Shared agency

1. Shared agency also has important normative implications.

a. Institutions or laws established by everyone acting together have a status different from
those that are, for example, imposed on a people by the dictates of one.

2. But what is it to act together?

a. Philosophy of Action

i. can shared agency be understood in terms of the resources available to us from the
study of individual agency?

The traditional ontological 1. There is a phenomenon falling under labels such as shared activity, and joint or
problem and the Intention collective action.
Thesis
a. How to understand it?

i. what distinguishes actions of individuals that together constitute shared activity from
those that amount to a mere aggregation of individual acts.

ii. What is left over when we subtract what each of us did from what we did together?

b. Searle’s intention thesis - we-intention as distinctive mark of joint action.

i. A number of individuals are scattered about in a park. Suddenly it starts to rain, and
each runs to a centrally located shelter.

1. Although there may be some coordination (people tend not to collide into one
another), running to the shelter is not, in the relevant sense, something that we
do together.

ii. Members of a dance troop performing a site-specific piece in that park. Suddenly it
starts to rain, and each runs to a centrally located shelter.

iii. In both cases, there is no difference in the collection or “summation” of

individual behavior:

1. A is running to the shelter, and B is running to the shelter, etc.

2. But the dancers are engaged in collective action, whereas the storm
panicked picnickers are not.

iv. what distinguishes the two cases is not the outward behavior, but something
“internal”. (Internal difference)

1. in the collective case, the outward behavior—everyone running to and

converging on the shelter—is not a matter of coincidence. It is explained as
something aimed at by the participants.

2. the internal difference is a matter of intention.

3. Individual intention - In both cases, a participant has an intention expressed

by “I am running to the shelter”.

4. We Intention - But in the collective case, this intention somehow derives

from and is dependent upon an intention that necessarily adverts to the
others, one that might be expressed as “We are running to the shelter.”

5. It is this “we-intention” that distinguishes shared or collective activity from a

mere summation or heap of individual acts.

c. Reservations about Searle’s notion of Intentionality

i. Most theorists treat intention as a psychological attitude.

ii. Some work on intention influenced by Anscombe and Wittgenstein understands

intention fundamentally in terms of intentional action.

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 iii. Unintentional collective action -

1. that there are φ-ings done jointly in some robust sense, but which are not
intended under any description.

2. For example, our jointly bringing about some severe environmental damage.

a. This might come about as a side effect of each of us pursuing our own
projects.

b. No subject intends the severe environmental damage, under any

description.

c. no single individual has enough of an impact to intend anything that would

count as severe environmental damage.

d. and as a collective the polluters seem not to be sufficiently integrated to

count as a subject of intention.

d. how the attitude of intention should be understood if it is to serve as a distinctive mark of

joint action?

i. think of it as an attitude of a peculiar, supra-individual entity.

1. Supra-Individual - Above or beyond what is Individual. for example, a nation

like U.S.A.

2. The intention whose content is expressed by ‘We are running to the shelter’ is
an attitude had by whatever entity is denoted by the ‘we’.

3. On this view whenever people act together, they constitute a group that intends.

4. This entails that groups can be genuine agents and subjects of intentional
attitudes.

ii. Searle is against this view.

1. because it leads to an abundance of supra-individual intentional subjects, group

minds, or corporate persons whenever individuals act together.

iii. strategy appealing to supra-individual entities as subjects of intentional states is

misplaced if the social phenomenon in question is shared activity.

1. It’s not at all obvious that an individual who is a constituent of a supra-individual

entity is necessarily committed to what it is up to.

2. For example, The U.S. increases research funding in physics in order to win the
space race with the U.S.S.R. I’m a graduate student benefitting from the
additional funding, and I do research in rocket and satellite technology and
teach physics and engineering to undergraduates; indeed, I wouldn’t have gone
into the area had it not been for the funding opportunities. I am in the relevant
sense a constituent of the larger entity - in this case the U.S. - but I have no
concern with the space race. I’m just doing my job, advancing my career,
hoping to raise a family and be able to pay the mortgage, etc.; I frankly couldn’t
care less about larger geopolitical issues, which are presumably the concern of
the supra-individual entity that is the U.S.

3. a participant in shared activity arguably is committed to the collective

endeavor and its aims - at least in the sense of commitment to an end
implicated in any instance of intention or intentional action.

