Actions by Collectives Raimo Tuomela Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 3, Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory. (1989), pp. 471-496. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1520-8583%281989%293%3C471%3AABC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 Philosophical Perspectives is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.
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Philosophical Perspectives, 3 Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory, 1989
ACTIONS BY COLLECTIVES Raimo Tuomela
University of Helsinki
I. Introducing Collective Actions 1. We commonly attribute actions to collectives. Thus, we use locutions like 'Firm F produced the goods G', 'Nation N, attacked nation N2', 'The board dismissed Jones', 'The team scored', and so on. On the basis of examples like these it seems to be a worthwhile project to accept this commonsensical view at least in part and to think that true statements of the above kind can be made. I shall do so in this paper and investigate some central philosophically and conceptually interesting problems related to actions performed by collectives. I shall below be concerned especially with studying under what conditions attributions of actions to collectives can correctly be made. The commonsensical view that actions can be and are commonly attributed to collective agents does not-under my construal of common sense at least-by itself entail that such attributions need be nonmetaphorical, nor does it entail the existence of collectives as supraindividual entities (see Section I1 below). And if collectives are construed as real entities, it must be admitted that they are entities clearly different from single human persons-to which action concepts and other mental concepts apply in the first place. Persons have (biological) bodies and perform bodily actions in contrast to collectives. Persons have a full-blown mental life while collectives do not. It can even be maintained that a collective is not a self-sufficient agent (e.g., in the sense of being capable of performing basic bodily actions).
472 / Raimo Tuomela Except for a few comments, I shall not below undertake a proper defence of the above semantical and metaphysical claims (which I am inclined to accept as correct). Irrespective of their correctness, it is possible to argue that the actions of collectives are "made up" or "constituted" by actions of persons. Indeed, this will be a central general thesis to be defended in this paper. Let me formulate the thesis in a preliminary manner as follows: If a collective (consisting presently of the agents A],...,A,) does something X then at least some of its members, say A,, ...,Ak (k equal to m or smaller) must, in the right circumstances, do something XI,...,Xk, their parts; and in normal circumstances these parts serve to generate or "make up" X. (Strictly speaking, XI, ...,Xk will be parts of a joint action of A],...,Ak which need not be of the type X but which still can be taken to generate or bring about a token of X.) For instance, if one nation declares war against another nation, this may take place through appropriate actions by the members of its government, or its parliament or by its president. Or consider a hockey team's scoring. Some player or, perhaps players, did the scoring. Let us say that it was the "operative" members of the team (collective) who did it. The team's scoring was constituted by their actions. (Note that the statement about the team's scoring holds under different conceptions of how to define the membership of the team-cf. the players not presently on the ice.) At this introductory stage I shall not go more deeply into the question whether all kinds of social collectives can be said to act. Here we will merely assume that at least typical social collectives such as groups and organizations can be taken to act; this will be substantiated, sharpened, and illustrated in our discussion to come. 2. While the main task of this paper is to clarify what is conceptually and philosophically interesting in actions performed by collectives, I shall start by introducing the notion of joint social action. A central claim of this paper is that actions by collectives are closely connected to relevant jointly performed individual actions; it is therefore appropriate to discuss joint actions at this stage. In the way of a preliminary sketch, by a joint social action I mean an action performed by several agents who suitably relate their individual actions to each others' actions in pursuit of some joint goal or in adherence to some common rules, practices, or the like. Consider thus two or more agents' doing something X, say carrying a table or writing a book (linguistically, e.g., 'Tom and John wrote a
Actions by Collectives / 473 book'). We are interested in the interpretation under which they jointly or collectively (rather than distributively and separately) did X. Or consider the still better example, 'All the king's men surrounded the castle'. Here the organized action of surrounding the castle is an irreducible joint action. Joint social actions in our sense will include such diverse manyagent actions as carrying jointly a heavy table, playing tennis, getting married, greeting, asking questions and answering, conversing, and quarreling. Joint actions in this sense should be distinguished from actions performed by (single) collectives such as a group's solving a problem, a bank staff's performing its daily routines, a community's electing a leader, a nation's declaring war, and so on. But it is our central claim in this paper that actions by collectives are connected closely (and in a precise sense) to joint actions by the members of the collective. To comment briefly on the classification of joint actions, let us distinguish between the logically presupposed results and other consequences and effects of actions. For instance, the window's opening is the result of the action of opening the window. Then we may ask whether, or to what extent, the full result event of a joint action comes about or is generated causally rather than conventionally or, as I shall below broadly say, "conceptually." For instance, two agents' carrying jointly a heavy table upstairs is causally brought about by their component actions of carrying the table. Technically speaking, the results, say rl and r2, of the component actions causally generated the full result, say r, viz. the table's having been moved upstairs (by the agents' jointly carrying it). Although how "thinly" or "thickly" we conceive of the component actions affects the issue somewhat, it can be maintained that causal generation is all that matters here. But consider next two agents' toasting by appropriately lifting their glasses. Here the full result of the social action, viz. a toasting getting performed (r), is conventionally generated by the individual glass liftings (rl and r2), the results of the agents' component actions. Here we may assume that r is a mereological sum of rl and r2 and that the conventional generation amounts to a redescription (according to the toasting-convention) of r, +r2 as r. In many social actions (such as communicative actions, e.g. asking questions-answering) both causal and conventional (or "conceptual") generation play a role (see Tuomela, 1984, Chapters 5 and 6). Another criterion of classification concerns whether the original
474 / Raimo Tuomela agents themselves carry out the whole social action as members of the collective or whether at some point they employ some representatives or "proxies" acting on its behalf. For instance, if properly authorized, a lawyer may buy a house for his client. He then represents his client relative to that action. When a nation declares a war or negotiates a treaty it is (or its members are) represented by, say, the Cabinet or perhaps the Prime Minister only; or when a worker's union negotiates a wage increase this takes place by means of its representatives. 11. What Are Collectives and Can All of Them Act?
