Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently flexible (...) to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 2, Page 140-165, Spring 2023.

Many believe that we ought to treat people as individuals and that this form of treatment is in some sense incompatible with treating people as members of groups. Yet, the relation between these two kinds of treatments is elusive. In this paper, we develop a novel account of the normative requirement to treat people as individuals. According to this account, treating people as individuals requires treating people as agents in the appropriate capacity. We call this the Agency Attunement Account. This (...) view has the surprising implication that it’s not only possible to fail in treating people as individuals but also possible to fail in treating people as members of groups, on the presumption that people’s agency is sometimes nested in, and exercised via, agential groups. (shrink)

The idea that we must move beyond anthropocentrism to overcome interspecies injustice and environmental collapse is widespread within the environmental humanities. Yet, the concept of anthropocentrism remains ambiguous, and so do some of the arguments raised against it. What exactly should we move beyond and why? The article attempts to answer these questions and clarify the merits and limitations of both anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric views within ethics and ontology. This article proposes that although some implausible and morally problematic forms of (...) anthropocentrism should be denounced, there are other ways in which we must remain anthropocentric. The article disambiguates the concept of anthropocentrism and assesses the key arguments against it, before it goes on to outline a minimal form of anthropocentrism that we call ostensive humanism. Ostensive humanism is compatible with many post-anthropocentric ideas but suggests that the ethical and political project aimed at ending interspecies injustice and the climate crisis inevitably points to human beings as its moral addressees. (shrink)