Introduction
When several agents act together, they do not just act in parallel. Consider two friends who are walking together. What they do is qualitatively different from what two strangers do who merely walk alongside each other.
This is true even if the latter are strategically responsive to each other, trying to avoid bumping into each other, and so on (Gilbert 1990: 2—3). In the former case, there is one (shared) intentional action with several participants, each of whom is performing actions that are components of the larger whole. Each participant treats the other as a partner or a co-participant. The strangers, on the other hand, treat each other merely as agents to be kept at an appropriate distance. They perform distinct intentional actions. They are engaged in strategic interaction.There are several carefully crafted accounts of this kind of small-scale acting together, or shared intentional action, each of which is meant to capture the intuitive difference between contrast cases of this type (for similar contrast cases, see e.g. Kutz 2000: 78; Bratman 2014: 9—10). Typically, these are presented as accounts of“shared intention,” where a shared intention is whatever it is that glues the participants’ contributions together and distinguishes what they do from acting in parallel.1 Just like individuals who act alone or in parallel, people who act together are responsible for what they do. But what does this mean? And what, if any, is the moral significance of the contrast between acting together and strategic interaction?
In order to answer these questions, we investigate the connection between shared intention and collective moral responsibility and collective blameworthiness.2 In the next section, we set out how we use some key terms and briefly rebut some skeptical arguments against the very idea of collective moral responsibility. In section 10.3, we sketch Michael Bratman’s influential account of shared intention and illustrate the distinction between shared action and strategic interaction with two cases.
Here, we demonstrate that collective responsibility for outcomes is not uniquely tied to shared intentional action. In section 10.4, we then go on to argue that, other things being equal, the degree to which the participants in a shared intentional wrongdoing are blameworthy is greater than when agents bring about the same wrong as a result of strategic interaction.Our point of departure is the Strawsonian idea that the degree to which one or more agents are blameworthy depends on the quality of will they display in their actions (Strawson [1962] 2013). We observe that those who form a shared intention are more intimately involved in what they do and its consequences. More specifically, they are implicated in each other’s will in a distinct way, which is in turn normally reflected in their quality of will. In cases of shared intentional wrongdoing, we show that this will typically be reflected in a greater degree of blameworthiness. Although we focus on wrongdoings, our conclusion generalizes to praiseworthiness for doing the right thing together.
10.2