1. In this section I will discuss actions by collectives more systematically, starting with some linguistic and ontological considerations. The second subsection gives a brief classification of collectives capable of action on conceptual grounds. Ware (1986) discusses the nature of collectives and actions by collectives. His approach is linguistic. He presents an analysis of several different kinds of sentences concerning collectives and their actions, and tries to reach ontological conclusions, as it were, from such linguistic considerations. As he has many interesting things to say about the topic and especially about various kinds of collective action, I shall start by considering his discussion. To begin, consider the sentence "Marge and Liz lifted the piano." It can be given two interpretations, the distributive and the collective (recall Section I). The distributive meaning relates the sentence to the conjunction of two statements to the effect that Marge lifted the piano and Liz lifted the piano. The collective interpretation says that they jointly (rather than separately) lifted it. Ware claims that the collective interpretation refers to an aggregate, a "sum individual", which as a whole does things, without always involving all its parts. There appear to be several logico-syntactic differences between the distributive and collective interpretations. For instance, distributive interpretation satisfies the so-called principle of contraction while the collective interpretation does not satisfy it. Thus we cannot infer from "The boys carried the piano upstairs" (a collectively interpreted sentence) and "Bill is one of the boys" that Bill was involved. Analogously, the converse principle of expansion does
Actions by Collectives / 475 not seem to apply either without recourse to sum individuals. Ware, following Massey (1976), claims that the collective interpretation somehow requires, in the way of ontology, that such holistic phrases as 'the boys' or 'the team', or what have you, refer to aggregate particulars, "sum individuals", in a mereological sense. But it seems to me that one can do at least as well with a different individualistically acceptable ontological interpretation. The above kinds of linguistic considerations do not commit one to the sum individual- approach.' The alternative approach I have in mind is to have only single agents (and other needed nonaggregate particulars) in one's ontology and still accept that there are genuine collective (as well as distributive) interpretations of sentences purportedly about collectives. Consider thus the sentence "The group carried the piano upstairs." Let the group consist of Tom, Dick, and Harry, viz. these three persons plus some relevant social psychological relations between them (and towards the group or "us"). According to the present individualistic approach, the basic ontology required by that sentence is just these three persons, the relevant social relations (including their relevant attitudes towards each other and the "us") and their joint action of carrying the piano upstairs. (The ontology may also be taken to include the piano, upstairs, etc.) Here we have an individualistic ontology, one without social wholes. In a deeper investigation we would presumably want to investigate the logical forms of sentences about collectives, although I am not sure what the logic would be-over and above standard first-order logic together with some suitable modal extension of it. Given that, we may consider a Tarskian semantics for this language. In such a semantics the elements in the domains would be merely persons, their actions, and other mentioned kinds of things; and we seem not to need here the mereological sum as a "truthmaker" or "satisfier". Anyway, linguistic arguments such as Massey's and Ware's cannot succeed in giving ontological conclusions, for there is, so to speak, no direct, unambiguous route from language to ontology. Any language can be connected to the world in a number of different ways in principle. (To assume that there is only one way would be to accept a rejectable form of the Myth of the Given.) But let me nevertheless say that it seems that one always has available the mereological sum in question in these cases without costly extra assumptions (the primitive overlap-relation, or alternatively the discreteness relation, needed for defining a sum can be regarded as
476 / Raimo Tuomela readily available). In this sense the mereological approach becomes acceptable. 2. It is not necessary for the purposes of this paper to take a definite ontological stand concerning the nature of collectives. For linguistic reasons, we shall speak as if groups really existed (e.g. as suitable mereological sums of person-stages as Copp, 1984, suggests). Given the above discussion and our earlier examples we can now discuss what kind of social entities can act (and how). First, we have social "face-to-face" collectives (more or less) structure. Thus crowds, defined with respect to a believed common interest or behavior-stimulus, are a case in point. Crowds, aggregates, assemblies, spontaneous gatherings of people, and related collectives can be said to act in virtue of the members' actions. Here the members do not, or at least need not always be, taken to represent or proxy or act on behalf of the collective (cf. Gruner, 1976, Londey, 1978). Thus in a riot the members of the collective typically perform their destructive actions as members of the collective without acting on its behalf. So we are here dealing with groups without much or any structure (and division of tasks and activities), and in such groups the members are (more or less) interchangeable or symmetrically related with respect to the goals and interests of the group. On the other hand there are groups with structure. Often such structure is formally (e.g. legally) defined, in other cases it is determined informally (e.g. in terms of factually existing power relation^).^ For instance, organizations, institutions, and at least some teams belong here. Thus for example, a business corporation (an organization) is typically defined by a charter, by-laws, and by other related constitutive and regulative rules. This kind of formal collective acts via its organization, so to speak, and thus performs only "secondary" actions (in Copp's, 1979, terminology). The collective has positions to be filled by persons, and the positions are partly characterized by rules defining the roles of position-holders. The positions are not generally interchangeable (symmetric), and hence neither are position-holders with respect to their roles. That such formal collectives act via their organization then means in general that some position-holders (or possibly representatives of position-holders or representatives of such representatives, and so on) act on behalf of the collective. As noted, a collective may be given structure in a number of different ways. A division of tasks and activities may be created by in-
Actions by Collectives / 477 formal agreement (or by threat, force, or what have you), which does not make so much difference with respect to how the collective acts. We have distinguished between two modes of group action. We may then make a rough and ready distinction between three types of groups: 1) groups which can only act because some agents act on their behalf (cf. organizations); 2) groups which always or typically act in virtue of the members acting just as members of the group (cf. crowds); 3) groups which act in either the first or the second mode, depending on occasion (cf. a soccer team as i) playing versus as ii) receiving a prize bowl, with its captain representing it). In our earlier terminology, both kinds of active members can be called operative members, for it is in virtue of them that the collective performs its action. As to the capacity of a social collective to act, it does not seem to make much difference whether it is in some loose or strict sense face-to-face or whether its members (or positions) are interchangeable. The analysis of the actions by collectives to be given below is meant to apply to any social collective capable of action. Social collectives in the sense meant in this paper are commonsensically taken to be capable of action; crowds, mobs, social groups, teams, organizations, institutions, and so on are simply understood as having goals and interests, which they are disposed to strive for by means of their actions. Classes of people such as red-haired women or something similar of course do not qualify as social collectives in this sense. (But if red-haired women organize themselves into a formal collective, then, as far as conceptual reasons are concerned, that collective will have the capacity to act.) 111. Two Theses on Actions by Collectives