4. while we haven’t ruled out that there are supra-individual agents, it’s not clear
that we need to be committed to them in order to understand shared activity.

2. The Intention Thesis

a. The Intention Thesis attributes to each individual participant in shared activity an

intention pertaining to that activity.

b. This participatory intention accounts for each individual’s participatory commitment to

the activity.

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 c. it serves to distinguish one’s action when it is done with others from the action done on
one’s own.

3. shared activity can be understood as a debate about the nature of the participatory
intention.

a. Reductive account of we-intention in terms of ordinary individual intentions -

Tuomela and Miller

i. Participatory intentions might be understood as an instance of an ordinary intention,

familiar from the study of individual agency.

ii. we-intentions are identified with or built out of these participatory intentions.

iii. Tuomela and Miller - the individual has a participatory intention with respect to X if
she intends to do her part in X, believes conditions for the success of X obtain, and
believes that there is a mutual belief amongst members of the group that conditions
for success obtain.

iv. Conter-example to reductive account

1. Searle

a. reductive approaches don’t guarantee the element of cooperation that is

essential to shared activity and necessarily reflected in the attitudes of the
participant.

b. one cannot respond by inserting the cooperative element into the content of
the intention, so that what the agent intends is to do her part in shared
activity.

c. That would in effect presuppose the notion for which we’re seeking an
account.

d. For example, Searle imagines each member of a business school

graduating class, versed in Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand,
intending to pursue his selfish interests and thereby intending to do his part
in helping humanity. Such an intention, even supplemented with the sort of
beliefs that Tuomela and Miller require, intuitively doesn’t count as the sort
of intention one has when acting with others, and it is implausible to think
that these graduates go on to act collectively. And yet it seems to satisfy
Tuomela and Miller’s analysis.

e. Searle, in contrast to Tuomela and Miller, insists that the individual’s

participatory intention (collective intention) is primitive.

f. for Searle, the participatory intention is primitively collective and expressed,

for example, as We will do A.

g. The aforementioned “we-intention” turns out just to be an individual’s

participatory intention.

h. But though it is an attitude or state of an individual, it is a fundamentally

different kind of intention and not the sort of intention that figures in
individual action.

i. this view has similarities to those held by Sellars and later Tuomela.

j. Rejection of anti-individualism

i. whether an individual has this primitively collective participatory

intention is independent of what may be going on in the minds of
others, or whether there even are any others around her.

ii. Thinking to help you with your stalled car, I might have the collective
intention expressed as we are pushing the car. And this is so, even if
you’re just stretching your calves before a run and not trying to move
the car, and even if I’m just hallucinating and there is no one around.

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 1. whether one is sharing an intention and acting with others will depend on there being other
agents with whom one is appropriately related.

2. Suppose that each of several individuals has a participatory intention. How must they be
related in order for those individuals to count as sharing an intention?

a. Searle - the participatory intention is primitively collective and expressed, for example,
as We will do A.

i. co-extensiveness of the we-element instanced in the intentions across the several

Interrelatedness of individuals is not sufficient for the sharing of intentions.
participatory intentions
1. No intention is shared if yours is for us to go to the beach this afternoon,
whereas mine is like working all day in the library.

2. Even if our intentions coincide on the action and the plural subject in question, if
there is no agreement on how to go about it, or if we each fail even to accord
any significant status to the other’s intentions, there would be no intention or
action shared in this instance.

3. more needs to be said about the interrelations of the participatory intentions if

they are to account for the coordination and cooperativeness we find in shared
or joint activity.

4. Searle is silent on the matter.

b. Bratman - reductive account of shared activity and shared intention.

i. Intention thesis - takes the form ‘I intend that we J.’

ii. understands a shared intention to be an interpersonal structure of related intentions

that serves to coordinate action and planning, as well as structure bargaining
between participants.

iii. The individually held intentions that constitute this structure—what we’ve been
calling participatory intentions or collective intentions in Searle’s terms—are
instances of a familiar sort of individual intention that figures in the planning and the
coordination of one’s activities over time.

iv. When these individual intentions concern something that is done by more than one
person, taking the form ‘I intend that we J’, they accord with Bratman’s version of
the Intention Thesis, and the core of his proposals about shared intention and
action.

v. Bratman imposes conditions that serve to relate these participatory intentions in

distinctive ways.

