•  20
    Morality, Friendship, and Collective Action
    Journal of Social Ontology 10. 2024.
    This paper uses the tools of experimental philosophy to examine the nature of interpersonal normativity in collective action, focusing on cases of immoral collective action and collective action by friends. The results of our two studies, which expand on recent empirical interventions into longstanding debates in social ontology, demonstrate that according to our everyday judgments there are interpersonal obligations in cases of collective action, even when immoral, and that, while friendship el…Read more
  •  147
    Response to LÖhr: Why We Still Need a New Normativism
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4): 1067-1076. 2023.
    Guido Löhr's recent article makes several insightful and productive suggestions about how to proceed with the empirical study of collective action. However, their critique of the conclusions drawn in Gomez-Lavin & Rachar (2022) is undermined by some issues with the interpretation of the debate and paper. This discussion article clears up those issues, presents new findings from experiments developed in response to Löhr's critiques, reflects on the role of experimental research in the development…Read more
  •  743
    Conditional Intentions and Shared Agency
    Noûs 58 (1): 271-288. 2024.
    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 stat…Read more
  •  351
    A Pathology of Group Agency
    Social Theory and Practice. forthcoming.
    Pathologies of agency affect both groups and individuals. I present a case study of agential pathology in a group, in which supposedly rogue members of a group act in light of what they take the group’s interests and attitudes to be, but in a way that goes against the group’s explicitly stated agential point of view. I consider several practical concerns brought out by rogue member action in the context of a group agent, focusing in particular on how it undermines the agency of the group and whe…Read more
  •  636
    Why We Need a New Normativism about Collective Action
    Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2): 478-507. 2022.
    What do we owe each other when we act together? According to normativists about collective action, necessarily something and potentially quite a bit. They contend that collective action inherently involves a special normative status amongst participants, which may, for example, involve mutual obligations to receive the concurrence of the others before leaving. We build on recent empirical work whose results lend plausibility to a normativist account by further investigating the specific package …Read more
  •  249
    Quasi-Psychologism about Collective Intention
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2): 475-488. 2021.
    This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasi-psychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by…Read more
  •  1000
    Power, Hegemony, and Social Reality in Gramsci and Searle
    Journal of Political Power 9 (2): 227-247. 2016.
    This paper reconstructs Gramsci’s account of social objects in light of recent developments in analytic social ontology. It combines elements of Gramsci’s account with that of John Searle, and argues that when taken together their theories constitute a robust account of social reality and a nuanced view of the relation between social reality and power. Searle provides a detailed analysis of the creation of social entities at the level of the agent, while Gramsci, by employing his concepts of heg…Read more
  •  532
    Normativity in joint action
    Mind and Language 34 (1): 97-120. 2018.
    The debate regarding the nature of joint action has come to a stalemate due to a dependence on intuitional methods. Normativists, such as Margaret Gilbert, argue that action-relative normative relations are inherent in joint action, while non-normativists, such as Michael Bratman, claim that there are minimal cases of joint action without normative relations. In this work, we describe the first experimental examinations of these intuitions, and report the results of six studies that weigh in fav…Read more
  •  268
    Alignment and commitment in joint action
    Philosophical Psychology 31 (6): 831-849. 2018.
    Important work on alignment systems has been applied to philosophical work on joint action by Tollefsen and Dale. This paper builds from and expands on their work. The first aim of the paper is to spell out how the empirical research on alignment may be integrated into philosophical theories of joint action. The second aim is then to develop a successful characterization of joint action, which spells out the difference between genuine joint action and simpler forms of coordination based on align…Read more