Jules Salomone-Sehr

Most shared agency theorists believe that acting together is a matter of forming and enacting shared intentions. Not all agree, however. A growing number of dissenters have gone minimalist about shared agency by arguing that acting together does not require shared intentions and, hence, does not require the tight practical alignment between participants that shared intentions-based accounts assume. In this paper, I survey recent minimalist accounts of shared agency and explain four reasons why minimalism is attractive. One reason has to do with shared activities engaged in by agents with limited cognitive sophistication. Although such agents (e.g., infants) do not have the capacity for shared intentions, they nonetheless have the capacity for shared agency—a fact that flies in the face of shared-intention-based accounts and thus supports minimalism about shared agency. Another reason minimalism is attractive has to do with the vast number of participants and many institutional intricacies that shared activities sometimes involve. Workers on the assembly line might act together simply by sticking to their institutionally-defined roles in the production plan and thus may not have shared intentions, a fact that, again, supports minimalism. A third reason in favor of minimalism flows from cases of alienated participation in shared agency, i.e., cases where (under some conception of alienated participation) participants feel they are no more than cogs in the machine. A fourth reason concerns shared responsibility. Even unintentional and unwitting participants in shared wrongdoing might share responsibility for the wrongdoing in question, a fact that yet again favors minimalism about shared agency. Our non-ideal social world (that is, a world rife with unjust power relations) increases the odds of alienated participation as well as unintentional and/or unwitting participation in shared wrongdoing. Minimalism, thus, is best geared to illuminate shared agency as we know it under non-ideal circumstances.

Denying blameworthiness after apologizing seems fishy. “Sorry, not sorry” is what this might sound like. Yet, this fact conflicts with another fact about apologies, namely, that we routinely apologize for blameless conduct. There is, thus, a puzzle regarding what it is that an apology must admit about one’s involvement in the apologized-for conduct for the apology to be fitting. This chapter solves this puzzle by arguing that in cases where our agency is blamelessly implicated in harmful conduct, apologies are fitting only if they involve an admission of responsibility—where the responsibility in question does not entail blameworthiness.

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.

Do participants in shared activity have mutual obligations to do their bit? This article shows this question has no one-size-fits-all answer and offers a pluralist account of the normativity of shared agency. The first part argues obligations to do one's bit have three degrees of involvement in shared activity. Such obligations might, obviously, bolster co-participants’ resolve to act as planned (degree 1). Less obviously, there also are higher and lower degrees of involvement. Obligations to do one's bit might provide our agency-pooling mechanism. When they do, we act together by virtue of satisfying them (degree 2). Conversely, some shared activities involve no obligation (degree 0). In the second part, I argue shared agency theory is best served by a non-moralistic conception of obligation, one on which co-participants’ obligations need be neither strict-performance obligations, nor directed ones. Overall, my arguments suggest that we can choose how to coordinate normatively our shared activities.

Unlike other ways of coming to act, for example as a result of habit or impulse, practical reasoning imprints our actions with the distinctive mark of rational full-blooded agency. This entry enquires into what practical reasoning consists in. First, we lay out four basic criteria—mentality, evaluation, practicality, attributability—that adequate accounts of practical reasoning ought to satisfy in order to capture essential features of the phenomenon. Specifically, practical deliberation is a by and large conscious mental process answerable to a range of evaluative standards. Moreover, this process is aimed at settling what to do. Lastly, reasoning does not merely occur to the practical reasoner but is instead something that they do. We then turn to John Broome’s influential account of reasoning which satisfies the aforementioned criteria. On his view, practical reasoning is the rule-guided activity by which we bring our mental attitudes (especially our intentions) to satisfy requirements of practical rationality. We then focus on three challenges to Broome’s account that have been the topic of recent debate. First, we discuss the role that autobiographical considerations of the sort ‘I’d like to φ’, or ‘I intend to φ’ might play in practical reasoning. Broome, perhaps, is wrong in giving them very little place. Second, we discuss Jonathan Dancy’s proposal that practical reasoning does not conclude in the formation of intentions but in action. Third, we consider whether assessments of rationality can come in degrees and why we should care about satisfying rational requirements in the first place.

This article articulates our everyday notion of cooperation. First, I topple an orthodoxy of shared agency theory by arguing that shared intentions to J are neither necessary nor sufficient for J to be cooperative. I refute the necessity claim by providing examples of shared intention-free cooperation (in institutional contexts and beyond). I refute the sufficiency claim by observing that coercion and exploitation need not preclude shared intentions but do preclude cooperation. These arguments, in turn, lead to my positive proposal. People cooperate, I argue, just in case their activities are coordinated in ways that do not undermine any participant’s agency.