1. The meshing of sub-plans

a. suppose each of us has the intention to paint the house together, but my
plan is to paint it green all over, whereas yours is to paint it purple all over.

b. It seems that we don’t share the intention to paint the house.

c. Condition - each participant intends that the subplans that follow upon the
participatory intentions of each individual mesh—that is, are mutually
satisfiable and coherent—in order for the individuals to count as sharing an
intention.

2. Roth - a normative element to the meshing

a. Participants are subject to some sort of rational requirement such that they
in a sense ought to mesh their plans.

b. the plans of the other participants serve as a normative constraint on one’s

own plans. This applies to Intentionality as well.

c. shared activity exhibits practical intersubjectivity.

d. each participant treats the other’s intentions and plans much in the way that
he or she treats her own: as rational constraints on further intention and

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 planning.

e. Bratman defends this view.

i. Your intentions and plans pertaining to our J-ing have an authority for
me because of what might be called a bridge intention to mesh my J
related plans and intentions with yours.

ii. Bridge intention - condition requiring each participant to have the

intention to act in accordance with and because of the others’ intentions
and plans (as well as his or her own).

iii. given my bridge intention, the norms of consistency and coherence

governing my individual intentions will be recruited to require that I form
my plans and intentions with an eye toward consistency and coherence
with your plans and intentions.

iv. Roth agrees with Bratman on everything except bridge intention

account of it. he resists the reductive bridge intention account of it.

c. Considering the possibility that individuals might engage in shared activity (and have the
corresponding intention) even when they have different and incompatible reasons for
doing so.

i. For example, representatives from rival parties might engage in the legislative
process that leads to the passage of laws, even when each is motivated by
considerations that the other finds unacceptable.

d. Gilbert - holds that shared activity gets started only when each individual openly
expresses a readiness to be jointly committed in a certain way with others.

i. She adds that rescinding or significantly modifying the resulting intention, as well as
releasing any individual from participation, would also require concurrence on
everyone’s part.

ii. whether I concur with how you propose to modify your intentions will depend in part
on my intentions.

iii. Gilbert’s conditions might be too strong - the concurrence criterion does not
permit one to withdraw unilaterally from shared activity.

3. other important conditions for shared activity than forms of integration between participants.

a. Epstein

i. the metaphysical grounds for some forms of shared activity, such as that involved in
some cases of group action, involve a variety of conditions that are not themselves
relations between members of the group but often can determine how those
members are related.

1. like how different castes are not related at all except for economic
purposes. there is no relation between members of different castes, but
caste determines the kind of social relation they are into.

ii. These might include historical conditions that determine the structure and
membership criteria for the group.

1. Endogamy

iii. Or the grounds might include external conditions such as the actions of some
designated individual (such as a sergeant at arms) not a part of the collective body
but who for example must convene a meeting in order that the members of the body
may collectively take some action.

1. Brahmins as external condition imposing body

iv. The problem of caste could be analyzed through this Lense. This view would
not help us explain the origins of caste, but the mechanism of caste could be
explained through this notion.

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 3. How is the structure of interrelated intentions established?

Structure of participatory 1. The issue of how to establish the interpersonal structure of participatory intention is
intentions. a central problem for the theory of shared agency,

2. shared activity is distinguished from a mere aggregation of individual acts by a structure of

appropriately related participatory intentions across different individuals.

3. It is a structure that has a distinctive normative significance for those individuals, with an
impact most immediately on each individual’s intention-based practical reasoning.

4. structure of intentions is brought about by individuals involved in shared activity, presumably

when each forms the participatory intention that is his or her contribution to the structure.
But recall that participatory intentions are meant to capture the sense in which each
individual is committed to what everyone is doing together, and not merely to what he or she
is doing.

a. Searle - I’m pushing only as a part of our pushing.

b. Bratman - I intend that we J.

5. Counter of Velleman

a. it’s not clear that one can intend the entire activity; or if one can, it would seem
incompatible with the activity being shared.

b. Intending is something I do to settle a deliberative issue: weighing several options, I

decide on A-ing, and thereby intend to A. (Deliberative = related to consideration or
discussion)

c. This suggests the Settling Condition that I can only intend what I take to be up to me to
decide or settle. It is a violation of a rational requirement to intend something I don’t
think I can settle, and thus regard my ensuing plans and actions as likely coming to
grief.

d. Applying the point to collective action, to say that I intend for us to be dining together
presumes that whether we’re dining together is something for me to settle.

e. But the idea behind shared activity and intention is precisely that it’s not entirely
up to me what we do.

f. You have a say in the matter; at the very least what you do should be up to you.

g. Our problem, then, is that shared activity would seem both to demand and to
disallow one and the same intention on the part of each participant.

i. Velleman’s solution - interdependent conditional intentions.

