple equilibrium within common knowledge. And I briefly contrast my views with aspects of views of John Searle and Margaret Gilbert. (shrink)

Whether collective agency is a coherent concept depends on the theory of agency that we choose to adopt. We argue that the enactive theory of agency developed by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde (2009) provides a principled way of grounding agency in biological organisms. However the importance of biological embodiment for the enactive approach might lead one to be skeptical as to whether artificial systems or collectives of individuals could instantiate genuine agency. To explore this issue we contrast the concept (...) of collective agency with multi-agent systems and multi-system agents, and argue that genuinely collective agents instantiate agency at both the collective level and at the level of the component parts. Developing the enactive model, we propose understanding agency – both at the level of the individual and of the collective – as spectra that are constituted by dimensions that vary across time. Finally, we consider whether collectives that are not merely metaphorically ‘agents’ but rather are genuinely agentive also instantiate subjectivity at the collective level. We propose that investigations using the perceptual crossing paradigm suggest that a shared lived perspective can indeed emerge but this should not be conflated with a collective first-person perspective, for which material integration in a living body may be required. (shrink)

Current debates in social ontology are dominated by approaches that view institutions either as rules or as equilibria of strategic games. We argue that these two approaches can be unified within an encompassing theory based on the notion of correlated equilibrium. We show that in a correlated equilibrium each player follows a regulative rule of the form ‘if X then do Y’. We then criticize Searle's claim that constitutive rules of the form ‘X counts as Y in C’ are fundamental (...) building blocks for institutions, showing that such rules can be derived from regulative rules by introducing new institutional terms. Institutional terms are introduced for economy of thought, but are not necessary for the creation of social reality. (shrink)

This paper argues for contextualism about predicates of personal taste and evaluative predicates in general, and offers a proposal of how apparently resilient disagreements are to be explained. The present proposal is complementary to others that have been made in the recent literature. Several authors, for instance (López de Sa, 2008; Sundell, 2011; Huvenes, 2012; Marques and García-Carpintero, 2014; Marques, 2014a), have recently defended semantic contextualism for those kinds of predicates from the accusation that it faces the problem of lost (...) disagreement. These authors have proposed that a proper account of the resilient disagreement in the cases studied is to be achieved by an appeal to pragmatic processes, and to conflicting non-doxastic attitudes. It is argued here that the existing contextualist solutions are incomplete as they stand, and are subject to objections because of this. A supplementation of contextualism is offered, together with an explanation of why failed presuppositions of commonality (López de Sa), disputes over the appropriateness of a contextually salient standard (Sundell), and differences in non-doxastic attitudes (Sundell, Huvenes, Marques, and García-Carpintero) give rise to conflicts. This paper claims that conflicts of attitudes are the reason why people still have impressions of disagreement in spite of failed commonality presuppositions, that those conflicts drive metalinguistic disputes over the selection of appropriate standards, and hence conflicting non-doxastic attitudes demand an explanation that is independent of those context dependent pragmatic processes. The paper further argues that the missing explanation is 2-fold: first, disagreement prevails where the properties expressed by taste and value predicates are response-dependent properties, and, secondly, it prevails where those response-dependent properties are involved in evolved systems of coordination that respond to evolutionarily recurrent situations. (shrink)

A substantial literature supports the attribution of intentional states such as beliefs and desires to groups. But within this literature, there is no substantial account of group concepts. Since on many views, one cannot have an intentional state without having concepts, such a gap undermines the cogency of accounts of group intentionality. In this paper I aim to provide an account of group concepts. First I argue that to fix the semantics of the sentences groups use to make their decisions (...) or express their beliefs, we need to appeal to a conventional semantics like that of Lewis. I then argue that the same reasons we have for taking group intentional states to be irreducible to the intentional states of their members apply also to the terms fixed by a conventional semantics. It follows that the meanings of terms in the sentences expressing a group's intentional states are also fixed by facts about the group, not its members. And recognizing this, I argue, amounts to attributing concepts to groups. Finally, I discuss a real-life example of a group concept—the meaning of ‘meter’ as fixed by the International Bureau of Weights and Measurements—and I discuss the upshot of these considerations for the question of social externalism about concepts. (shrink)

Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types, and contents of intentions or representational states must be construed so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers, and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs, or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, (...) this very issue has not received much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper, I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds. (shrink)

Philosophers have proposed accounts of shared intentions that aim at capturing what makes a joint action intentionally joint. On these accounts, having a shared intention typically presupposes cognitively and conceptually demanding theory of mind skills. Yet, young children engage in what appears to be intentional, cooperative joint action long before they master these skills. In this paper, I attempt to characterize a modest or ‘lite’ notion of shared intention, inspired by Michael Bacharach’s approach to team–agency theory in terms of framing, (...) group identification and team reasoning. I argue that the account of shared intentions this approach yields is less cognitively and conceptually demanding than other accounts and is thus applicable to the intentional joint actions performed by young children. I also argue that it has limitations of its own and that considering what these limitations are may help us understand why we sometimes need to take other routes to shared intentions. (shrink)

Decision theory explains weakness of will as the result of a conflict of incentives between different transient agents. In this framework, self-control can only be achieved by the I-now altering the incentives or choice-sets of future selves. There is no role for an extended agency over time. However, it is possible to extend game theory to allow multiple levels of agency. At the inter-personal level, theories of team reasoning allow teams to be agents, as well as individuals. I apply team (...) reasoning at the intra-personal level, taking the self as a team of transient agents over time. This allows agents to ask, not just “what should I-now do?’, but also ‘What should I, the person over time do?’, which may enable agents to achieve self-control. The resulting account is Aristotelian in flavour, as it involves reasoning schemata and perception, and it is compatible with some of the psychological findings about self-control. (shrink)

Over the last three decades, joint action has received various definitions, which for all their differences share many features. However, they cannot fit some perplexing cases of weak joint action, such as demonstrations, where agents rely on distinct epistemic sources, and as a result, have no first-hand knowledge about each other. I argue that one major reason why the definition of such collective actions is akin to the classical ones is that it crucially relies on the concept of common knowledge. (...) To this end, I first argue for the necessity of common knowledge for joint action in general due to the increased reliability of success it entails. I then defend the relevance of common knowledge against several criticisms, point at an adequate weakening, and discuss alternative approaches. Although structurally weaker, the common knowledge has a richer content in weak joint actions. As a result, even if the links between individuals are seriously stretched, much is still shared among them. Weak joint actions still require considerable cognitive abilities indeed. (shrink)

Shared activity is often simply willed into existence by individuals. This poses a problem. Philosophical reflection suggests that shared activity involves a distinctive, interlocking structure of intentions. But it is not obvious how one can form the intention necessary for shared activity without settling what fellow participants will do and thereby compromising their agency and autonomy. One response to this problem suggests that an individual can have the requisite intention if she makes the appropriate predictions about fellow participants. I argue (...) that implementing this predictive strategy risks derailing practical reasoning and preventing one from forming the intention. My alternative proposal for reconciling shared activity with autonomy appeals to the idea of acting directly on another's intention. In particular, I appeal to the entitlement one sometimes has to another's practical judgment, and the corresponding authority the other sometimes has to settle what one is to do. (shrink)

Most definitions of cooperation provide sufficient but not necessary conditions. This paper describes a form of minimal cooperation, corresponding to mass actions implying many agents, such as demonstrations. It characterizes its intentional, epistemic, strategic, and teleological aspects, mostly obtained from weakening classical concepts. The rationality of minimal cooperation turns out to be part of its definition, whereas it is usually considered as an optional though desirable feature. Game-theoretic concepts thus play an important role in its definition. The paper concludes by (...) answering concrete questions about what should and should not be called cooperation. (shrink)

Theories of collective intentions must distinguish genuinely collective intentions from coincidentally harmonized ones. Two apparently equally apt ways of doing so are the ‘neo-reductionism’ of Bacharach (2006) and Gold and Sugden (2007a) and the ‘non-reductionism’ of Searle (1990, 1995). Here, we present findings from theoretical linguistics that show that we is not a cognitive primitive, but is composed of notions of I and grouphood. The ramifications of this finding on the structure both of grammatical and lexical systems suggests that an (...) understanding of collective intentionality does not require a primitive we-intention, but the notion of grouphood implicit in team reasoning, coupled with the individual concept I. This, we argue, supports neo-reductionism but poses difficulties for non-reductionism. (shrink)

