Kutz (2000) Complicity (3) Acting Together

Kutz, Christopher (2000). Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

3.1 Introduction

Two partners plan to rob a bank. The first recruits a driver while the second purchases a shotgun from a gun dealer. The driver knows he's taking part in a robbery, although not a bank robbery. The gun dealer should have checked his customer's police record before the sale, but failed to do so. The bank is robbed, a guard is killed, and the robbers escape, only to be caught later. 'They committed bank rob bery," a prosecutor will say. But does "they" include the gun dealer, whose lax standards made the robbery possible? 'They conspired to rob the bank" - but does "they" here include the driver, who didn't know it was a bank they were robbing? "They killed a bank guard" but does it matter who pulled the trigger?

The general intuition I shall be exploring at length is that collective action is the product of individuals who orient themselves around a joint project. The particular form of the analysis I will defend makes use of the notion of an individual participatory intention, or an intention to act as part of a group. When suitably combined, individuals acting upon participatory intentions achieve jointly intentional action, and the group of which they are a part can be said to have acted.

3.2

In this chapter, I aim to give an account of collective action, collective intention, and individual participation in collective action. Indeed, I will argue that the first two items on the list can be explained by the third. But collective action (or joint action, as I will often refer to it) is a slippery notion: two drivers jointly navigate a four-way stop without crashing into one another; you and I play a chess match; a baseball team makes a double play in the bottom on the ninth; Exxon posts its third-quarter earnings; a hostile mob storms the Bastille. These joint acts involve very different kinds of groups, whose individual mem bers engage in very different activities, with different degrees of mutual interaction. I want to lay out the methodological structure of my approach to these disparate phenomena: I seek an explanation that generalizes over a broad range of collective acts, explains those acts in terms of individual mental states and, in particular, in terms of individual intentions and beliefs.

3.2.1 For Generality

Are the myriad forms of collective action in which we continuously engage susceptible to a single analytical account? We can easily iden tify at least five dimensions of variation in types of joint action, beyond the infinite variations among particular species of joint action.

1. the number of agents, ranging from the minimal two, to populations of hundreds of millions, as in general elections.
2. task-intricacy: Many coordinated activities, such as negotiating a four-way stop sign, involve few choices (I'll go if you wait). Other activities, such as conversing or playing tennis, involve great responsiveness, the evaluation of many options, and sophisticated individual skills
3. collective activities will vary in cooperative spirit. That is, some activities require degrees of goodwill, or willingness to put forth extra effort or incur extra costs for the sake of others (playing a team sport), while other activities can be conducted with little goodwill on the part of others (merging onto a freeway).
4. joint actions can involve different levels of agent autonomy, or individual (nonresponsive) discretion in how to perform one's task.
5. collective activity can be more or less egalitarian. Individuals can vary in the influence they actually or properly have over the direction taken by the collective, in choice of ends and means.

I will argue in this chapter that although various elements of organization and interaction are essential to particular types of joint action, most forms of collective action share a common structural feature: individual members of a group intentionally do their parts in promoting a joint outcome, or engaging in a joint activity.

Participatory intentions explain both the nature and possibility of joint action, and its distinctive normative contours.

I seek a general explanatory framework in order to make sense of the commonalities in our normative responses to individuals who participate in wrongful or harmful collective acts. Although forms of individual participation may vary greatly - from the role of a criminal kingpin to that of an investor in a predatory corporation - intentional participation generally shapes agents' normative relations to the consequences of collec tive action, as well as their relations to other members of the group. Because of their participation, agents can be accountable for acts and outcomes attributable to the group as a whole, as well as for acts attributable to other participating members.

3.2.2 For Individualism in the Explanation of Collective Action

Perhaps because as a matter of social fact we often hold individuals accountable for what groups, or other members of groups, do, it is tempting to think collective action is in some sense prior and irreducible to individual action. That is, accountability appears to accrue first to the jointly acting group, and then derivatively to its individual members.

This feature of our practices of accountability has suggested to some that individual action is also explained by collective action, so that, for example, my stepping left is explained by our dancing a waltz. On such a holistic view, individual action is seen as a product of a collective will (perhaps embodied in individuals), such that the latter explains the former and not vice versa.

By contrast, on an individualistic view, collective action is explained by individual intentions and actions: our waltzing is explained by my dancing my part and you dancing yours. Individualists typically claim that collective action can always be "reduced" to individual action.

The possibility of the reduction of claims about groups to claims about individuals.

Take the sentence, "Because Exxon posted a third-quarter loss, its share price fell." This sentence predicates an act of a collective entity, Exxon, and attributes an effect to that act. Methodological individualists suggest that such sentences may be replaced in many contexts, perhaps for the sake of social-scientific explanation, by sentences referring only to individuals and individualistic predicates, that is, predicates that do not relate individuals to social institutions.

Individualists would claim Exxon refers only to a set of individuals (some subset of Exxon employees and share holders); that the sentence could be replaced by a (very large) set of sentences about those individuals, as well as about individuals trading Exxon stock; and the best explanation for the lower share price can be deduced from sentences about those individuals.

