Jules Salomone-Sehr

We are valuing beings, beings who possess the capacity to value things. But what is it “to value” something? The most common accounts in the literature hold that to value an item is either to have a first‐order or a second‐order desire toward it; or to believe that item to be valuable; or to care about that item; or to have a combination of all these mental states. In our paper, we raise some objections against all these accounts and defend a new affective account of valuings. Unlike standard affective accounts, according to which the term “valuing” refers to a single type of affective state, such as care, we hold that “valuing” refers to the members of a class of affective states, namely, the class of sentiments. On our view, to value something is to have a particular sentiment toward it. Since sentiments can be of different types, our account implies that there are as many ways of valuing things as there are types of sentiments.

In this article, I argue that boys’ club dynamics are best understood as collective action, even in the absence of shared intentions. It is unsatisfactory to think of these phenomena as mere accumulations of isolated individual actions. A minimalist theory of collective action allows us to consider that it is indeed a phenomenon of collective action: The patriarchal social order offers a plan of action, which orients and coordinates the behaviour of agents. This coordination allows us to speak of collective action.

Shared agency is a distinctive kind of sociality that involves interdependent planning, practical reasoning, and action between participants. Philosophical reflection suggests that agents engage in this form of sociality when a special structure of interrelated psychological attitudes exists between them, a set of attitudes that constitutes a collective intention. I defend a new way to understand collective intention as a combination of individual conditional intentions. Revising an initial statement of the conditional intention account in response to several challenges leads to a specification of the properties these intentions need to have in order to be genuine commitments. I then show how a structure of conditional intentions with these properties settles a collection of agents on engaging in social interactions that display all the features typically associated with shared agency.