1. Given the above discussion of the various ways actions can be performed by collectives I shall formulate a general thesis on the nature of actions by collectives. This thesis, which is surprisingly simple, is meant to apply to all kinds of social collectives in principle, although I will here substantiate and test it only in the case of informal groups and simple examples of organized collectives. The basic content of the thesis is that a group's intentional action requires (ultimately on conceptual grounds) that at least some of its members suitably act and that as a consequence the group will have acted. These acting members, as earlier, will be called operative members
478 / Raimo Tuomela and they include representatives which are strictly speaking nonmembers, a kind of substitutes and delegates of proper members of the group. Consider thus the following general analysis of a collective's doing something X intentionally relative to some relevant circumstances C, to be commented on later: (CA) A collective, G, performed an action X intentionally in circumstances C if and only if there were operative agents A, ,...,A, of G such that A, ,...,A, jointly performed X intentionally (in a relevant sense complying with the criterion (IA) to be presented below) in circumstances C. This thesis analyzes intentional actions performed by collectives. Such actions are obviously as central in the case of collectives as they are in the case of single individuals. Thus, for instance, an intentional action by a collective is one for which it is legally and morally responsible. Our above analysis does not quite postulate group-minds (in analogy with the individual case) to account for intentionality, but it does implicitly postulate a kind of modern counterpart of groupminds, viz. we-intentions, to be shared at least by the operative members of the collective, as will be seen below. The concept of joint action that the thesis (CA) relies on requires some further remarks. First, as an important special case we technically allow actions performed by one single individual, in order to have unified terminology (cf. the President representing his country). Furthermore, we accept the following liberal usage: in the context of (CA) we need not be able to say that the operative agents jointly do X (even in the above wide technical sense) but only that they jointly (in the indicated technical sense) do something which will bring about X. What they thus perform could be a joint action Y, nonidentical with X. To see the reason for this consider a case of a state's entering a treaty where the operative agents jointly ratified the treaty and did whatever was needed; but of course they did not jointly enter the pact even if they jointly brought about that the state entered the pact. However, given these qualifications, we shall below, for simplicity, typically speak of joint actions whenever the agents jointly bring about some result. One further feature of (CA), worth noting here, is that because of the close connection (a non-accidental coextension based on conceptual grounds) it establishes between group action and joint action, some central properties attributable to joint action become
Actions by Collectives / 479 rather straightforwardly attributable to group action. Social power is one such property: if, in the context of (CA), the operative members have the social power to bring about X, then the group has the social power to do X. (Or so it can be argued at least, but we shall not here discuss the matter in detail.) Another feature, to be briefly commented on in Section 111 below, is that in the case of joint actions performable conjunctively as contrasted with those performable disjunctively the same distinction carries over to group action in virtue of (CA). The analysans of (CA) relies on the notion of (full-blown)intentional joint action. In order to characterize this notion we need (in my account, at least) to have an account of the intentionality of single-agent action. Put briefly, an action token u performed by an agent A was intentional if and only if there was a conduct plan of A such that A purposively brought about u because of this conduct plan (see Tuomela, 1977, pp. 320-325). In view of the above, I now propose for a joint action token u = < t ,...,b ,...,r > which may be assumed to exemplify a complex joint social action type (for a fuller discussion see Chapter 5 of Tuomela, 1984): (IA) A social action token u jointly performed by Al,...,A, was (fully) intentional if and only if there were (complete) conduct plans Ki, one, respectively, for each Ai, i = 1,...,m, such that AI,...,A, purposively brought about u because of the social conduct plan K = K1&...&K,, where each conduct plan Ki makes essential reference to a we-intention (not necessarily one formed prior to action) that Al,...,A, shared. In this criterion for intentionally performed joint action the technical notion of conduct plan is used, which is my explication and expansion of the notion of a plan of action. The notion of we-intention appearing in (1A) can be given the following rough and ready explication sufficient for our present purposes (cf. Tuomela and Miller, 1988). We say that a member Ai of a collective G we-intends to perform a joint social action X if and only if i) he intends to do his part of X, ii) believes that the conceptual joint action opportunities for X obtain (e.g. that the other operative members are going to do their parts of X), and iii) believes that it is a mutual belief among the participating members of G that the conceptual joint action opportunities for X obtain. (See below for a formulation of (CA) employing the notion of the content of a we-intention.) 2. As earlier, we allow that the operative agents of G (viz. those ac-
480 / Raimo Tuomela tive agents in virtue of which G's action actually comes about) may include representatives for G who are not proper members of G (cf. lawyers in the case of a corporation, for example). The satisfaction of the right hand side of (CA) entails that A1,...,A, performed some appropriate actions X1,...,X, such that these actions generated or probably generated (and thus "made up") X, and this involves bringing about the result event of X. Here generation is understood in the sense of "purposive" (or "intention-preserving") generation as technically explicated by the relation IG*(u,,...,u,,u), to be read 'ul,...,u, purposively generated u', of Section I1 of Chapter 6 of Tuomela, 1984, such that the agents' conduct plans involved a relevant we-intention and where ul ,...,u,,u tokened X1,...,X,,X respectively. As said, (CA) is meant technically to allow cases where only one agent acts as an operative member, even if then we do not have a proper joint action but only a single individual's action. Note, furthermore, that (CA) could also have been formulated in more linguistic terms, taking as the analysandum something like "G performed X intentionally", but I have preferred the so-called "material" mode presentation, assuming that that mode is not quite so material as to determine the ontological commitments of the analysis. Let us now consider in some more detail the distinction between the operative and the non-operative agents of G. We have said that the operative members are the actively acting ones (though possibly intenFiona1 omissions may be included in their relevant actions) in virtue of which the collective's action "really" comes about. Thus both the representatives acting on behalf of a collective and its (active) members acting just as members are included among the operative agents. To reflect on our distinction a little more, consider a state's making a pact with another state. This takes place by, say, the Cabinet ministers' agreeing to the pact and the Prime Minister's signing it. Most citizens of the state do nothing relevant here, we may assume; the Cabinet represents them. But the state would not act fully intentionally unless the (non-operative)citizens were (at least to some degree or in some sense) aware that there are operative agents acting on their behalf, although they may not know who they are and in what roles they act nor exactly what relevant act they are performing. (Imagine a secret pact made in the name of the state by the Cabinet members without anybody else's faintest knowledge of it: the state did not act fully intentionally, I would say.) In some
