Commitments and Shared Agency

Let’s now consider Gilbert’s and Bratman’s respective accounts of commitments and shared agency. The characteristics gleaned from SMARTPHONES in answer to The Agency Question suggest the following guiding questions around which to organize this discussion:^{20, 21}

(1) Are joint or shared commitments propositional attitudes, dispositions or some other kind of mental state?

(2) Are joint or shared commitments distinct from or reducible to individual commitments?²²

(3) What is joint or shared commitments’ normative status?

13.2.1 Gilbert’s Account of Commitments

Gilbert’s (1989: 183; 2000: 23-4; 2002; 2006a: 101; 2006b; 2013; 2014; 2018) extensive treatment of the role of commitments deserves special attention.²³ Before considering Gilbert’s view of what she calls joint commitment, let’s briefly consider the role they play in her account of shared agency.

So what is a joint commitment, according to Gilbert? To answer this question, let’s first con­sider joint commitments’ origin. Two individuals have created a joint commitment if they meet the following sufficient conditions: “If it is common knowledge in a population, P, that everyone in P has expressed his readiness to be jointly committed in a certain way, this suffices to create the rele­vant joint commitment” (Gilbert 2006a: 101). The members of, say, a community garden have a joint commitment to, for short, tend to their garden’s plants when it is common knowledge among the members that each and every one of them has expressed her readiness to be jointly committed to tending their garden.

Let’s consider this account in greater detail. First, what constitutes “readiness”? Gilbert (2006b: 139; 2014: 27, 30) suggests that an agent expresses “readiness” when she agrees to undertake an activity with someone else or even when she simply displays her readiness to par­ticipate with others by pursuing actions with them for which such willingness is a prerequisite. Here Gilbert focuses on how readiness is expressed, but it is useful to speculate on what readi­ness means for each individual participating agent. Gilbert provides the following answer:

It is not clear that there is any helpful way of breaking down the notion of expressing one’s readiness to be jointly committed. It could be said that one makes it clear that all is in order as far as one's own will is concerned for the creation of the relevant joint commitment.

(2013: 48)

With this point in mind, let’s speculate a bit more about what readiness involves. To do so, let’s consider what readiness means for individual agents. I take Gilbert’s view to require something akin to the following picture of readiness in the individual case: I express my readiness to, say, learn Italian if I am prepared to form an intention to do so and I have no conflicting plans (e.g., that I also intend not to learn it). Here, “conflict” need not only mean “logically inconsistent”; rather, it can be read more weakly, where any conflicting attitudes or plans would indicate that I am less than wholehearted, to invoke a phrase of Frankfurt’s (1998), with regard to the course of action. For Frankfurt (1998: 164—5), agents are wholehearted with regard to what they aim to do when they meet the following conditions: first, they are internally coherent insofar as their aims correspond to what they want themselves to want; and second, they have second-order volitions regarding what they want themselves to will.

Although this picture of readiness seems to apply to individual commitments, it can also be applied, mutatis mutandis, to Gilbert’s account ofjoint commitments.

Given this description of readiness, it would seem that Gilbertian commitments are what, in §13.1, I called volitional. Yet Gilbert (2014: 6) emphasizes that while “the process [of forming joint commitments] is psychological, the product is normative.”²⁹ This suggests that joint commitments are not, themselves, reducible to the individual attitude of being committed to φ- ing nor are they, themselves, jointly-held attitudes toward φ-ing; rather, they are states of affairs that supervene on or are constituted by the conditions for agents to be jointly committed to φ-ing outlined above.³⁰ This suggests that Gilbert would answer question (1) in the negative.

This picture of joint commitments suggests that they are not reducible to individual commitments, thereby giving us an answer to (2) above (Gilbert 2014: 38, 40—3). What makes joint commitments irreducible is their distinctive aim—namely, to secure the foundations for agents to act together such that they “emulate” a single body (Gilbert 2014: 118—19). Here “emulate” captures the sense in which individuals’ joint commitments are aimed at bringing about the state of affairs where they constitute (and maintain) a “non-collective body” (Gilbert 2014: 119, 41). In the case of the members of the community garden who are jointly committed to tending their plants, they aim to constitute a non-collective body insofar as each intends to bring it about that they tend the garden.³¹ But what does it mean that “they” tend the garden? That is, they aim to act together such that they act as though they were a single agent by way of the actions of each participant. This has the twofold result of explaining how commitments unify individuals’ actions while avoiding the need to point to a wholly distinct collective agent (Gilbert 2014: 41, 117).

