Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together

Abstract

We all agree that the ability to act together with others is a fundamental human characteristic, one that comes easily to members of our species and which is central to our survival and flourishing. There is less agreement about how to understand this evident fact. At one extreme, one could take it as a consequence of a capacity for strategic thinking, facilitated no doubt by suitable heuristics and shortcuts. Many economists would choose this option. At another extreme, one could take it as evidence that individual humans are often parts of larger-than-individual wholes, social selves, which can perform acts of which the actions of their component individuals are parts, on the basis of intentions and other states that do not reduce to states of these component individuals. This option, group agency, has been developed and defended by philosophers such as John Searle and Margaret Gilbert. Bratman's aim in this clear and careful book is to avoid both extremes by developing a concept of ‘modest sociality’ that links individual agents more closely than strategic thinking while remaining ontologically restrained in that it does not require plural agents or distributed states of mind. Modest sociality is constructed out of the intentions of individual cooperating people, and a central aim of the book is to argue that, if we understand intention and planning as he has described it in his earlier work, we do not have to do a lot more work to get the required middle position. He is not arguing that strategic thinking is unimportant in human life, or even that there could not be such thing as collective agency. Instead, he argues that strategic thinking all by itself is explanatorily inadequate, collective agency is not ontologically required, and modest sociality in many cases gets the advantages of both. So it is a concept we need.