Raimo Tuomela

(1940 - 2020)

This chapter presents an analysis of collective goals that extends the ideas that Tuomela in particular has developed over the past three decades. The chapter is concerned with understanding the apparent variety of collective goals and set out to explicate what makes a goal collective. The chapter argues that collective goals are collectively accepted and that a collective goal is such that it is satisfied for one member of a collective only if it is satisfied for all. The chapter argues that conceptions of collective goals are important not only to a number of social sciences but also for political philosophy, and points out a number of similarities between the notion of a collective goal and Rousseau’s conception of a general will.

This chapter presents an account of motivational reasons that agents have for acting. This account covers not only the case of single‐agent action and reasons for them, but also the case of social reasons for action. In the course of presenting his account, this chapter relates it to Audi's theory of reasons. As it explains, this account is largely compatible with Audi's, but there remain theoretical differences. For instance, the view put forward here is more externalist than Audi's and does not connect reasons to psychological states as closely as does Audi's account.

This paper investigates the truth conditions of intention expressions of the kind “We will do X,” taking group-intentions to be exactly those entities of which such expressions are true in the case of single members of a group. The basic philosophical motivation for this study is in part the argued importance of the notion of we-intention and, in addition, the idea that we can plausibly attribute to group-members intentions which are not directly action-prompting. The paper presents and argues for an analysis of the truth conditions of the conative locution “We will do X”.

This article investigates some central philosophical problems related to actions performed by collectives with the focus on studying under what conditions attributions of actions to collectives can correctly be made. We commonly attribute actions to collectives, and hence it seems to be a worthwhile project to accept such a commonsensical view at least in part and to think that true statements attributing actions to collectives can be made. This view does not by itself entail that such attributions need be nonmetaphorical, nor does it entail the existence of collectives as supraindividual entities. The central thesis defended in this article is that the actions of collectives are “made up” or “constituted” by actions of persons.

Group agents are able to act but are not literally agents. Some group agents, e. g., we-mode groups and corporations, can, however, be regarded as functional group agents that do not have “intrinsic” mental states and phenomenal features comparable to what their individual members on biological and psychological grounds have. But they can have “extrinsic” mental states, states collectively attributed to them - primarily by their members. In this paper, we discuss the responsibility of such group agents. We defend the view that if the group members have accepted the group agent’s (attributed) attitudes and are committed to them, we can favorably compare the situation with the case of individual human agents and a group agent can be regarded as morally responsible for its intentional activities.

This paper studies social practices and the dynamics of their maintenance in precise mathematical and logical terms. Roughly, social practices (such as shaking hands, going regularly to sauna, eating a certain kind of food at Easter, etc.) are recurrent collective activities based on collective attitudes (“shared we-attitudes”), and the central kind of social practice under study here, is one based on collective intention. Social practices are the building blocks of human societies, and also of artificial ones. In this paper, we present a mathematical model representing the dynamics of social practices, and some properties of the process are subjected to detailed mathematical study.

Social norms can be divided into social rules (“r-norms”) based on relevant authoritative agreement-making and proper social norms (“s-norms”) which may exist even unverbalized and are based on the mutual beliefs of the members of the social collective in which they are in force. The paper argues for the following two-fold thesis: a) r-norms override s-norms in a sense of having more “agreement-based” objective social obligating power than the latter, but b) which one or ones of these kinds of social norms wins “empirically” (viz. in terms of actual obedience or, which we also allow here, mere acting in accordance with the content of the norm) is a factual issue not to be decided a priori. As an additional empirical hypothesis it is also claimed that a) rnorms generally tend to empirically win over the other norms, still it is true that b) instances of each kind of norm can on some occasions empirically win over all the other kinds of norms.

It is argued in this paper that there can be both ‘normative’ and ‘nonnormative’, merely factual group beliefs. The former involve the whole social group in question, while the latter only relate to the distributions of personal beliefs within the group. The paper develops a detailed theory, called the positional account of group beliefs, to explicate normative, group-involving group beliefs. Normative group beliefs are characterized within this approach in terms of joint acceptances of views by the group members - or their representatives - acting in their right positions and tasks, and in a sense creating group commitments for all the members to accept (and keep accepting) the view in question. Also ‘aggregate’ accounts of group belief are considered in the paper, especially the ‘shared we-belief’ approach. Such aggregate accounts purport to account for merely factual group beliefs.