Holists, in contrast, might claim Exxon's posting of a loss can only be explained by reference to a collective plan for notifying the public about the company's performance. Though Exxon's act necessarily involves the actions of certain company officials, a holist might say, their actions can only be explained by reference to the collective, insofar as the officials both conceive of themselves as acting as their institutional offices require and because their acts are only regarded as authoritative in virtue of those offices. Holists do not deny that individuals act; they deny that the best explanation of social facts is couched solely in terms of facts about those individuals.

Statements about collective acts may be rephrased always as statements about individual agents, because all collective action is explicable in terms of the intentionality of individuals - their motives, beliefs, and plans. If Exxon posted a third-quarter loss, then this fact may be explained in terms of the acts and intentions of individuals who saw themselves as acting on behalf of Exxon, as well as the expectations and beliefs of other individuals regarding what Exxon is and what acts it is capable of. Furthermore, the corporate policy these individuals saw themselves as promoting can itself be explained as the product of the deliberations and negotiations of and between individuals. Here the adequacy of such a reductive explanation is relative to a particular theoretical purpose, namely understanding the causal his tory of Exxon's act with the smallest gaps between intermediate explanatory events. Other purposes may be better served either by ignoring individual mediating events or looking to more distant original causes. For example, citing unrest in the Middle East might provide a better explanation of Exxon's posting a loss than would simply resting with unexplained facts about individual pricing and buying behavior.

My claim is only that individual intentional action always implicitly mediates the causal explanation of collective acts and events, not that referring to individual acts always provides the most useful explanation.

This very weak form of individualism does not generalize to any strongly individualistic position in the philosophy of the social sciences. Indeed, it is compatible with many moderate forms of holism. In particular, I deny that a full explanation of collective action can be given without reference to collectives or social facts, because refer ence to irreducibly holistic facts and entities must occur in an account of the mental states of individual agents.

For example, if a group overcomes free riderism and collectively provides a public good, the explanation may be that individuals accept fairness norms, modify ing their preferences. However, accepting an individualistic explana tion of the act does not commit one to the further view that accep tance of these norms is in any strong sense a choice of the individ uals. The best explanation of the inculcation and acceptance of fair ness norms might be nonindividualistic, for example, it might be a form of group-level evolutionary adaptationism.

In addition, many social groups cannot be reduced to sets of their members, because some groups can persist through changes in their membership (Exxon would be Exxon with a new bookkeeper). That is, certain structured social groups have nonextensional (or non mereological) identity criteria. In many cases, the identity of a group is grounded in individuals' dispositions to identify themselves (and certain others) as members of that group.9 In other words, group identity is explained in terms of individual participatory intentions. These dispositions include not just inchoate, romantic feelings of group solidarity, but a willingness to assume obligations taken on by other group members, to speak, decide, and act on others' behalf, and to deliberate about how to act so as to further collective plans and intentions. The identity of Exxon is independent of the extensio nal composition of its membership, for example, because newly ar riving insiders understand themselves to be joining the Exxon organ ization, and outsiders attribute representative authority to self proclaimed Exxon members.

3.2.3 Intentionalism and Functionalism as Methods in the Theory of Action

My account of intentional actions generally, and individual intentions in particular, is intentionalist and functionalist in form, and thus in keeping with a large body of philosophy of action.

Following Donald Davidson, I will assume intentional action is action (body movements) that is both causally and teleologically explained by an agent's goals, as those goals are embedded in networks of intentions, desires, and instrumental beliefs. Describing an action as inten tional is appropriate because of the logical and causal role of the goal in explaining the actions in question. Goals teleologically explain actions so long as there is a possible deliberative route from what an agent wants or intends to what the agent does; the agent need not actually have deliberated.

As long as what the agent does satisfies a goal nonaccidentally, an intentional action is performed, and the action is intentional under a description appropriately related (or identical) to a statement of the agent's goal.

Intentional actions that are a means to an end may be redescribed in terms of their ends, either as contributions towards that end, or, if closely connected, as realizations of that end.

My intentional turning on of a switch to light a room may be redescribed as my intentional lighting of the room. My opening the refrigerator to get the mayonnaise may be redescribed as my preparing to make a sandwich.

In the collective context, this aspect of intentional action allows us to re-describe individual contributions in terms of a collective end: The musician, for example, is not just playing the viola, but is performing - along with the others - a certain symphony. The musician's intention to participate in a collective act, playing the symphony, both causes and rationalizes the viola playing, and so licenses our redescription. The possibility of legitimate redescription will be central to my account of individual accountability for collective acts.

Mental states in general, and intentions in particular, are defined by their role in a causal theory that maps agents' psychologi cal inputs (perceptions, intentions, beliefs, and desires) onto their outputs (actions, subsidiary intentions, further beliefs, and desires). Intentions mediate between agents' beliefs and desires (their reasons) and their practical reasoning and action.

