Chaeyoung Paek

This paper critically examines Sara Rachel Chant’s attempt to extend the category of collective action to include unintentional collective actions and, on that basis, to provide a unified account of individual and collective action. While Chant’s proposal is motivated by a plausible criticism of classical theories that focus narrowly on small-scale, fully cooperative cases, we argue that her account cannot achieve both of its central aims simultaneously. We introduce a novel case, The Wicked and The Innocent, in which one agent intentionally uses another agent as a means. According to Chant’s criteria, this case qualifies as a collective action. We argue that such cases generate a dilemma for Chant’s view: either they undermine her account as counterexamples, or they force a disanalogy between individual and collective action. We conclude that the category of collective action cannot be broadened in the way Chant proposes.

In this paper, I examine two different kinds of production processes, mass production and collaborative production. While both production processes intuitively seem like collective actions, the established views about collective action fail to treat them as collective action due to the common issue: the lack of shared intention. As an alternative, I propose the artifactual view of action, according to which collective action is possible even when there is no shared intention among agents. Motivated by Evnine’s (2016) view about action, the artifactual view of action claims that we can have other people’s actions as matter out of which we create our own action. I argue that the artifactual account of action can successfully explain mass production as collective action. Furthermore, it provides a way for the intention-dependent views about artifacts to better understand how mass-produced artifacts come into existence.