1. Each individual conditionally settles what the group will do, where the condition
is that each of the others has a similar commitment and intends likewise.

2. Thus, I intend to J, on condition that you intend likewise.

3. Some have worried that when intentions are interdependent in this way it’s not
entirely clear that they settle anything at all, and hence, whether anyone is

Shared agency 6
 appropriately committed to our J-ing.

4. If each intention is conditioned on the other, it’s just as reasonable to refrain

from acting as it is to engage in it.

ii. Bratman’s solution- Predictive attitude w.r.t the intentions.

1. what an individual intends can extend beyond what he can settle himself, so
long as he can reasonably predict that the relevant other parties will act
appropriately.

2. Flagrantly disregarding sound medical advice, I can have the categorical

intention to work on my tan at the beach this afternoon, so long as I can
reasonably predict that it’ll be sunny.

3. Likewise, when I reasonably believe that you have or will have the appropriate
intentions, I can then intend that we J.

4. One might wonder whether taking this sort of predictive attitude with respect to
the intentions and actions of fellow participants is consistent with sharing an
intention and acting with them.

iii. Another solution

1. a participant intends not the entirety of the activity, but only his or her part in it.
Such an intention is more modest in that it does not purport to settle what other
people do.

2. An account of shared activity in terms of such intentions does not entail the
authority or control over others that would be difficult to reconcile with the
activity being shared.

3. But this modest intention involves a commitment only to one’s part in our
J-ing and doesn’t seem to account for a participatory commitment to our
J-ing as a whole.

4. For example, consider the case of walking together from Gilbert 1990. We might
describe my part as walking at a certain pace. But intending to do that is entirely
compatible with undermining my partner’s contribution, for example by tripping
him.

5. Suppose instead that we avail ourselves of some robust conception of part, so

that each participant intends to do his part in shared activity, as such. This
would appear to rule out attempts to undermine a partner’s contribution.

6. But this intention seems to presuppose an understanding of the concept

of shared activity, which is the notion we’re trying to elucidate.

7. Way to resolve this issue using the notion of ‘team reasoning.’

a. a way to characterize the intention to do one’s part that doesn’t presuppose

the notion of shared activity.

💡 Team Reasoning - a distinctive form of strategic practical

reasoning. This view of reasoning was developed to address
certain difficulties standard game theory has in accounting for the
rationality of selecting more cooperative options in strategic
scenarios such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Hi-Lo. The idea is
that we get intuitively more rational outcomes with individuals
each approaching the situation asking him- or herself not what’s
best for me given what others do? but what is best for us or
the group as a whole?

b. The participatory intention is characterized in terms of the distinctive

reasoning that leads to its formation, rather than in terms of some more
intrinsic feature of the intention or its content.

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 c. It remains to be seen whether intending one’s part can account for the
participatory commitment distinctive of shared activity.

4. Mutual obligations

Gilbert 1. participants in shared activity are obligated to do their part in it.

a. Take her well-known example of walking together, starring Jack and Sue. When Jack
does something that’s not compatible with walking together, e.g., walking so fast that
Sue cannot keep up, Sue is entitled to rebuke Jack.

2. Gilbert has used this mutual obligation criterion to criticize reductive accounts of shared
activity in terms of “personal intentions” such as that defended by Bratman.

3.

4.

5. The directed nature of the non-moral obligations

a. To mark the directed nature of the normative relation, and in a way that does not
suggest as strongly that they are moral in nature, we might speak of contralateral
commitments.

b. Jack has a contralateral commitment to Sue to walk in a way that is compatible with
their walking together.

c. Articulating the sense of directedness in terms of Ownership.

i. Jack’s contralateral commitment to Sue to walk at the appropriate pace entails that
Sue is owed, and in a sense owns, the relevant performance on Jack’s part.

ii. This would presumably explain why Sue and not anyone else can release Jack from
fulfilling the obligation/commitment, by giving up her claim on Jack’s action.

d. Articulating the sense of directedness in terms of Promising.

i. If we understand Jack’s obligation as the result of something like a promise to Sue,

we can see not only that Jack has a commitment, but that Sue is in a special
position such that she can, for example, release him from fulfilling it.