This entry addresses the question of group minds, by focusing specifically on empirical arguments for group cognition and group cognitive states. Two kinds of positive argument are presented and critically evaluated: the argument from individually unintended effects and the argument from functional similarity. A general argument against group cognition – which appeals to Occam’s razor – is also discussed. In the end, much turns on the identification of a mark of the cognitive; proposed marks are briefly surveyed in the final (...) section. (shrink)

Many philosophers have offered accounts of shared actions aimed at capturing what makes joint actions intentionally joint. I first discuss two leading accounts of shared intentions, proposed by Michael Bratman and Margaret Gilbert. I argue that Gilbert’s account imposes more normativity on shared intentions than is strictly needed and that Bratman’s account requires too much cognitive sophistication on the part of agents. I then turn to the team-agency theory developed by economists that I see as offering an alternative route to (...) shared intention. I concentrate on Michael Bacharach’s version of team-agency theory, according to which shared agency is a matter of team-reasoning, team-reasoning depends on group identification and group identification is the result of processes of self-framing. I argue that it can yield an account of shared intention that is less normatively loaded and less cognitively demanding. (shrink)

Sometimes individuals act together, and sometimes each acts on his or her own. It's a distinction that often matters to us. Undertaking a difficult task collectively can be comforting, even if only for the solidarity it may engender. Or, to take a very different case, the realization (or delusion) that the many bits of rudeness one has been suffering of late are part of a concerted effort can be of significance in identifying what one is up against: the accumulation of (...) grievances (no doubt well catalogued) is seen, not as an unfortunate coincidence of affronts stemming from various quarters, but as itself a product of a unified exercise of agency. A paranoid conspiracy theorist is not usually to be taken seriously. But he does get right that it certainly would be awful, for example, if everyone were out to get him and were working together to do so. After all, the stability and impact of agency that's shared can be expected to be more serious than the effects of a mere collection of individual acts.[1.. (shrink)

Utilitarians think that what matters in ethics is making the world a better place. In that case, it might seem that we each rationally ought to do our best—perform the actions, out of those open to each of us, with the best expected outcomes. In other words, we should follow act-utilitarian reasons. But often the result of many altruistic agents following such individualistic reasons is worse than the result of them following collectivist ‘team-reasons’. So utilitarians should reject act utilitarianism, and (...) accept a dualist view according to which both individualistic and team reasons are fundamental. In order to align these distinct kinds of reason, utilitarians must focus centrally on questions of political and social reform—as did their historical forebears. (shrink)

An important thesis discussed in the literature on shared agency is that group identification motivates pre-school children to act together. This paper aims at further illuminating this thesis by clarifying what triggers the process of group identification in young children. It is argued that joint attention, among other functions in supporting joint actions, can reveal to the co-attenders that they share some preferences. Since sharing preferences has been established by the literature to be a reliable motivation of group identification and (...) since joint attention has an early emergence in development, one can consider joint attention to be a putative trigger of group identification in pre-school children. If this is on the right track, group identification, joint attention, and preferences identify a cluster of minimal pre-conditions for joint actions. (shrink)

What is involved in acting together with others? Most shared agency theorists endorse the Shared Intention Thesis, i.e., the claim that shared agency necessarily involves shared intentions. This article dissents from this orthodoxy and offers a minimalist account of shared agency—one where parties to shared activities need not form rich webs of interrelated psychological states. My account has two main components: a conceptual analysis of shared agency in terms of the notion of plan, and an explanation of undertheorized agency‐sharing mechanisms. (...) My analysis states that we act together just in case our activities conform to a plan and that plan figures in an explanation of our activities’ joint conformity to it. To sloganize:shared activity is plan‐coordinated activity. Sometimes, plan‐coordination goes by way of shared intentions. However, besides shared intentions, there are at least two additional families of agency‐sharing mechanisms. The first features a central planner who determines the content of a plan and attributes the different parts of that plan to a collection of agents. The second does away with the planner and involves a roughly Darwinian selection of patterns of activity. Both families of mechanisms enable us to act together even in the absence of shared intentions. (shrink)

