Group Action

In this section we will give an account of the conceptual nature of actions performed by social groups and do it primarily by investigating under which conditions attributions of actions to social groups can correctly be made.

One of the central theses below will be that the actions performed by social groups are “made up” of, or “constituted” by, joint actions of persons. This thesis will be discussed and made precise below. Here is a simplified formulation of this thesis: If a group (with the agents A₁,...,A_n as its members) does something X then at least some of its members, say A₁,...,A_m (m ≤ n) must, in the right circumstances, do something X₁,.,X_m, as their parts of a joint action X (or of a joint action generating X); and in normal circumstances these parts serve to generate or “make up” X. Here, X₁,...,X_m will be parts of a joint action ofA₁,.,A_m, which need not be of the type X but which still generates or brings about a token of X. In the case of intentional group action, intentional joint action and therefore shared “we-intentions” by the agents will be involved (see Tuomela 2013: ch. 3). Roughly speaking, we-intentions are intentions of an individual with the collective content “we intend to do X” accompanied with the true belief that there are other agents similarly intending to contribute to the joint action, and thus the success conditions of the joint action are satisfied. From the we-intention the individual infers to his or her part action; we-intend to do X thus I will do X_i. A we-intention is a collective intention with “we” as its agent. A single group member can have a we-intention as one of the members of a collection or group of we-intenders. Consider: “We intend to do X together.” I as a member of “us” we-intend to take part in our action of performing X, and the same for the other participating members (see Tuomela 2013: 79 and 89).

Consider an example, say, a hockey team’s scoring. Some player, or perhaps players, did the scoring. We may say that it was the operative members of the team who did it and define that the operative members in the group relative to an action, X, are those in virtue of whose acting the performance of action X can be attributed to the group in this situation. We can also say in our example case that the team’s scoring was constituted by these operative members’ actions. When a hockey team scores we are dealing with the whole team of players being the group agent jointly causing the goal to come about. Although only one player ultimately caused the puck to move to the goal for scoring, the whole team of players was involved. They jointly intended, or so we suppose, to score. Joint intention means here the players intending together (jointly) to score. This kind ofjoint intending involves that the individual players are supposed to we-intend to contribute to scoring. So joint intending involves shared we-intention, where the sharing is of the strong kind involved in the members’ joint action with the same main goal, viz. to score and ultimately to win the match (see Tuomela 2013: 88).

More generally, it is a common situation in the case of groups with normatively specified positions that some of those positions and their holders are related to action in the analo­gous way and that the position holders thus designated as operative members are indeed operative members for a large range of actions, perhaps all the actions that the group in question is capable of undertaking. In such cases we need not always speak of specific actions in the context of group action, but may speak of operative members for all the activities or for some broad subclass such as decision making (or plan formation) and for carrying out decisions and plans.

As actions by groups will, in the core case, be analyzed in terms ofjoint actions, some (add­itional) comments on them may start our discussion.

Actions by groups are connected closely (and in a precise sense) to joint actions by the members of the group performed qua members of the group (see section 5.3). The basic con­tent of our general thesis on the nature of actions by groups is this: a group’s intentional action requires (ultimately on conceptual grounds) that at least some of its members suitably act and that as a consequence the group will have acted. Indeed, a joint action appropriately performed in the we-mode in the right social and normative circumstances by the operative members of the collective will be redescribable as a group action. Accordingly, if a group can be taken to be responsible for its actions, by way of this analysis we can speak of the members of the group being jointly responsible for such group actions.

This thesis analyzes intentional actions performed by social groups. Such actions are obviously as central in the case of groups as they are in the case of single individuals. Thus, for instance, a group can be regarded as legally and morally responsible for its intentional action.

The concept ofjoint action that our thesis on group action relies on requires some further remarks. First, as an important special case we technically allow actions performed by one individual, in order to have unified terminology (cf. the President representing the country). Furthermore, we accept the following liberal usage: in the present context we need not be able to say that the operative agents jointly do X (even in the above wide technical sense) but only that they jointly (in the indicated technical sense) do something which will bring about X and is believed by them to bring it about.

The present requirement applies to all cases with internal authorization, that is, authoriza­tion via the members’ commitment to the group-internal decision-making procedure, thus also to e.g. societies, which are collectives with involuntary group membership. On the other hand, in the case of teams, for instance, we need to require more of them in either all the members are operative members or the non-operative members stand “in reserve” in the strong sense that they may be called in at any moment and could equally well in principle have been selected as operative ones. In this kind of strong case we must require, it seems, that all group members accept or at least ought to accept the we-intentions and group beliefs needed for group action.

Given the above, there will be a shared we-intention to perform X (in our schematic case), and that involves the idea that the members of the group are collectively committed to bringing about X (see Tuomela and Makela 2016: ch. 3). But in the general case this does not require that all the members strongly “participate” in the satisfaction of the group will in question. Thus, in the case of non-operative members this involves not a commitment to doing one’s part of X but the commitment to supporting passively — or at least not overtly opposing — what the operative members are doing when carrying out their commitments, given, of course, that the non-operative members are adequately informed about what the operative members are doing.

We can now spell out our preliminary thesis in a more precise, although stylized form and arrive at the following formulation, assuming that — on conceptual grounds — acting for the group is a task rather than only a right of the operative members (we draw on Tuomela 2013: 163):

(IGA) A group g brought about an action or a state X intentionally (or alternatively, saw to it that X was the case) as a group in the social and normative circumstances C if and only if in C there were specific (internally or externally) authorized operative agents A₁,...,A_m for action in g such that

(1) A₁,...,A_m, when acting qua group members intentionally together brought about X (i.e., there was an action Y such that these operative agents intentionally together brought aboutY and this performance of Y generated X, and was correctly believed and purported by the operative members to generate X), or, respectively these operative agents saw to it that X;

(2) because of (1), the (full-fledged and adequately informed) nonoperative members of g, as members of g, tacitly accepted the operative agents’ intentional bringing about (or seeing to it that) X — or at least ought to have accepted it;

(3) there was a mutual belief in g to the effect that there was at least a chance that

(1) prior to action and to the effect that (2).

Accordingly, given the right C, we claim that (IGA) is acceptable as an account of inten­tional group action. It also analyzes the sense in which individuals can bring about a group action and also the sense in which group actions can be said to be constituted by the we-mode actions (essentially: proper actions qua a group member) by their members and authorized representatives (for a longer discussion, see Tuomela 2013: ch. 3).

What we have been analyzing above in (IGA) is group action in a sense involving the group as a whole. The exercise of the decision making system was claimed to involve the whole group. Especially, in (IGA) the non-operative members are assumed to have the obligation to (tacitly) accept what the operative ones did. In our view, proper group action requires at least implicit agreement or plan about relevant goals and views.

5.3