6. One drawback of appealing either to ownership or promising

a. it is not clear that this would allow for these commitments to be as insulated from moral
considerations.

b. whether ownership or promising fully captures all that there is to the contralateral or
directed nature of the commitment.

c. it might be that certain aspects of promising - in particular the directedness of the

obligation - might in some way depend on shared agency or aspects thereof.

7. the central explanatory concept deployed by Gilbert - Joint commitment.

a. contrasting it with personal commitment associated with individual intention or decision.

b. Whereas one can on one’s own take on and rescind the sort of commitment associated
with individual intention and decision, joint commitment can only be formed through a
process whereby everyone expresses their readiness, and it can only be rescinded
when all parties concur.

c. This raises the issue of how exactly the joint commitment comes into force. Even if
everyone expresses a readiness to A together, it doesn’t follow that we all take the
plunge and actually undertake it.

d. Charge of circularity - it would seem that the expression of readiness needed to

establish joint commitment would itself be an instance of shared activity and thus

Shared agency 8
 presuppose joint commitment.

8. Criticism of Gilbert

a. Understood as a kind of obligation, Gilbert’s insight about a distinctive normative

relation holding between participants in shared agency risks rejection.

b. Many find obligation, and especially the no-unilateral withdrawal condition, to be too
strong.

c. Gilbert’s general idea might find wider acceptance if we talk instead of commitment that
allows for unilateral withdrawal.

Bratman 1. acknowledges that mutual obligations are typically associated with the sharing of
intentions but insists that they are not essential.

2. when present, the obligations are explained in terms of a moral principle that one should live
up to the expectations about one’s actions that one has intentionally created in others.

3. Suppose that we have individuals engaged in an endeavor they know to be immoral, such
as that of a pillager and a lazy plunderer raiding a village.

a. For example, the inadmissibility of the action undermines the pillager’s entitlement to
hold the plunderer accountable for slacking off in his search for loot.

b. There could not be an obligation to do one’s part in this activity.

c. this shows that there can be shared activity without these obligations.

d. Gilbert’s response

i. it only shows that the obligations in question are special, “of a different kind”
than the sort of obligation familiar from discussion of moral philosophy.

ii. She goes so far as to say that the obligations to do one’s part are present, even
when one’s partners in shared activity have coerced one into joining them.

5. The discursive dilemma and group minds

1. Rovane and Pettit

a. thinking of a group as itself an agent and a subject of intentional states.

b. some groups can be genuine subjects of intentional attitudes and can have minds of
their own.

Pettit
1. a rational integration of a collective is a sign of its mentality.

a. it is reasonable, even compulsory, to think of the integrated collectivity as an intentional

subject.

b. The basis for this claim is that the integrated collectivity, as characterized, is going to
display all the functional marks of an intentional subject.

c. The group mind hypothesis thus seems to explain or account for the rationality exhibited
by the group, both in what it does and what it represents.

2. But is the group mind hypothesis explanatorily indispensable?

a. If the rational behavior, representation, speech, etc. can easily be explained (or
explained away) without invoking group minds, then the presumption of mindedness is
defeated.

b. Thus, if we discover of what appears to be a subject that its behavior was entirely
controlled by or explicable in terms of the attitudes and behavior of some other (or
others), then one would no longer have reason to think the subject in question as
minded.

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 c. For example, if the rational behavior of a group is explained wholly in terms of the
individual members, then we are not tempted to think that the group itself is genuinely
minded.

d. Or, if there is a very tight fit between judgments and attitudes of the group on the one
hand, and members on the other – for example if ascriptions of attitudes to a group just
is a summary of ascriptions to its individual members – then there is no reason to think
of the group as having a mind of its own.

3. Pettit addressal of the issue

a. some group decision procedures are such that past group judgments rationally
constrain subsequent decisions, judgments, and intentions.

b. When such “premise-driven” procedures are followed, a group not only displays a
rational unity indicative of mindedness but does so in such a way that it might arrive at a
judgment that a minority—perhaps even none—of the individual members personally
hold.

4. Read further, don’t leave anything!

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