Actions by Collectives / 481 cases it may be appropriate to require the non-operative members to have a relevant conditional we-intention, where the condition might be that they are elected, or otherwise become, operative members, thus changing status from being non-operative ones (see Tuomela and Miller, 1988, on conditional we-intentions). We may now in any case say that, in something like the above sense, the distinction operative/non-operative is an epistemic one: in the case of intentional actions performed by collectives also the non-operative agents so to speak "passively" participate in virtue of having some relevant awareness of what is going on in the collective. I shall not here try to spell out more clearly what the required passive participation must minimally be nor shall I try to give an analysis of how the operative representatives of collectives are selected, for I doubt that this can be done without performing empirical studies of the power and information structures of various collectives. 3. What are the circumstances C that (CA) relies on? It seems obvious that they must satisfy the right social and normative constraints. Thus the treaty proposal a Prime Minister signs does not qualify if it is unlawful. But he can intentionally do everything which he has the authority to do and which, accordingly, does not violate the rolerules defining the position of a prime minister. Similarly the members of the governing board of an institution obviously cannot nominate somebody for a post, say, if the board lacks the authority to do so, but they can do everything the rules of the organization permit. So, in general, we should demand that the circumstances C be such that the following at least "prototypically" holds: the ought-to-be rules (saying e.g. what the administration ought be like), ought-to-do rules (specifying e.g. what the position-holders ought to do in various circumstances), and maydo rules (specifying analogously which actions are permitted) characterizing an organization should not at least be intentionally violated by the position-holders. If we concentrate on a single operative member Ai we may say this. Assume first that this agent is a position-holder in the collective. His actions as a position-holder are governed by some role-rules. A position may in fact be analyzed into a collection of roles, and roles may be characterized as conjunctions of role-rules-ought-todo and may-do rules- related to possibly several joint or single actions. Accordingly, positions can, for our present purposes at least, be viewed as conjunctions of role-rules (cf. Tuomela, 1984, Chapter
482 / Raimo Tuomela 8). Let us speak of "position-actions" in the case of actions satisfying (or "obeying") the position in question and of "role-actions" in the case of actions similarly satisfying a role related to the position. Given this simple schematic account, we can characterize the socialnormative circumstances C as follows. Concentrating on one joint action type X, the suggestion is to regard C as the circumstances satisfying the role-rules pertaining to X (in a sense requiring the agents to act in the right roles, performing their role-related actions). The latter are understood to cover the role-rules for Xi, whenever Ai is performing Xi as his part in the context of our analysis (CA), in the case of all i= I , ...,m. It is also implicitly understood here that C also comprises all the (prior) satisfaction conditions (or the so-called "conceptual joint action opportunities") concerning the performance of X (hence e.g. the conditions related to the joint satisfiability of the Xi's). Put in simpler terms, when performing Xi in the context under discussion, Ai is, at least in the prototypical cases, assumed to act in his Xi-related role, viz. to obey the role-rules in question, and the obtaining of C will be assumed to account for that. (If some action is merely compatible with the role rules in question but not in a strict sense required or permitted by them, that action has not been performed in the right social and normative circumstances C.) In the case of unorganized collectives we reason by analogy. In their case we may sometimes have a previously formed, but informal, division of tasks and activities, with accompanying expectations corresponding to the above kind of role-expectations in the case of organized collectives. Or there may be only an "on-the-spot" division of tasks and activities, and then the analogy with the organized collective may be only a dim one. But the circumstances C may in any case be defined analogously in the case of unorganized collectives, and when the division of activities and the conditions underlying it get dimmer (cf. crowds) so does C, but this obscurity lies more in the nature of the social phenomenon under discussion than in our conceptual analysis of it. This characterization of C, even if tentative, serves to handle at least some, perhaps all problematic cases which relate to the social and normative content of the situation. Suppose for example that president Koivisto reproaches the government for something. Then he is not representing Finland, for he is not acting in his representative role, which concerns primarily matters related to foreign affairs. But acting in that representative role he may sign a pact and
Actions by Collectives / 483 thus represent Finland. Note that acting in a role is not only a matter of performing appropriate kinds of actions hut also acting in the right context. Consider now the president acting as himself in a movie or in a play, where he signs a pact giving away Finland to Sweden. This case is not real because he does not act in the right circumstances although he performs the right type of action. I have meant my above analysis to apply at least to standard or prototypical cases. There are many kinds of borderline cases, which all fall more less short of satisfying the above conditions for C. And then the question arises whether they are close enough for satisfying the right social-normative conditions for the attribution of an action to the collective. Consider a case where a corporation supposedly buys a factory but where it was later found out that a legal mistake was involved. if the mistake was a minor one (e.g. a slip in a document) the case is close enough to the prototypic case to be rectified and to qualify as a sale, viz. an action by the corporation. But, to go to an alternative possibility, if the seller was later found out not to be the legal owner of the factory, after all, no change of ownership took place. Between these somewhat extreme cases (both of which, however, involve some kind of violation of C) the reader can invent all kinds of sophisticated examples. My point here is that cases of collective action seem amenable to an analysis in terms of prototypes (which I take rather unproblematically to satisfy C) and similarity relations between them and cases violating C. "Sufficiently" similar cases qualify or may qualify as actions by collectives, the others do not. By this I mean that the problem is shifted to evaluating relevant similarities (related to rules and descriptive properties of actions) case by case. Think of a case where a country militarily invades another country, but that it is later found out that no proper authorization, required by the constitution of the country existed (e.g. the Government never made the appropriate decisions) although it was a common belief that it did. Largely on the basis of the descriptive features involved in the act of invasion we seem justified to say that the country (at least d e facto if not d e jure) invaded the other country. As another example consider Finland's President Ryti's signing the so-called RytiRibhentrop Pact with Germany in 1944. However, Ryti acted in part as a private person and did not satisfy all the position rules concerning a president. He seemingly made a pact with Germany acting in a sense as an representative of Finland. While he seems to have made
