About the project

Many of the things humans do intentionally, they do together with others. Such activities are not mere sets of coordinated individual actions. Two friends going for a walk together are not like two strangers walking in parallel, each trying to avoid colliding with the other. But what is that makes the former case an intentional joint action but the latter a case of mere coordinated action?

Answering this question is important for a number of reasons. First, the ability to join forces and act collectively has played an important role in the evolution of the human species and also plays an important role children’s socio-cognitive development. What is it about joint action that has made it play this role? Secondly, many philosophers have argued that intentional joint agency ground attributions of collective responsibility. To understand under what circumstances it is appropriate to hold collectives responsible, we thus need a better grasp on intentional joint action. If this is right, then understanding intentional joint action will be of great practical importance, with the potential to inform legal and moral practice.

The project has three parts, focused on coordination, responsibility and knowledge.

Part 1: Coordination toward a common goal

Several agents who each want to bring about a single outcome can often each benefit from bringing it about together. With this in mind, joint action is typically characterised as a form of interpersonal coordination with respect to a common goal. Such coordination allows participants to achieve things that none of them could achieve on their own. Indeed, the ability to pool our efforts and act collectively has been a powerful force in the biological and cultural evolution of our species. We want to understand what this force is. However, philosophers have actually paid very little attention why persons must have a common goal and what it even means to have a common goal. To rectify this, I will answer the following questions:
- Why must agents have a common goal for their actions to constitute a joint action?
- What does it take for the agents to have a common goal?
- Must the common goal be some kind of “joint goal”, a goal that “we” bring something about?

Part 2: Intentional joint action and collective responsibility

Arguably, an account of intentional joint action should inform our best accounts of collective responsibility, and thereby also inform moral and legal practice. And perhaps our practice of assigning collective responsibility should constrain theorising about intentional joint action. Collective responsibility can be contrasted with ‘shared responsibility’. If you and I share responsibility over our bank robbery, then each of us is individually responsible for the whole joint activity and its outcome. Collective responsibility requires that we, as a collective, are responsible, even if neither of us is responsible for the whole activity. In this part of the project, the aim is to clarify what the relation is between intentional joint action and collective and shared responsibility by answering the following questions:
- If agents intentionally jointly do something, do they have collective/shared responsibility over it?
- Can agents have collective/shared responsibility over a joint action without intentionally jointly performing the action?
- Must participants have a joint goal to be co-responsible for a collective outcome?

Part 3: Plural agent’s knowledge

On the face of it, an agent has a special kind of direct awareness of what she is doing intentionally, awareness she lacks when it comes to what others are doing intentionally or what she herself is unintentionally doing. Could this hold regarding intentional joint action too? Plausibly, an agent cannot participate in an intentional joint action unless she knows, or at least believes, that she is trying to participate in such an action. However, the idea of a special kind of first-person plural agent’s knowledge may at first seem impossible, since it must arguably be in part based on one’s observational-theoretical knowledge of what other participants are doing in contribution to the intentional joint action.
- What would make it possible for there to be such a thing as first-person plural agent’s knowledge?
An answer to this question may provide a promising link between Part 1 and Part 2 of the project, since knowledge is a plausible requirement for both reliable coordination and responsibility.

Postdoc Olle Blomberg