Voluntary Groups, Noncompliance, and Conflicts of Reason: Tuomela on Acting as a Group-Member

Abstract

Raimo Tuomela’s work on collective action and social phenomena is extremely elaborate and well-engineered, it has matured and undergone numerous refinements over the last four decades, and it will continue to be a main point of reference in the debates surrounding the term “collective intentionality.” Already in the early 1980s, when – although this is somewhat speculative – only a handful of philosophers of action (not counting rational choice theorists) paid attention to the cognitive and intentional structures underlying cooperation, Tuomela and his immediate collaborators, originally especially Kaarlo Miller, embarked on the study of specifically social forms of intentionality, which lead, to mention just some of the highlights, to analyses of we-intentions, cooperators’ practical reasoning, social practices and institutions, collective responsibility, group agency and group solidarity. The breadth and depth of these analyses can hardly be reconstructed in one short commentary. Instead, in what follows I shall focus on the most recent statement of a centrepiece of Tuomela’s philosophical social theory and I shall seek to formulate a challenge to it that at least calls for further clarification. In particular, the following considerations centre on Tuomela’s account of acting as a group-member as it is presented in several chapters and passages of his Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (2013, here cited as “SO”).