Putative Authority and Shared Action
Normally, you decide whether to do some action ô by considering the reasons for and against φ. Things are different, though, when you decide what to do in response to someone you believe to be authorized to tell you what to do with respect to φ.
The reason to do φ in such a case derives not from the merits of φ itself, but from the very fact that the authority has a claim against you that you do φ. H.L.A. Hart points out that regardless of how widely authorities differ in what they require of us, they all provide us with the same reason for compliance: the very fact that the authority has a claim against us that we so act (Hart, 1990, p. 101).4 In addition, the putative authority’s claim against you that you do φ provides a reason to exclude certain competing first-order reasons from further deliberation pertaining to φ. (The authoritative claim does not exclude all competing reasons, however; the zone of exclusion varies with the command and the context in which it is given.)5 The combination of the first-order reason to act in accordance with the authoritative claim against you, and the second-order reason to exclude from deliberation certain competing first-order reasons, yields what Joseph Raz calls a protected reason (Raz, 1977; Raz, 1990, pp. 35—84).Deference to authority, then, requires doing what the authority commands precisely because the authority commands it. In this respect, the commands of an authority serve to ‘settle the matter’ for you within a particular domain of conduct. To be clear, though, someone you believe to have authority over you needn’t actually issue a command that you do φ in order for you to have what you take to be a protected reason to do φ. It is enough if you believe that, in virtue of the person’s authority over you — that she has a claim against you that you do φ.
There is, of course, a vast literature on what constitutes legitimate authority, and even whether such authority is possible, especially in the context of whether governments are justified in compelling its citizens to obey laws. But here I limit myself to authority between individuals. Suppose you accept a promise I made. The reasons to fulfill a promise are in general protected (see Raz, 1986, pp. 35—37). So, if I promise to you that I will do φ, then we both take it that you have authority over me with respect to φ, by deciding whether or not to hold me to that promise. If you decide to hold me to that promise, then we both take it that you have a claim against me that I do φ, where, by our lights, that claim provides me with a protected reason to do φ.6
I wiH argue that participants in shared action have authority over one another — even in cases of shared action among equals. In what follows, I focus on the two most influential accounts of shared action — the accounts developed by Margaret Gilbert and by Michael Bratman.
30.2.1 Margaret Gilbert’s Account
On Gilbert’s account, shared activity requires that each participant individually express their willingness to be committed with others to act as a body, thereby resulting in a ‘joint commitment.’ The participants thereby form a ‘plural subject’ (Gilbert, 2006, p. 134). I will use an example to explain what each of these terms means.
Suppose you and I agree to bake a cake for our colleague’s potluck. Each of us does not individually agree to bake our colleague a cake; that would result in two cakes. Instead, we each individually express willingness to be committed to baking a cake together. It is in this respect that we ‘act as a body’ — we coordinate our efforts in furtherance of baking the cake as would a single individual. By doing so we together form a ‘plural subject’ — an entity to which intentional action and propositional attitudes can be attributed (Gilbert, 2006, p.
145).On this account, a joint commitment is not the aggregate of a commitment I make to you and of a commitment you make to me. Instead, a joint commitment is a commitment we both become party to, when I express my willingness to bake the cake with you and you express your willingness to do the same. Though the commitment is held by a plural subject, this does not mean that the commitment is held by a “single centre of consciousness” or a “distinctive form of ‘subjectivity’ ” (Gilbert, 2006, p. 134). Instead, the commitment is held, simply, by those bound to it — me and you.
On Gilbert’s view, joint commitments entail a normative relationship between the individuals who are party to the commitment. By forming a joint commitment, each of us is obligated to do his or her part in furtherance of baking the cake together. And each of us has a claim against the other that he or she do the same. If I neglect to live up to those obligations, you would be justified in rebuking me (Gilbert, 1990). Rescinding the joint commitment or otherwise releasing any individual from the requirements of participation requires unanimous concurrence from all the persons party to the commitment (Gilbert, 1999; see also Gilbert, 1990).7
Gilbert makes clear that relevant obligations are ‘directed’ in that if I fail to do my part in baking the cake, you have an agent-relative complaint against me; but it isn’t a moral complaint (Gilbert, 2009, 2008, p. 497).8 The relevant obligations are not moral obligations (Gilbert, 2009, p. 178). The result is that individuals party to a morally wrongful shared activity have claims against each other that they do their part even though these claims generate no moral reasons in favor of doing their part.
It seems, then, that on Gilbert’s view the merits of the joint commitments do not affect my obligation to you that I act in accordance with the joint commitment; neither does it affect your claim against me that I act in that way.