Thus far, I have focused on the descriptive aspects of Gilbert’s view. To understand its import for collective responsibility, let’s consider its normative features. Gilbert (2014: 49—50) suggests that insofar as we are party to a joint commitment, we have obligations to follow through on it. But what sort of obligation? They create, Gilbert (2006b; 2014: 50, 276—7, 305; 2018) thinks, directed obligations to the other parties to the commitment, such that they are rights- bearers who can demand that it be fulfilled.^32,33 Since each party to the joint commitment is in this position and the commitment is jointly held, it follows that all parties are “answerable” to one another for violations of the joint commitment (Gilbert 2014: 40). Moreover, indi­vidual members cannot justifiably rescind the commitment (or even reject the sense in which it holds sway over each of them); rather, joint commitments must be jointly rescinded (Gilbert 2014: 40).³⁴ Returning to the community garden case, each member is answerable if they fail to tend the garden.

So in what sense are Gilbertian joint commitments normative? They are normative insofar as they establish the obligations (and concomitant answerability) outlined above. Notably, how­ever, this normativity is non-moral. I take it that Gilbert means that the obligation to follow through on one’s joint commitment to, say, go for a walk with a friend is not grounded in moral principles, such as those that say that we ought to keep our promises. The normativity in question is particular to commitments in that, like promises, they have the power to create obligations and, thereby, reasons to follow through on them.³⁵

13.2.2 Bratman’s Account of Commitment

Bratman’s (1987; 1999a; b; 2007a; b; c; 2014; 2015) account of shared agency stands at odds with much of Gilbert’s view, and his account of what he calls shared commitment is no exception (2014: 132). While he takes shared commitments to play a role in cases where agents already share an intention to engage in a joint activity, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for shared intention itself.

Consider one of his more recent formulations of the sufficient conditions for shared intention:³⁶

We are thereby led to the following somewhat compressed sufficient conditions for our shared intention to J: A. Intention condition: We each have intentions that we J; and we each intend that we J by way of each of our intentions that we J (so there is interlocking and reflexivity) and by way of relevant mutual responsiveness in sub-plan and action, and so by way of sub-plans that mesh. B. Belief condition: We each believe that if the intentions of each in favor of our J-ing persist, we will J by way of those intentions and relevant mutual responsiveness in sub-plan and action; and we each believe that there is interdependence in persistence of those intentions of each in favor of our J-ing.

(Bratman 2014: 103)

Take the case of two people dancing the tango. The tango dancers share an intention to dance the tango under the following sufficient conditions. Each dancer intends that they dance the tango (that “we J”). Each intends to dance the tango by way of the intentions of each other agent that they act jointly (that we J). Each correctly believes that they will dance the tango by way of these intentions and their meshing sub-plans (e.g., the particular dance moves required to successfully dance the tango). Finally, each of these aspects of their dancing the tango are common knowledge among them.

In outlining his view of the sufficient conditions for shared intention, Bratman makes no explicit reference to, nor does his view require, joint or individual commitment. In fact, he rejects Gilbert’s use of joint commitment to ground (even partially) shared agency. He does so for two reasons. First, he regards joint commitments as what he describes as “shared-intention- loaded concepts of shared activity” (2014: 46—7). Here the idea is that it is circular to draw on concepts that already contain reference to shared intentions (or similar shared attitudes). Instead, we ought to focus on individual intentions directed toward what he calls “shared-intention­neutral joint activity” (Id.), as in the case of two friends intentionally walking down the street with one another. Arguably, joint commitments are not fully neutral in this sense. Second, while Bratman (2014: 114—15, 155) acknowledges that there may be interpersonal obligations that arise in particular instances ofjoint activity, these obligations are neither necessary conditions for, nor are they entailed by, joint activity. Since Gilbert regards joint commitments, in the con­text of their role in shared intention, as entailing directed obligations, this is a second reason that Bratman does not adopt them.

