Jules Salomone-Sehr

When faced with a hard decision, we can and sometimes should decide decision-making away, for instance by flipping a coin. At first, this strategy might look suspect: it seems that conforming with the verdict of a coin flip and φ-ing as a result involves making the decision to φ. To address this worry, we inquire into the psychological structures that make deciding decision-making away possible. Our main contention is that it involves conditional intentions: you form the intention to φ if the coin lands heads and ψ otherwise. We then rely on the nature of the conditional intentions involved to argue that we do not make the decision to φ when the coin flip tells us to φ⁠. We conclude by exploring the normative status of deciding decision-making away. Not only is it often permissible, whether the choice situation is mundane or life-defining, deciding decision-making away may sometimes be required, for example, to promote equality in shared agency or fairness in distribution.

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.