Samuel Mortimer

Recent work on collective action appeals to a range of philosophical constructs to explain the difference between collective and individual actions—from joint or shared intentions, we-intentions, and participatory intentions, to collective beliefs and desires, mutual obligations, and so on. I believe this is a mistake. In this paper, I defend a deflationary account of collective action, which holds that the difference between individual and collective actions can be explained purely in terms of the behaviour of the participants. This account faces the challenge of explaining how collective action can be intentional if it is to be reduced to the behaviour of individuals: intentionality is usually held to distinguish actions from accidents (and thus, one would expect, collective actions from accidents), but according to some philosophers, individuals cannot intend to do collective actions. To respond to this concern, I show that individual agency can extend beyond the individual to encompass the actions of others.

Much of what we do, we do together. This raises the question of what moral responsibility individuals have for collective actions. Recent discussions have largely ignored the psychology of participants in collective behavior. Some people act through their collective as if it were a tool; some see themselves as mere cogs in a machine; others see themselves as helping their collective achieve its ends. I argue that these perspectives affect an individual's moral responsibility for collective actions. These perspectives vary independently of the individual's level of power, causal impact, or hierarchical position in the collective. Instead, they reflect the self‐narratives people adopt as they engage in collective activity. Narratives play an important role in coordinating collective behavior; they also have a deep and pervasive impact on individuals' experiences and intentions. I build on these considerations to present a narrative‐based account of individual moral responsibility for collective actions.

Two approaches to authenticity have gained currency in the recent analytic philosophical literature. The first takes authenticity to be a property of how people act (authentic agency). The second takes it to be a property of who people are (authentic self). This paper motivates both views, then argues that there is a dependency between the two: the exercise of authentic agency depends on the possession of an authentic self, while the possession of an authentic self relies on the prior exercise of authentic agency. On a particular, individualist conception of the self, this leads to a paradox. This paradox is resolved if one instead adopts a social conception of the self, according to which the self is partially ontologically constituted by other agents (a ‘we’, rather than an ‘I’).

Prior scholarly approaches to meaningful work have largely fallen into two camps. One focuses on identifying how work can contribute to a meaningful life. The other studies the antecedents and outcomes of workers experiencing their work as meaningful. Neither of these approaches, however, captures what people look for when they seek meaningful work—or so I argue. In this paper, I give a new, commitment-based account of meaningful work by focusing on the reasons people have to choose meaningful work over other options. I draw on philosopher Ruth Chang’s account of voluntarist reasons (reasons that arise from an act of the will) to argue that commitments can create distinctive reasons to pursue certain work. It is the presence of these distinctive reasons that makes work meaningful.