484 / Raimo Tuomela the pact with the approval of the Government this pact was (intentionally) never taken to the Parliament to be ratified by it, and so all the position rules were not satisfied. Now the Finns did not consider this to be a pact between the two countries while the Germans did, and here we have a real life example of the difficulties just discussed. And let me end by suggesting that when making in casu judgements of relevant similarity factual, a posteriori considerations may have to enter, and I conjecture that even the relevant criteria for making such judgements (nor all the required data) may not be available before a satisfactory empirical investigation of e.g. various types of collectives and occasions for acting. I shall not in this paper try to clarify in more detail what the right normative and social circumstances amount to, and it may not perhaps be possible to do it without empirically investigating various types of collectives. Let me mention that Copp (1979) has discussed this problem, although in somewhat more general terms. Using his terms, we may agree that in the case of organized collectives, C must satisfy all the constraints entailed by the constitutional rules, laws and by-laws of organized collectives. Furthermore, in the case of unorganized collectives, C must satisfy relevant constraints concerning the composition and dynamics of, or patterns of interpersonal relations within, such collectives. These constraints form a kind of informal counterpart and analog of the constraining rules in the case of organized collectives. 4. 1 have here distinguished two different problems in accounting for the conceptual nature of actions by collectives. First, there is the discussed problem of giving the right normative and social circumstances C; secondly, a structural account of the relationships between the holistic, collective level and the individual level must also be given. I have concentrated on this second task. Accordingly, given the right C, I claim that (CA) is acceptable as an account of intentional actions by collectives. It also analyzes the sense in which individuals can bring about a collective's action and also the sense in which actions by collectives can be said to be constituted by actions of their members (and representatives). (See the analysis of the notion of constitution given in Tuomela, 1987). Before discussing the truth of the thesis (CA), let me formulate yet another relevant thesis which does not distinguish between intentional and nonintentional actions and which seems not to be affected by the difficulties we encountered in the context of (CA). The thesis
Actions by Collectives / 485 below connects a collective's actions, intentional or not, to its members' actions, intentional or not: (CA *) A collective, G, performed an action X in circumstances C if and only if there were operative agents A1,...,A, of G such that A1,...,A, jointly performed X in circumstances C.
I shall not here specifically discuss (CA*) except for noting that the concept of joint action we need in it will have to be the very broad one analyzed by formula (5.5) in Tuomela (1984). But, in any case, our discussion below will be seen to support this thesis.
IV. Are the Main Theses True? 1. Let us now begin our examination of the truth of (CA)and, in passing, also of (CA *). These analyses represent a kind of necessary coextension between macroconcepts and relevant microconcepts, we may say. But, apart from saying that the necessities can be argued to be ultimately based on conceptual considerations, I shall not here go deeper into that. Rather I shall regard these theses as philosophical analyses and take them to be necessary truths in the sense philosophical analyses in general can be so regarded. The if-part of (CA)can be falsified by finding cases where a collective acts intentionally but where still no operative members are jointly intentionally doing anything relevant serving to bring about the collective's action (viz., in our earlier terminology, the result-event involved in the collective's action). The only if-part can be falsified by finding cases where, in the right circumstances, the operative members jointly perform something bringing about the result-event of the collective's action but where the collective cannot be taken to act intentionally under the relevant description. Our task below is to try to find out whether there are such counterexamples to (CA). And the tenability of (CA*) can be analogously handled. While we shall below proceed by examining example cases, let me mention another approach, which I have pursued in Tuomela (1987). It claims that the actions by collectives are supervenient on the relevant joint actions of the operative members. While I shall not in this paper use that approach, it is interesting to note that it gives an equivalent of (CA*) as its central result, thus showing that there are two routes to the same end.3
486 / Raimo Tuomela To return to (CA), when an informal collective does something intentionally the intentionality (purported aboutness, purpose) of its action, loosely speaking, derives directly from its members' relevant joint action. Thus if a dyad intentionally carries a heavy table upstairs the intentionality of this action resides in the dyad's members' actions making up an intentional joint action. And these component actions by the members were guided by the same we-intention, here typically the we-intention to carry the table upstairs. The presence of this we-intention in all the participants serves to make the total joint action and, as a consequence, also the collective's action intentional in the full-blown sense of the notion. Let us consider this in more detail. The full-blown notion of intentionality is the admittedly idealized core notion from which all weaker notions of intentionality derive their significance. This full-blown notion is a core notion because of the analogy between the collective and the single agent, viz. we wish to view the collective as if it were a single agent. Consider a single agent's action X, e.g., his drinking a cup of coffee or reading an article. If X is intentional then it is purposively generated by his relevant willing-belief complex. This entails that the agent controls his action and is to some degree aware of it (or at least of the bodily actions involved in it). But to the degree that this kind of control over (and awareness of) the total action diminishes, the degree of intentionality also diminishes, ceteris paribus. To clarify the analogy, consider the following collective action. Some people (perhaps unknown to each other) arrive at a public meeting at which a foreign guest with a hard-to-follow accent will speak. How do the listeners seat themselves? As it happens (we assume) they leave the first three rows completely vacant even if the talk would be easiest to follow from these rows. Instead they fill every seat from the fourth row on. Every auditor surely acted intentionally, whatever reason each one had for his choice of location. We can yet argue that the collective did not act intentionally because the control and awareness afforded by a relevant we-intention was lacking. But with such an effective we-intention (concerning rational seating)assumed to be shared by every auditor, and with the resulting joint action, the distribution of vacant and filled seats would certainly have been different. What I am trying to stress is that a weintention, together with relevant beliefs, will make a collective an action-controlling unit comparable to a single agent but that such