Our common-sense framework uses a great variety of social and collective notions related to action. Thus some persons can be said to perform joint actions, act together, act in concert, act collectively in pursuit of a goal, cooperate, struggle against each other, and so on. This article investigates variable forms of social action in order to create a classification of various kinds of social and collective action that would be useful for social-scientific purposes and for further philosophical analysis. The discussion in the article concentrates on intentional action, and as a result the covert rather than overt factors play a central role in the resulting analysis. It will be argued that all intentional collective social actions can be fitted in our typology.

This paper is mainly about cooperation as a collective action in a group context (acting in a position or participating in the performance of a group task, etc.), although the assumption of the presence of a group context is not made in all parts of the paper. The paper clarifies what acting as a group member involves, and it analytically characterizes the “we-mode” (thinking and acting as a group member) and the “I-mode” (thinking and acting as a private person). The main task of the paper is to clarify cooperation, and this is done by dividing cooperation into I-mode and we-mode cooperation. I-mode cooperation relies on the participants’ relevantly adjusting their goals toward others’ goals and actions to the benefit of all participants. We-mode cooperation basically amounts to joint action in the we-mode. These kinds of cooperation are also connected to the respective kinds of acting as a group member. The paper also investigates the relationship between cooperation and trust and, basically, argues that a two-way connection is involved.

The book includes both essential classics and buried treasures that have not yet received the attention they deserve.The papers of the collection cover a time span of 30 years and thanks to that the collection provides a historical perspective into the development of the field, and into the development of one of the main positions in particular. The collection also provides insights that are still viable and worthy of further scrutiny and development, and in virtue of this the collection functions as an inspiring source for those engaged in the debates of the field today.

The paper argues that there are two main kinds of joint action, direct joint bringing about (or performing) something (expressed in terms of a DO-operator) and jointly seeing to it that something is the case (expressed in terms of a Stit-operator). The former kind of joint action contains conjunctive, disjunctive and sequential action and its central subkinds. While joint seeing to it that something is the case is argued to be necessarily intentional, direct joint performance can also be nonintentional. Actions performed by social groups are analyzed in terms of the notions of joint action (basically DO and Stit). A precise semantical analysis of the aforementioned kinds of joint action is given in terms of “time-trees”.With each participant a tree is connected, and the trees are joined defining joint possible worlds in terms of state-expressing nodes from the trees. Sentences containing DO and Stit are semantically evaluated with respect to such joint possible worlds. Intentional joint actions are characterized in terms of the notion of “we-intention” (joint intention), characterized formally by means of a special operator.

Paradigmatically, a we-intention is a participatory intention of a group member to do her part of a joint action, together with the other members, while believing that there is a mutual belief (awareness, understanding) concerning this action. She takes her contribution as a means for satisfying the group’s end. When she intends to perform her share as her part of the joint action, she intends to perform her part and believes that the others will do theirs in circumstances of mutual awareness. She cannot we-intend to perform her part, unless she also intends to perform it with the purpose of the joint action coming about. The paper also discusses various reasons for introducing the notion of we-intention, and suggests that we-intentions have a central role in the basis of social theory or theories. In addition to the basic notion of we-intention, also conditional we-intentions are discussed. These are relevant for analyzing the notions of standing in reserve and free-riding. The paper provides an appendix that argues for the requirement that the we-intending agent needs to believe that the members are mutually aware of the requirements of their joint attempt.

People sometimes think in terms of ‘we’ referring to a group they belong to. When making decisions, they frame the decision problem as: ‘What should we do?’ instead of ‘What should I do?’.We study one particular approach to such ‘we-reasoning’, economist Michael Bacharach’s theory of ‘team reasoning’, and relate it to philosopher Raimo Tuomela’s distinction between ‘Imode’ reasoning and ‘we-mode’ reasoning.We argue that these theories complement each other: Tuomela’s philosophical theory provides a conceptual framework augmenting Bacharach’s theory, and Bacharach’s mathematical results support Tuomela’s view on the irreducibility of the we-mode to the I-mode. We-mode reasoning can explain some kinds of human cooperative behaviour left unexplained by standard game theory. Standard game theory is not wellequipped to deal with we-mode reasoning but it can be extended by the methods developed by Bacharach. However, we argue that both standard game theory and Bacharach’s theory require more attention to the information-sharing stages that precede actual decision making, and we describe a stage-based model of we-reasoning.