Shared and Institutional Agency: Toward a Planning Theory of Human Practical Organization

Abstract

What grounds the capacity of human agents to engage in individual, temporally extended activity (e.g. a philosopher writing a book), small-scale social interaction (e.g. two people having a conversation together), and large-scale, rule-guided organised institutional action (e.g. a non-profit medical supply organisation sending medical aid to a certain country)? According to Bratman's new book, it is our ‘capacity for planning agency’ (p. xv). In developing his proposal, Bratman claims, on the one hand, that planning agency is continuous (conceptually, psychologically, metaphysically, and normatively) within these three levels of (individual temporally extended, small-scale social, and large-scale institutional) human practical organisation (pp. 111–3), and, on the other, that this provides ‘defeasible’ support for a reductionist, though not an eliminativist, account of social and institutional agency (pp. 179, 201). While I believe that Bratman's project deserves serious attention, I do not think that his book delivers on its promises. After summarising its content, I will show that his idea that planning agency plays a crucial role in the organisational structure of institutions and institutional agency is in need of further justification.