Actions by Collectives / 487 unity in the case of fully intentional social action cannot be arrived at without a relevant we-intention on the part of all acting agents. This idea naturally gives direct support to (CA) at least in the case of informal groups where all the members of the group are operative agents. My claim accordingly is that in such cases a group's action is (fully) intentional just in case all the members of the group act on the same relevant we-intention. Had some agents acted without the we-intention, the group's action, say X, would not have been fully controlled and unitary and hence not fully intentional (cf. (IA)above). The case of organized collectives is more problematic. Consider a formal collective like a corporation. The intentionality of the collective's action seems to derive in the first place from the public, constitutive and regulative rules of the corporation, and especially from its officially stated non-personal plans, programs, decisions, and what have you, which the representatives (the governing board, executives, etc.) are carrying out. The problem with respect to the truth of (CA) is to make sure that the joint action referred to by its right hand side is performed for the correct reason, viz. the collective's formal reason which makes the collective's action intentional. If the operative members had performed X jointly and intentionally but for a reason different from the collective's formal reason they might have brought about an action of the kind X by the collective, but the latter would not have been intentional under the correct description. So we must require the same source of intentionality both on the left hand side and on the right hand side of (CA). Thus the content of the operative agents' we-intention making their joint performance of X intentional must be essentially the same as the collective's reason making its action intentional. Speaking somewhat loosely, we can say that the intention making the collective's action'intentional must coincide in its basic content with that of the weintention in question. (How to clarify the notion of content technically and how, in doing so, to treat the minor differences stemming from the possible singular first person reference in the collective's intention and the reference to "we" in the case of the we-intention I shall not discuss here.) It is worth emphasizing that my requirement allows that the operative members have different motives and different views about what the group should do provided that they somehow arrive at the same relevant we-intention. Consider group decision making by a voting procedure where the majority rule is employed. Applying the rule will result in the specification of the relevant part
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of the we-intention. In view of what we have above said about the close relationship between the intentionality of the collective's action and the intentionality of the operative member's relevant joint action, we can rewrite (CA), preserving its content, as follows: (CA) A collective, G, performed an action X intentionally (for reason Rg) in circumstances C if and only if there were operative agents AI,...,A, for G such that A, ,...,A, jointly performed X intentionally (for reason Ri) in circumstances C. Here Rg of course means the group's reason and Rj the relevant joint action reason. Rj can be taken to refer to the content of the relevant we-intention in question (but see subsections 2 and 4 below for potential difficulties for this view). Rg and Ri are to be regarded as basically the same, as argued above. (Let me point out here that my analysis (CA) is compatible with weaker senses of intentional joint action than the one explicated by (IA), if need for the use of such a notion is demonstrated.) Informal collectives can also act via their representatives. For instance, the members of a group may agree that a certain member will present the group's congratulation to a person celebrating his 60th birthday. Here the mechanism of group action is quite analogous to the case of formal collectives, the informal agreement and authorization replacing the rules of the formal organization such as the corporation discussed above. Accordingly, our theses are meant to apply here as well. 2. One can classify group action in terms of the tasks characteristic of the actions. I understand actions to be achievements which are responses to tasks, tasks-involving the occurrence of the relevant result-events; cf. Section I. An important classification principle is accordingly the structural nature of tasks. Collective actions may be classified as disjunctive or conjunctive depending upon the kind of the tasks involved. Let us call an action by a collective purely disjunctive if it suffices that one of the participating agents brings about the result of the action. Group problem solving can be mentioned as an example: the group has solved the problem as soon as one of its members has. A purely conjunctive social action would be one requiring an active contribution from every participating agent (cf. two agents toasting each other). Naturally, many complex real-life social actions may involve as their parts both conjunctive and dis-
Actions by Collectives / 489 junctive tasks.4 Let us now consider some examples of the different ways in which actions by collectives can take place, keeping in mind also the above conjunctive-disjunctive dimension. (Most of the examples in this paragraph are from Ware, 1986). First, there are many things a group can do that its members cannot. A choir can encircle a piano, a team can cover a field, rallies can form, fill the mall, and disperse without any of the participants doing this, solo. From the point of view of the above classification these are indispensably conjunctive actions and also purely conjunctive with respect to the operative members (note that not all of the members of the collective need to participate). Next, there are many things that groups do that their individual members could but do not do (understanding 'could' here in a weak, conceptual sense). For instance, a team can win a game without all of the members taking part in all the matches. And groups can do what only one or two members of the group do, for example, the Chinese team reached the top of Mt. Everest even if only two members of the team went to the top. These are obviously examples of disjunctive actions. A still further kind of example to which the conjunctivedisjunctive classification also applies is group action by institutionally determined representation, cf. a nation's declaring war. Consider now the truth of (CA) in relation to the above examples. First consider things a group can do but its members cannot. If a choir intentionally encircles a piano then its members surely must do their parts of the encircling, and those intentional component actions bring about the case that the members of the choir jointly encircle the piano: this is what the group's intentionally encircling the piano amounts to. How about things that groups do but that their individual members could do but do not do? A team with some of its members held in reserve can win a game. This being so, then of course the operative members jointly perform something, e.g. score a sufficient amount of goals, which in those circumstances amounts to the team's winning. In this sense the operative members brought about the team's winning. But note that a team cannot properly be said to win intentionally but only to try to win (intentionally), nor can its members intentionally bring about the team's winning although they can intentionally try to do it. Next consider cases where a group does (or can do) something when only one or very few of its members do it. Thus, for instance, a group may intentionally solve a problem when one of its members intentionally does it; and this accords with (CA).