Functionalists attribute content to individuals' intentions by interpreting their planning and action in terms of reasons that explain and rationalize that deliberative behavior. Although individuals are presumably introspectively aware of the content of their own intentions, we can also attribute intentions on the basis of behavioral observations coupled with a general theory of human rationality.19 Because func tionalists identify the content of intentions according to the best in terpretation (or most coherent theory) they can offer of agents7 plan ning, dispositions, and behavior, functionalist analyses deny a strong first-person epistemological privilege. Other interpreters may be in equally good positions to make sense of an individual's behavior.

Functionalists may, therefore, ascribe intentions in virtue of uncon scious or explicitly disavowed goals and motives if an interpretation making use of those motives is better than the interpretations offered by agents themselves. This point will be important in Chapter 5, when I consider those cases in which individuals claim to be alien ated from a collective activity, but in fact contribute to its realization.

3.3

I will defend an account of collective action in which what makes a set of individual acts a case of jointly intentional action is the content of the intentions with which the individuals act. In particular, I will argue that jointly intentional action is primarily a function of the way in which individual agents regard their own actions as contributing to a collective outcome. I call this way of regarding one's own action, acting with a participatory intention. In this section, I will show why participatory intentions are ineliminable elements of any account of joint action

3.3.1 The Necessity of a Collective Conception

This raises the obvious suspicion that there simply are no univer sal conditions constitutive of collective action as such, that collective action types simply hang together in a familial fashion. I will argue in this section, however, that all forms of collective action share a com mon element in the form of overlapping, individual participatory intentions. My strategy is first to try to elicit the individually neces sary and jointly sufficient conditions for a case which is under detailed enough to generalize plausibly, yet determinate enough to guide our intuitive assessment of the analysis. Then I will show whether these conditions remain necessary for other collective action types.

We can imagine cases of spontaneous collective action in which there is neither mutual responsiveness nor mutual awareness beyond what is implicit in the idea of a participatory intention - a conception that one is doing one's part in a collective project.

Consider first some examples that resemble jointly intentional action but are not genuine - examples where it would be false to say some group of agents jointly did G, where G stands for either a joint act or activity (such as playing softball), or for an outcome brought about by several agents (such as the performance of a symphony). You and I may go to Chicago together by happening to go there in the same plane or train, but it would not be true to say that we went to Chicago jointly if our coming on the same flight or train was sheer coinci dence.20 Jointly acting individuals do not merely act in parallel: Each responds to what the others do and plan to do.

Thus, our going to Chicago jointly requires that the presence of each of us on the plane or train somehow depends upon the presence of the other. Unless my choice of transportation somehow depends upon your choice (or my expectations regarding your choice), and similarly for you, we will not have coordinated our going to Chicago. Let us call agents' intentions strategically responsive if what they intend to do is sensitive to their beliefs or predictions about what others intend to do.

Joint action will often - and coordinated action will always - require strategic responsiveness: Individuals acting jointly decide to act, and do act, in light of their beliefs about other potential or actual joint actors.

You and I satisfy another plausible condition on joint action: We share a goal. Let us say two agents share a goal if there is at least one token activity or outcome involving the actions of the other whose performance or realization would satisfy the intentions of each.21 Both of us share the goal of going to Chicago on the same mode of transportation. Even competitive forms of joint action involve some shared goal. You and I may each be trying to beat the other at chess, and hence no ending of the game will wholly satisfy the goals of each of us. But, at a lower degree of resolution, there are some goals we do share: We each seek an orderly game with the other, played by the rules, and so on. If we did not share these goals, we could not com pete with one another, for there would be no background against which to assess the other's performance.

Sharing goals, in a sense that I specify further in Section 3.7, is a necessary condition across all forms of joint action.

Conversely, it seems that for our going to Chicago together to be joint, we each must believe it at least possible the other knows of or will try to predict our choice, and be favorably disposed to the other's knowledge or anticipation of that choice at least in the sense that no one would modify his or her plans in virtue of disclosure. As friends rather than spies, each knows or hopes the other got notice of the planned means of transportation, or was otherwise able to predict the other's choice. If, in fact, the messages did get through, or if we are able successfully to anticipate the other's choice, then each will be acting consistently with the other's preferences: our individual aims are furthered rather than frustrated by the other's awareness. So for our trip to be a joint production, each must not only act in light of beliefs about the other's plan, but each must also be favorably disposed towards the other's possible knowledge of this strategic sensitivity. More simply, each must be open to the possibility of joint action. Call this a condition of mutual openness concerning our interaction. Mutual openness is a much weaker condition than common knowledge of our situation: it can accommodate those cases of joint action that come off despite inchoate expectations about the other's plans or awareness.22 Yet it is strong enough to exclude cases of fully adverse strategic interaction, cases like the spy example that are not plausibly regarded as joint.

By contrast, if we are friends trying to go to Chicago together, our goals will not be fully satisfied by a third party's intervention. For we do not (presumably) simply want it to be the case that we arrive in Chicago on the same plane. Rather, we want our traveling together to be the product of the decision of each. That is, we go to Chicago jointly when we go there together, and our going there together is the product of each of us acting with an intention of contributing to our joint project of getting to Chicago together. We act jointly when we act as members of a group who act together.