Put differently, once I’m party to a joint commitment, the obligation that I have to act accordingly does not derive solely from whether it is a good idea to do so, but from the claim that you have against me that I so act. By agreeing to be part of a joint commitment, I thereby grant you authority over me, which grounds a claim that you have against me: the claim that I do my part in the shared activity. Once I have agreed to be party to the commitment, I have a reason to act accordingly. Moreover, your claim against me that I do my part gives me a reason to exclude from the zone of deliberations certain contrary reasons that might otherwise be relevant. For example, the fact that I do not feel like doing my part ought not to serve in my deliberations as a reason against doing my part. The result is that once I agree to do my part, no further deliberation is practically required from me in the absence of new information.9 I have a reason to act in accordance with the claim you have against me, and a reason to ignore competing reasons. The result is that my reason to do my part is protected.It might seem strange to think that equals — i.e., individuals in a non-hierarchical relationship — can have authority over one another.10 But in shared activity, the authority I have over you and you have over me is only the authority that you fulfill the terms of the commitment you made. The claim that each of us has over the other is that the other do his or her part, sans phrase.11 Absent some further agreement, you lack a claim that I do my part in the way that you specify. If, in baking the cake together, you tell me to melt the butter before mixing, but my mother always told me to use it cold, you needn’t cease to deliberate and do as you’re told, since the authority I have over you does not extend to specifying how you are to mix the batter.
The upshot is that on Gilbert’s view, joint commitments by default establish relationships in which individuals party to that arrangement enjoy authority over one another which grounds mutual claims against each other that they do their part in the shared action.
Such claims yield protected reasons to conform with the joint commitment they have made.30.2.2 Michael Bratman’s Account
Bratman has developed a competing, reductive account of shared activity (Bratman, 1993, p. 11); Bratman, 1999, pp. 108, 129). It is reductive in the sense that he analyzes shared activity in terms of shared intentions, which in turn are analyzed wholly in terms of first-personal intentions held by individuals.
On this view, shared intentions are instantiated in an arrangement of individually held intentions across multiple persons. These shared intentions reflect the commitment each individual has to what they are doing together, rather than merely a commitment to her own role in those plans. Inasmuch, each participant intends the entirety of the shared activity. So, if you and I intend to bake a cake together, our respective intentions do not refer to our own respective acts but to the joint act of baking a cake. Put more generally, each participant has an intention of the form I intend that we J, where J refers to the joint activity in which the intending agents participate (Bratman, 1992). Though such an intention refers in its content to an action performed by a collective, the intention is still personal, in that the intention is held by an individual rather than a group (Bratman, 1999, pp. 122-123).
As participants in shared activity, the ordinary norms of individual planning agency — such as consistency and coherence — apply to our interpersonal intentions. So, for example, suppose again that you and I share an intention to bake a cake. We share this intention only if each of us intends that we bake a cake. But the norms of consistency and coherence require more than this. We need to formulate a complex of interrelated personal intentions that interdepend in the right way. In particular, our plans must mesh. That is, our respective intentions instrumental to or constitutive of our shared intentions — our ‘subplans’ — need not be identical, but they do need to be mutually compossible as a result of intending as much.12 The resulting set of interdepending individual attitudes composes a shared intention.
Each participating agent must intend that they achieve the activity together, in part because of the other participant’s corresponding intention; and it must be common knowledge between them that their subplans in furtherance of that activity are consistent.In discussing Gilbert’s view, Bratman rejects her claim that obligations are constitutive of shared action (Bratman, 1999). He admits that individuals engaged in shared activities will often create mutual expectations, which in turn might create moral obligations to fulfill those obligations, in accordance with something like Timothy Scanlon’s principle of fidelity.13 But on Bratman’s view, these obligations are incidental consequences of, rather than essentially intrinsic to, shared action.14 As such, he maintains that it is perfectly possible to embark on shared activities absent any such obligations.
If something like Bratman’s account of shared actions is correct, then they will not necessarily establish relationships in which each participant has an authoritative claim against the other yielding protected reasons for them to do their part in the shared action. This is because shared activity only contingently results in mutual promissory obligations among the participants. If the participants explicitly or implicitly promise to do their part in furtherance of their shared activity, then it is the promise, rather than the shared activity per se, that yields mutual authority among the participants. The fact remains, though, that typical instances of shared action will include implicit agreements among the cooperators. And since these agreements themselves yield protected reasons, the result is that on Bratman’s account, shared action typically yields protected reasons for participants to do their part.15
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