490 / Raimo Tuomela Consider next cases where a collective acts via its institutionally determined representatives. For instance, suppose a nation (intentionally) declares war precisely in the case that the President does something appropriate which amounts to or brings about (in the sense of "purposive" of intention-preservinggeneration) the nation's declaring war. By taking the President to be the sole operative member, (CA) handles this fine. Note, too, that in more complicated cases of organized collectives the collective may contain subcollectives,whose actions will determine the collective's action. But even that presents no special problem to our analysis, it seems, for we can always go back to the subcollectives' joint actions and then combine them to get the whole collective's action via all the combined individual efforts. Of course we must then interpret the notion of joint action on the right hand side of (CA) broadly enough to cover this (cf. (5.5) of Tuomela, 1984, for a good candidate). But as far as I can see what was said earlier will suffice, although grinding out the same (or at least relevantly similar) intentional-making reason or purpose from all those (joint)actions of the separate subcollectives and other possible system-agents may not be so easy a task. 3. Ware (1986) compares single individuals and aggregate individuals, stressing their similarities. In that context he presents a (probably non-exhaustive) list of predicates applicable to both. In his analysis Ware presents five broad classes of predicates. His characterization of these is not entirely independent of his purported aggregateontology, but I shall try to ignore that, and consider here only how they apply to my above analysis of actions by collectives. First we have 1) cumulative predicates, which are characterized as ones depending on the cumulative contribution of all the parts involved. The social whole is said to have the property in question because the parts make a common contribution through a related property. As an example consider "The group met at Hotel Helsinki". This can easily be analyzed in terms of the group members jointly coming there at the agreed upon time, and this is the case irrespective of whether the mentioned group sentence is taken to be made true by an aggregate or by single persons as sketched in section 11. Next we consider 2) distributive predicates. Ascriptions of these distribute across the parts uniformly. As an example sentence consider "The convoy advanced". This is to be analyzed in terms of the ships, viz. the members of the convoy, jointly advancing, and seems unproblematic for (CA) (and (CA *)).
Actions by Collectives / 491 The third broad group is 3)predicates of agency. Among them 3)a) predicates of whole agency are used for ascriptions about what the whole does with all the parts being involved but without doing what the whole does. As an example consider "The assembly elected him". This example is analyzed in terms of the (operative) members jointly performing something which generated his being elected. Note that (CA) does allow that what the operative members jointly are said to do can be something "less" than X, but it has to bring about X in an intention-preserving way. Next we consider 3)b) predicates of contributed whole agency. Ascriptions of these concern the whole's doing something because of the crucial involvement of some part and with the uninvolvement of many other parts. As an example we have "The hockey team used the power play". Here the operative members are those on the ice and playing, but the power play action can still be ascribed to the whole team, and this clearly fits (CA) (recall our earlier remarks on this kind of example). As a third subgroup of predicates of agency we have 3)c)predicates of variable agency: what something does involves either the whole or some part doing it. As an example consider "Sonny and Cher sang ten songs". This sentence can be made true in a number of ways. Consider here only the interpretations where Sonny and Cher are regarded as a group, a dyad. This dyad's action or action-sequence can come about by Sonny and Cher singing together (in the strict sense) any number from one to ten songs and by their performing the rest separately. But also this entire action sequence counts as a joint action by them, for even when singing some songs separately they were taking part in an intentional joint activity generating or amounting to the dyad's performing ten songs intentionally. As the final subgroup of agency predicates we consider 3)d) predicates of necessarily partial agency yielding ascriptions which are about what something does because necessarily a part does it. Consider "The crowd lynched the traitor". As a matter of factual necessity at most only a few members can be physically involved in the hanging of the traitor, we may suppose. They are the operative members who intentionally jointly hanged the traitor and they may also be said to have intentionally lynched him (or at any rate their hanging him in those circumstances generated the lynching). (CA) seems not to be in trouble in this case, either. Ware's fourth broad group of predicates is called 4) reciprocal
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predicates. In this case there is reciprocity of parts in the sense illustrated by "The team conferred about their strategy". Here parts of the team are involved, and it is not necessary that these parts be individual members. If subgroups are involved, then (CA) must first be applied to them (cf. predicates of contributed whole agency), and then be used for the whole team. And here we take the operative members to be all the members of the team or, if parts are involved, only the operative members belonging to those parts. The fifth broad group of predicates are the 5) predicates o f composition. These predicates give the constitution or composition of something. Consider the sentence "The band marched in a heartformation". Here the individuals in the band are assigned specific tasks involving their positions, but no problems for (CA) seem to be forthcoming. 4. Our theses (CA) and (CA*))have so far gained support from this analysis of examples, and no counterexamples have been found. To end this paper, I shall present some potential criticisms of these theses. Let us first consider (CA). There are some putative problems that have to do with weaker senses of intentionality. (CA) requires full-blown intentionality, viz. that all the operative agents intentionally perform their parts with the same we-intention. But there are examples in which intentional joint action can be said to take place without all the agents' having the relevant we-intention (and acting on it). For instance, there are various kinds of cases where some of the agents are to some degree misinformed about the situation at hand, or simply lack some pieces of information relevant for having the correct we-intention. Let us consider a spy ring's activities. The ring intentionally steals some information without all of the participants having knowledge of the total goal of the operation. Here it might be the case that an agent intends to do something, Z, and knows (or correctly believes) that Z is a subgoal of the group. This subgoal-relation might involve the agent's believing that there is an action, X, such that were he to intend to do X he would in those circumstances be justified in intending to do Z. The agent's so intending to do Z might accordingly strongly limit the class of actions that the group can perform, and thus the member in question might well be acting "in the right direction" without being exactly aware of the specific action X the group intends to perform. In the above cases the group's action is to at least some extent intentional. In response to this kind of case I really must insist on the distinction between
Actions by Collectives / 493 full-blown intentional group action and to a lesser degree intentional group action. (CA) is concerned with the former. Its left hand side is concerned with full-blown intentional group action if and only if its right hand side is concerned with full-blown intentional joint action. Thus the kind of cases exhibiting weaker senses of intentionality do not directly affect (CA). It needs to be emphasized once more that the notion of joint action in (CA *) must be understood in a very broad sense which does involve the existence of a common goal but not necessarily the awareness of the operative agents concerning it (see the analysis (5.5) of Tuomela, 1984, for details). But even with this broad interpretation problems seem to arise. Let us consider one putative problem. I shall discuss an example which Werhane (1985) discusses also. This example of collective action, which seemingly provides a counterexample to our (CA *), is as follows: The American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) was recently accused of discrimination because it does not promote women and minorities to management positions. Whether or not this was a deliberate AT&T policy will perhaps never be fully decided, but let us assume here that it was not. Anyhow, looking at the pattern of company behavior, it is clear that women and minorities were not promoted. What really happened at AT&T I do not know, but the example at any rate helps us to see better the conceptual possibilities involved. At first glance, we seem to have here an action by a collective, viz. AT&T1s discriminatory action (or a sequence of such actions), which we assume not to be an intentional group action (viz. the collective did not intentionally discriminate). The corporative action of course takes place via some operative agents' actions, but nevertheless at least no intentional joint action by those operative agents seems to be involved (or so we assume, to make the case interesting). And could it be the case that not even unintentional joint action was involved? If so, isn't this a counterexample to the only if-part of (CA*), for the corporation did act, didn't it? Now in order for there to be joint action in the broadest sense (see (5.5) of Tuomela, 1984) arguably a "we-attitude" in a wide behavioral sense must be involved. That is, the operative agents must then, loosely speaking, at least behave or be disposed to behave as if they were pursuing the common goal of not promoting minority people. If that indeed was the case, which seems unlikely, I propose we say that AT&T nonintentionally acted in a discriminative way.
