Joint Ability and Ignorance

Further, we might say that in such cases the joint ability of potential contributors to per­form an action or produce an outcome together is severely diminished. That is, there will be circumstances under which the success ofjoint action is so unlikely that a collection of agents cannot be said to have the level ofjoint capacity minimally required for ascribing an obligation to them.

Two agents, a and b, have joint ability¹⁶ to do x if there is at least one combination of con­tributory actions such that

• these are genuine options a and b have, and, if both are performed in the right way, they produce x;

• both contributory actions are compossible;

• a and b are capable of performing these actions with a view to combining them.

Let me explain the last condition: Joint ability is not mere compossibility. Rather, agents must — in principle — be able to willingly combine their actions. That is, they must be in a position to intentionally perform their contributory action as a contributory action.^{17, 18} There must be some reason for agents to form plural intentions in the most minimal sense as intentions the content of which is some collective endeavor (Ludwig, 2016).¹⁹ This is important, because otherwise we could ascribe joint ability wherever an outcome could accidentally be jointly produced. But surely, the accidental production of any outcome by some agent (or group thereof) should not be mistaken for a robust ability to produce that outcome where this robust ability is the basis for ascribing moral obligations.

Joint ability, then, is highly context-dependent and particularly sensitive to shared (or even common) beliefs.²⁰ As such, joint ability can be deliberately generated in a given collection of agents by providing information related to collective goals and contributory actions.²¹ In fact, public information campaigns concerning specific collective causes do precisely that: they communicate collectively desirable patterns of action and outline those individual contributory actions, which are most likely to produce the collective pattern.

In other words, knowing of possible joint initiatives to address collective action problems will reduce or remove propositional ignorance of the issue concerned. A person is propositionally ignorant of a proposition p if they do not know of p (Le Morvan, 2011). For instance, someone may have never heard of anti-microbial resistance and therefore will not form intentions to contribute to the reduction of such resistance by changing her dietary habits, for instance (Giubilini, Birkl, Douglas, Savulescu, & Maslen, 2017). Further, information campaigns may reduce or eliminate factive ignorance, that is, they may correct false beliefs on the matter at hand. For instance, people may believe that there is nothing we can do to stop run-away climate change, but we may learn that there are things we can each do that will have a significant impact on mitigating global warming (Blok et al., 2012; Dietz, Gardner, Gilligan, Stern, &Vandenbergh, 2009; Wynes & Nicholas, 2017). Factive ignorance, then, can also prevent agents from having reasons to form minimal plural intentions to perform their contributory action as a contributory action.

It is easy to see that in our main example, the case of the trapped motorcyclist, we will hardly need to worry about propositional ignorance. To each of the passers-by it is immediately obvious that the person is in need of help and that he must be pulled out from underneath the burning car.

In our exemplary case, there may be some factive ignorance as to whether the random group of strangers is in fact capable of lifting the car and extracting the driver, but in the real-world case, the passers-by were confident enough to try. The more immediate a problem, the less likely it is that agents are propositionally ignorant concerning that issue. Factive ignorance, in contrast, can have all kinds of causes, including emotional and psychological factors, and as such is often difficult to combat.

If we think that forming intentions to act depends on having certain beliefs (as I have been alleging) then interesting questions arise where we think that an agent or a group of agents can be held responsible for their suboptimal epistemic position. Take the example where a group of agents is factively ignorant of some harm they are collectively causing and they therefore continue to perform the actions that in aggregation cause harm. For instance, this was the case before the climate greenhouse effect was widely known. On my account, people who lived during the industrial revolution were not in fact jointly able to prevent global warming because their epistemic position was not such that they could have formed the intention to reduce (or abstain from) their fossil-fuel burning activities as part of an effort to prevent global warming.²² This is not because there were no (feasible or economical) alternatives to burning fossil fuels and neither is it because they were not (accidentally or incidentally) capable of preventing the release of massive amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but rather because they could not have formed the relevant intentions to contribute to a joint effort to prevent aggregate harm, because they were ignorant of that harm. In other words, their ignorance undermined their joint ability. But were they responsible for that ignorance? And if so, can we say that they were culpable for their lack ofjoint ability?

I cannot discuss here which criteria should make us consider an agent blameworthy of her ignorance, but will simply point to some of the literature on this topic (Le Morvan, 2011; Peels, 2010, 2016; Rosen, 2003; Zimmerman, 2016).What we may be able to say, though, is that where a proposition is public knowledge, agents will be less justified in claiming ignorance. A proposition is public knowledge if (a) most people believe that the proposition is true and (b) most people believe that (a) is the case.

18.4