Collective Action
I summarize a view about the general structure of collective action and shared intention that I have developed elsewhere (Ludwig 2016; 2017). However, the main conclusions reached will not depend on the details that separate it from other individualistic accounts of collective action and shared intention.
I distinguish between plural and institutional action. In plural action discourse, we use plural noun phrases as grammatical subjects of action verbs: we lifted the bench, they danced the tango, the girls teased the boys, and so on. In institutional action discourse, we use grammatically singular noun phrases designating institutions as grammatical subjects of action verbs: The Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation is constitutional, The Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1974, The British Eighth Army defeated The Panzer Army Afrika at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Since the subject positions are occupied by terms that refer to groups, there is a prima facie case for our conceptualizing the groups themselves as agents. I argue elsewhere that this is a mistake for both plural and institutional action. I have argued instead for the MULTIPLE AGENTS ACCOUNT of collective action.
MULTIPLE AGENTS ACCOUNT: Collective action is a matter of all the members of a group (and only them) contributing (in the right way) to bringing about some event or state.
Consider a simple plural action sentence such as [1].
[1] We lifted a bench.
This is ambiguous between a distributive reading on which we each lifted a bench and a collective reading on which we lifted a bench together. On the distributive reading, it is clear that we are saying that there is something that each one of us did individually, namely, grasp parts of the bench and exerted upward force, that led to the bench rising. What goes on when the collective reading is true? There is still just one event of the bench rising, but now there are multiple contributions to its going up. On the distributive reading, each of us individually does something that causes a bench to go up; on the collective reading, a bench goes up as a result of contributions from all of us (and no one else).
It follows from the MULTIPLE AGENTS ACCOUNT that collective action is not essentially intentional because while to do something individually always involves an intention to do something, we might fail to share an intention to do something together though individually intending to do something separately. For example, we may each intend to lift an end of the bench not knowing the other is going to lift the other end, and so lift the bench together without intending to do so.Institutional action sentences also turn out to be about what (the then-) members of the institution do. The agency of all members (at the time) is implicated in what the group does, though sometimes very indirectly, especially when the group employs proxy agents institutionally authorized to act in the name of the organization.6 We get a sense of how the basic account can be extended in noticing that [2] exhibits the same distributive/collective ambiguity as [1].
[2] The Supreme Court went to lunch after the morning’s session.
They could have gone individually or together. On the collective reading, it is a matter of each of them contributing to their lunching together. The same idea extends to the Supreme Court exercising its essentially collective constitutional duties. For example, [3]
[3] The Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation is unconstitutional.
just says that each justice (and no one else) contributed in their roles as justices to bringing about a ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation is unconstitutional—by each voting in a decision procedure that results in a ruling.
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