Jules Salomone-Sehr (Birbeck, University of London), former postdoctoral researcher at the CRÉ, publishes a new article entitled “Four Routes to Minimalism about Shared Agency” in the Washington University Review of Philosophy. 

Abstract

Most shared agency theorists believe that acting together is a matter of forming and enacting shared intentions. Not all agree, however. A growing number of dissenters have gone minimalist about shared agency by arguing that acting together does not require shared intentions and, hence, does not require the tight practical alignment between participants that shared intentions-based accounts assume. In this paper, I survey recent minimalist accounts of shared agency and explain four reasons why minimalism is attractive. One reason has to do with shared activities engaged in by agents with limited cognitive sophistication. Although such agents (e.g., infants) do not have the capacity for shared intentions, they nonetheless have the capacity for shared agency—a fact that flies in the face of shared-intention-based accounts and thus supports minimalism about shared agency. Another reason minimalism is attractive has to do with the vast number of participants and many institutional intricacies that shared activities sometimes involve. Workers on the assembly line might act together simply by sticking to their institutionally-defined roles in the production plan and thus may not have shared intentions, a fact that, again, supports minimalism. A third reason in favor of minimalism flows from cases of alienated participation in shared agency, i.e., cases where (under some conception of alienated participation) participants feel they are no more than cogs in the machine. A fourth reason concerns shared responsibility. Even unintentional and unwitting participants in shared wrongdoing might share responsibility for the wrongdoing in question, a fact that yet again favors minimalism about shared agency. Our non-ideal social world (that is, a world rife with unjust power relations) increases the odds of alienated participation as well as unintentional and/or unwitting participation in shared wrongdoing. Minimalism, thus, is best geared to illuminate shared agency as we know it under non-ideal circumstances.