Still, even if they are not necessary to explain what Bratman (2014: 3) dubs “modest soci­ality,” Bratman suggests that they figure in its more complex expressions (2014: 132—50; 2006).³⁷ To see their promise, consider Bratman’s (2004: 336—7) account of individual commitment. Individual commitments involve higher-order (e.g., second-order) forms of endorsement of first-order, volitionally significant attitudes (e.g., desires). These endorsements reflect, minimally, what we take to be reasons in favor of acting on the volitionally significant attitudes or, more demandingly, in light of overall policies for self-government.³⁸ This more demanding type³⁹ of individual commitment provides a starting point for understanding Bratman’s (2014: 132) account of what he calls “shared” commitments. The relevant kind of commitments that figure in some instances of modest sociality are those that, first, are shared and, second, play a role in the group’s shared deliberation.

Let’s consider each of these claims. First, these commitments must be shared because, Bratman (2014: 132) argues, they are made possible only by other, pre-existing shared intentions. Notice that this does not mean that commitments cannot be individually held; rather, Bratman thinks that the kinds of commitments that matter for shared agency in general and modest sociality in particular are those that piggyback upon shared intentions. Second, shared commitments represent a group’s policies regarding the weight they should give to reasons, matters of concern or values in shared deliberation (Bratman 2014: 132—50). They thus serve two functions: they organize and rank considerations, goals, side constraints, and values; they rule out some consid­erations as weighting considerations in shared deliberation (Bratman 2014: 132—3).

But why are shared commitments essential for understanding shared deliberation? For delib­eration to be genuinely shared, individuals must begin from some type of common ground. Neither common knowledge, nor individual policies for deliberation, nor even “public con­sensus” about values⁴⁰ will be sufficient, Bratman (2014: 132, 136) contends. By contrast, shared commitments explain how individuals can move from “more or less articulated rela­tive weights” about matters of shared deliberative concern to genuinely shared conclusions (Bratman 2014: 133). Given this role, commitments’ direct objects are the weights or policies we want to govern our shared deliberation. So, in the example of the community garden, Bratman would likely say that the members of the group have a shared commitment to weighting the end of tending the garden more heavily than, say, socializing with one another at their weekly gardening sessions.

With Bratman’s account in view, let’s consider how a proponent of a view like his would answer the questions outlined at the beginning of §13.2. Given the role that Bratman contends shared commitments play in shared deliberation, it seems clear that he would answer (1) in the affirmative. Shared commitments are at least partially constituted by individual group members’ attitudes regarding what they intend to do jointly with others and how they should deliberate as a group.

In a departure from Gilbert’s view, Bratman (2014: 8—9) would likely answer (2)—are joint or shared commitments distinct from or reducible to individual commitments?—by noting that shared commitments are an extension of commitments’ role in individual planning agency.^{41, 42} In this regard, we should understand them in terms of the commitments that each individual member of the group has with regard to how they should deliberate as a group. Since they piggyback on already shared intentions, however, the fact that they are distributive in this way does not entail that they are simply an aggregation of individual commitments.

This answer sheds light on how a Bratmanian would answer (3)—viz., what is commitments’ normative status? Given shared commitments’ role in shared deliberation, they have normative import, but not in Gilbert’s sense. While Gilbert takes joint commitments to be normative in that they entail directed obligations, Bratman’s view suggests that their normativity arises from the way in which they establish positive and negative constraints on deliberation that the group has voluntarily adopted.⁴³ This type of normativity, if indeed it is correctly characterized as such, is akin to the normativity of the requirements of rationality.⁴⁴

In light of these answers to the central questions about commitments, there is significant dis­agreement between Gilbert and Bratman about how to understand (individual, joint or shared) commitments themselves (Gilbert 2014: 122-6; Bratman 2014: 107-20, 134-6).⁴⁵ As we will see in the next section, their views also provide competing pictures of commitments’ role in collective responsibility.⁴⁶

13.3