Abstract
According to a common claim, a necessary condition for a
collective action (as opposed to a mere set of intertwined or
parallel actions) to take place is that the notion of collective
action figures in the content of each participant’s attitudes. Insofar as
this claim is part of a conceptual analysis, it gives rise to a circularity
challenge that has been explicitly addressed by Michael Bratman and
Christopher Kutz.1
I will briefly show how the problem arises within Bratman’s and
Kutz’s analyses, and then proceed to criticize some possible responses,
including the ones proposed by Bratman and Kutz. My
conclusion is that in order to avoid circularity and retain the features
that are supposed to make this sort of account attractive, we need a
notion of collectivity that does not presuppose intention. I suggest
that we should make a distinction between collective and noncollective
activity merely in terms of dispositions and causal agency. There
are independent reasons to think that we actually possess such a
distinct causal conception of collectivity. It is not necessary for the
participants in a jointly intentional collective action to possess a
stronger notion of their intended collective activity than this. In particular,
they do not need to possess the concept of a jointly intentional
collective action.