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(CA*) does stand in this case. But suppose not even such broad behavioral we-attitudes were involved. Then there was no joint action even in the broadest possible sense. I suggest we keep (CA*) and say here that the corporation did not really perform a discriminative action or pursue such a policy of action but rather that, discrimination was a consequence of something the operative members did while acting (promoting personnel) in their official capacity as position- or role-holders.The officials thus (unintentionally) performed discriminatory actions, but the corporation did not. It did not, because the operative members did not act jointly (even in the broadest possible sense of the notion). This is admittedly a borderline case, and I am suggesting we resolve it in a way satisfying (CA*). In this last case I am of course relying on (CA *) rather than testing it, but hasn't our principle already obtained much independent confirmation? When common sense intuitions are hazy we had better rely on theory. Our above approach concentrated on an examination of whether commonsensical and linguistic examples of actions by collectives fit the schemas (CA) and (CA*). As mentioned earlier, there is also another route-examined in Tuomela (1987)-to the thesis (CA*). This other approach proceeds in a precise technical framework in terms of the notion of supervenience and argues that actions by collectives supervene on the actions of the operative members of the collective, and this yields an equivalent of (CA *). Together these two approaches to the same problem, by ending with the same general result, strongly indicate that that result indeed is tenable or at least worthy of more detailed investigation. Notes
1. Actually the mereological approach cannot simply take collectives to be mereological sums of persons. First, the members of a collective may exist before the collective exists (or before they have joined it); thus their sum before that moment has no intimate relation to the collective. Secondly, mereological sums change with the change in persons involved in the sum, but collectives typically do not so change. One may try to repair this by taking collectives to be sums of "person-stages" over time such that the sum-stages at different time points are suitably structurally related or exhibit suitable unity. This idea has been explored and accepted in a lucid paper by Copp (1984).
Actions by Collectives / 495 2. We are dealing with two different dimensions here, viz. a) degree of organization and b) degree of formality. Collectives can be organized to different degrees and also their organization can be more or less formal (cf. Copp, 1984, on this). 3. In Tuomela (1987) it is shown that the notion of supervenience can also be used to elucidate the notions of constituting (viz. that a collective's action is constituted by its operative members' relevant actions) and representing or, which amounts to the same thing, acting on behalf of a collective. 4. Let us clarify the conceptual nature of disjunctive and conjunctive joint actions and actions by collectives. For this, we must explicitly speak of the occurrence of result events. Let thus occ(ri)stand for r;s occurring. Then a purely or strictly disjunctive action by a dyad satisfies (a) occ(r) = occ(rl) V occ(r2), while a purely conjunctive one satisfies (There are disjunctive and conjunctive actions in weaker senses where the individual and total results do not satisfy (a) or @) but only e.g. a containment relation.) Here it is not necessary to distinguish between the result events of group actions and the corresponding result events of the joint actions of the operative members, given (CA) and (CA *). Note especially that viz. the occurrence of a sum rl +r2 (as in the toasting example of section I) is different from either rl's occurring or r2's occurring. Completely analogously Cases satisfying @) are easy to come by while cases with occ(r) = occ(rl r2) are not. Analogously, we may discuss, for instance, cases of conditional dependence where and cases where the occurrence of the individual results combine in more complex ways, truth-functional or not. (In the text we assumed that the conjunctive-disjunctive classification is the most central.)
References Copp, D., 1979, 'Collective Actions and Secondary Actions', American Philosophical Quarterly 16, 177-186. Copp, D., 1984, 'What Collectives Are: Agency, Individualism and Legal Theory', Dialogue XXIII, 249-269.
496 / Raimo Tuomela Gruner, R., 1976, 'On the Action of Social Groups', Inquiry 19, 443-454. Londey, D., 1978, 'On the Action of Teams', Inquiry 21, 213-218. Massey, G., 1976, 'Tom, Dick, Harry, and All the King's Men', American Philosophical Quarterly 13, 89-107. Tuomela, R., 1977, Human Action and Its Explanation, Reidel, Synthese Library, Dordrecht and Boston. Tuomela, R., 1984, A Theory of Social Action, Reidel, Synthese Library, Dordrecht, Boston, and Lancaster. Tuomela, R., 1987, 'Collective Action, Supervenience, and Constitution", forthcoming in Synthese. Tuomela, R. and Miller, K., 1988, 'We-Intentions', Philosophical Studies 53, 115-137. Ware, R., 1986, 'Conjunction, Plurality, and Collective Particulars', manuscript. Werhane, P., 1985, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.
