Joint Action: The Individual Strikes Back

Abstract

Joint actions are actions involving a number of agents performing interdependent actions in order to realise some common goals. Examples of joint action are: two people dancing together, a number of tradesmen building a house and a group of robbers burgling a house. Joint action is to be distinguished from individual action on the one hand, and from the ‘actions’ of corporate bodies on the other. Thus an individual walking down the road or shooting at a target are instances of individual action. A nation declaring war or a government taking legal action against a public company are instances of corporate action. Over the last decade or two a number of analyses of joint action have emerged, of which John Searle’s is one of the most important.1 These analyses can be located on a spectrum at one end of which there is so-called (by Frederick Schmitt 2003) strict individualism, and at the other end of which there is so-called (again by Schmitt [ibid.]) supra-individualism. Roughly speaking, Searle is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. A number of these theorists have developed and applied their favoured basic accounts of joint action in order to account for a range of social phenomena, including conventions, social norms and social institutions. Moreover, a variety of arguments have been offered for and against many of these differing accounts. At the risk of oversimplification, I suggest that the tendency has been to eschew individualist accounts in favour of supra-individualist accounts, or at least in favour of the occupancy of hoped for anti-reductionist middle ground. In this chapter I defend a relatively strong form of individualism, namely the Collective End Theory (CET)2 against arguments emanating from the supraindividualists and from their fellow traveller anti-reductionists, such as Searle, who try to occupy middle ground. Individualism, as I see it, is committed to an analysis of joint action such that ultimately a joint action consists of: (1) a number of singular actions; (2) relations between these singular actions. Moreover, the constitutive attitudes involved in joint actions are individual attitudes; there are no sui generis we-attitudes. Here, it is important to stress that individualism can be, and in the case of CET certainly