Theories of rational decision making often abstract away from computational and other resource limitations faced by real agents. An alternative approach known as resource rationality puts such matters front and center, grounding choice and decision in the rational use of finite resources. Anticipated by earlier work in economics and in computer science, this approach has recently seen rapid development and application in the cognitive sciences. Here, the theory of rationality plays a dual role, both as a framework for normative assessment (...) and as a source of scientific hypotheses about how mental processes in fact work. The latter project, often called rational analysis, depends for its success on a fine-grained characterization of the computational problem facing a decision maker, which may in turn depend on realistic assumptions about what the relevant agent is like. As a consequence, resource rationality involves a delicate, but often fruitful interplay between the normative and the descriptive. (shrink)

It is common to ascribe agency to some organized collectives, such as corporations, courts, and states, and to treat them as loci of responsibility, over and above their individual members. But since responsibility is often assumed to require free will, should we also think that group agents have free will? Surprisingly, the literature contains very few in-depth discussions of this question. The most extensive defence of corporate free will that I am aware of (Hess [2014], “The Free Will of Corporations (...) (and Other Collectives)”, Philosophical Studies 168 (1): 241–260) rests on a compatibilist understanding which takes reasons-responsiveness and acting from one’s own ‘actional springs’ as key conditions for free will but says little about a condition that free-will libertarians emphasize: the possibility of doing otherwise. In this paper, I will argue that group agents can have free will not only in a (less demanding) compatibilist sense, but also in a recognizably libertarian sense, which includes the possibility of doing otherwise. In developing this account of corporate free will, I will bring together recent work on group agency and recent work on free will. (shrink)

In this paper, I answer the question,how do we collaborate well with others?I first look at cases of good collaboration, contrasting them briefly with some cases of poor collaboration; I then describe the similarities between the good cases, such as shared aims, shared planning of projects, shared norms among collaborators. The conclusion is that collaborating well involves shared norms, derived both from societal norms and from a well‐ordered relationship between participants; a shared vision derived from shared knowledge and open communication (...) grounded in relationship; and open‐mindedness and thoughtful disagreement, which depend on mutual respect and trust between participants. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In what sense is commitment essential to joint action, and do the participants in a joint action themselves perceive commitment as essential? Attempts to answer this question have so far been hampered by clashes of intuition. Perhaps this is because the intuitions in question have mostly been investigated using informal methods only. To explore this possibility, we adopted a more formal approach to testing intuitions about joint action, sampling naïve participants’ intuitions about experimentally controlled scenarios. This approach did reveal (...) patterns in participants’ responses which may hint at potential conceptual links between commitment and joint action. It did not however provide evidence to support the view that commitment is essential to joint action, at least not from the agents’ own perspective. We conclude that intuitions alone, even when drawn systematically from a large sample, may be a poor basis for theorizing about joint action. (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)

This paper argues for theoretical modeling and model-construction as central types of activities that philosophers of social ontology engage in. This claim is defended through a detailed case study and revisionary interpretation of Raimo Tuomela’s account of the we-perspective. My interpretation is grounded in Ronald Giere’s account of scientific models, and argued to be compatible with, but less demanding than Tuomela’s own description of his account as a philosophical theory of the social world. My approach is also suggested to be (...) applicable to many other methodologically naturalist accounts of collective intentionality and social ontology. (shrink)

Many of the things we do are, or could be, done with others. Mundane examples favoured by philosophers include painting a house together (Bratman 1992), lifting.

