Shared Valuing and Frameworks for Practical Reasoning

Abstract

Abstract Intentions, plans, and policies provide background frameworks that structure deliberation and practical reasoning. These background frameworks have a characteristic stability over time. They shape practical reasoning, sometimes by shaping what options are to be considered, sometimes by shaping what is to count as a consideration of significance in favor of or contrary to options considered. In providing such frameworks, our intentions, plans, and policies help constitute and support important forms of cross-temporal coordination and organization both within the life of an individual agent and socially, across different lives. This chapter extends the account of valuing to the case of shared valuing. It does this, in part, by drawing on the approach to shared agency that includes ideas of interlocking intentions as well as intentions in favor of meshing subplans. Shared valuing involves interlocking policies of treating, in ways that mesh, certain considerations as justifying in relevant shared deliberation and practical reasoning. This chapter also discusses individual intentions and plans concerning individual action.