This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of collective affective niche construction, which extends the extended mind (ExM) thesis from cognitive to affective phenomena. Although theoretically innovative, the theory lacks a detailed psychological account of how collective affectivity is scaffolded. It has also been criticized for its uncritical assumption of the subject qua the autonomous user of the affective scaffolding as disposable resources, abstracting away from embedded subjectivity in particular techno-political arrangements. We propose that the social motivation hypothesis, an account (...) grounded in recent empirical and theoretical developments in psychology as well as in the classic theory of moral sentiments, will address the former criticism by explicating the basic mechanisms of human social orientation at work in collective affective niche construction. We also begin to address the latter normative criticism in mobilizing a so-called we-mode approach to collective emotion. To make these theoretical dialectics salient, we study social media as a case of collective affective niches, focusing on the impact on subjective well-being. Finally, we briefly identify promising future directions in building a normative theory of affective niche construction on the collective level. (shrink)

We propose a new account of collective moral obligation. We argue that several agents have a moral obligation together only if they each have (i) a context-specific capacity to view their situation from the group’s perspective, and (ii) at least a general capacity to deliberate about what they ought to do together. Such an obligation is irreducibly collective, in that it does not imply that the individuals have any obligations to contribute to what is required of the group. We highlight (...) various distinctive features of our account. One such feature is that moral obligations are always relative to an agential perspective. (shrink)

People walk, build, paint and otherwise act together with a purpose in myriad ways. What is the relation between the actions people perform in acting together with a purpose and the outcome, or outcomes, to which their actions are directed? We argue that fully characterising this relation will require appeal not only to intention, knowledge and other familiar philosophical paraphernalia but also to another kind of representation involved in preparing and executing actions, namely motor representation. If we are right, motor (...) representation plays a central role in the story of acting together. (shrink)

Our linguistic communication often takes the form of creating texts. In this paper, we propose that creating texts or ‘texting’ is a form of joint action. We examine the nature and evolution of this joint action. We argue that creating texts ushers in a special type of joint action, which, while lacking some central features of normal, everyday joint actions such as spatio-temporal collocation of agency and embodiment, nonetheless results in an authentic, strong, and unique type of joint action agency. (...) This special type of agency is already present in creating texts in general and is further augmented in creating texts through digital media. We propose that such a unique type of joint action agency has a transformative effect on the experience of our sense of agency and subjectivity. We conclude with the implications of the proposal for social cognition and social agency. The paper combines research in philosophy of mind with the emerging fields of digital humanities and text technology. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of a Civil Economy approach to consumer ethics, by addressing the idea that Antonio Genovesi’s (1713–1769) notion of _mutual assistance_ can be understood in terms of _collective intentionality_ or _team reasoning_. I try to give reasons for this idea by a careful examination of Genovesi’s conception of social life and human agency and by reading it through the lens of team reasoning. I argue that this understanding of mutual assistance may imply broad constraints over agents’ (...) choices whenever they conflict with the good of society. Then I explore the implications of a mutual assistance approach to market ethics in a global society, where conflicting views of good and different group affiliations are possible. (shrink)

This paper examines two strands of literature regarding economic models of cooperation. First, payoff transformation theories assume that people may not be exclusively motivated by self-interest, but also care about equality and fairness. Second, team reasoning theorists assume that people might reason from the perspective of the team, rather than an individualistic perspective. Can these two theories be unified? In contrast to the consensus among team reasoning theorists, I argue that team reasoning can be viewed as a particular type of (...) payoff transformation. However, I also demonstrate that many payoff transformations yield actions that team reasoning rules out. (shrink)

What are the implications for agency – and in particular, the idea of acting for reasons – if we are to take seriously the notion of collective responsibility? My thesis is that some cases of individuals subject to a collective form of responsibility and blame will force us to make sense of how it is that an individual can be entitled to collective reasons for action, i.e. entitled to a reason had in the first place by a plurality of individuals (...) together rather than any one of them alone. This entitlement makes it possible for the collective reason to be a reason for which one acts, even if one’s contribution on its own makes little or no difference in the collective effort. Although a full defense of this entitlement cannot be undertaken here, I will gesture at how this might work by suggesting that intentions function to preserve reasons for action. . (shrink)

This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthiness, as distinct from her scope of blameworthiness. (...) We suggest that an agent mostly controls her degree of blameworthiness—but even here, luck constrains what possible degrees of blameworthiness are open to her. (shrink)

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human features to non-human subjects. Anthropomorphized organizations acquire in the minds of their members a unique identity, which becomes capable of guiding members’ motivations, with important managerial implications. Ashforth et al. offered a theoretical model of anthropomorphism in organizations, including “top-down” and “bottom-up” processes of organizational anthropomorphism as antecedents, and sensemaking and the sense of social connection of the organization as outcomes. Using SEM, this study operationalizes Ashforth et al.’s model using a two-trait scale of (...) organizational virtue derived from Chun, including measures of CSR and OCB as antecedents, and organizational justice and affective commitment as outcomes. The model is tested on survey data from seven UK managed service organizations in the hotels, logistics and legal sectors. As secondary contribution, moderation analysis is undertaken by industry, offering further insight into the evaluation of organizational anthropomorphism. Firstly, we note that high evaluations of Empathy influence evaluations of Courage through a halo effect. Secondly, we note that heuristic evaluation of the firm’s CSR practice also influences perceptions of Empathy and Courage. The paper also includes a discussion of the critique of organizational virtues by virtue ethicists in an effort to advance the dialogue between the two traditions. (shrink)

Since at least the 1980s, the role of adversariality in argumentation has been extensively discussed within different domains. Prima facie, there seem to be two extreme positions on this issue: argumentation should never be adversarial, as we should always aim for cooperative argumentative engagement; argumentation should be and in fact is always adversarial, given that adversariality is an intrinsic property of argumentation. I here defend the view that specific instances of argumentation are adversarial or cooperative to different degrees. What determines (...) whether an argumentative situation should be primarily adversarial or primarily cooperative are contextual features and background conditions external to the argumentative situation itself, in particular the extent to which the parties involved have prior conflicting or else convergent interests. To further develop this claim, I consider three teloi that are frequently associated with argumentation: the epistemic telos, the consensus-building telos, and the conflict management telos. I start with a brief discussion of the concepts of adversariality, cooperation, and conflict in general. I then sketch the main lines of the debates in the recent literature on adversariality in argumentation. Next, I discuss the three teloi of argumentation listed above in turn, emphasizing the roles of adversariality and cooperation for each of them. (shrink)

Our moral obligations can sometimes be collective in nature: They can jointly attach to two or more agents in that neither agent has that obligation on their own, but they – in some sense – share it or have it in common. In order for two or more agents to jointly hold an obligation to address some joint necessity problem they must have joint ability to address that problem. Joint ability is highly context-dependent and particularly sensitive to shared (or even (...) common) beliefs. As such, joint ability can be deliberately generated in a given collection of agents by providing information related to collective goals and contributory actions. As moral agents, we regularly face problems wherein the outcome of our actions depends on how others choose. There are two ways of deliberating about our own choices in such cases. We can either think of our choices as best responses to others’ choices (I-mode reasoning). Or we can think of our own choices as contributions to the collectively best option (even when we do not know how others are (likely) to choose) (we-mode reasoning). In deliberating about the right (individual) course of action vis-à-vis collective action problems, agents regularly we-frame the case at hand, that is, they include options in their deliberation that are only collectively available, and they we-reason with regard to their individual contributory actions. It is a necessary condition for collective obligations that potential collaborators facing a joint necessity case have grounds to privilege we-reasoning over reasoning in I-mode. (shrink)

The Nash counterfactual considers the question: what would happen were I to change my behaviour assuming no one else does. By contrast, the Kantian counterfactual considers the question: what would happen were everyone to deviate from some behaviour. We present a model that endogenizes the decision to engage in this type of Kantian reasoning. Autonomous agents using this moral framework receive psychic payoffs equivalent to the cooperate-cooperate payoff in Prisoner’s Dilemma regardless of the other player’s action. Moreover, if both interacting (...) agents play Prisoner’s Dilemma using this moral framework, their material outcomes are a Pareto improvement over the Nash equilibrium. (shrink)

‘We’ is said in many ways. This paper investigates Kurt Stavenhagen’s neglected account of different kinds of ‘we’, which is maintained to be one of the most sophisticated within classical phenomen...