What distinguishes
an ordinary, individual action from a mere happening?
We can understand this idea by comparison with a claim about
ordinary, individual action.
What distinguishes genuine joint actions from parallel but merely individual actions?
For example, suppose the coffee in cup in your hand ends up all over my face.
This event might involve an action on your part, or it might be a mere happening.
What distinguishes the two?
Your intention that you throw the coffee at me.
One quite standard idea is that it is intention.
Where the event is an action, you must have an intention to throw coffee in my face
and this intention must be appropriately related to your action.
By contrast, where there is no such intention the event is merely an accident.
What distinguishes
genuine joint actions from parallel but merely individual actions?
Our intentions that we, you and I, cycle to school together.
\emph{The Simple View}
The Simple View
Two or more agents perform an intentional joint action
exactly when there is an act-type, φ, such that
each agent intends that
they, these agents, φ together
and their intentions are appropriately related to their actions.
Explain: ‘I wish I had done that’.
We are no longer talking about joint action generally, only about intentional joint action.
Compare individual action: much individual action is arguably purposive but not
intentional. Similarly, we might think that there are non-intentional but purposive joint
actions.
A further problem concerns the link between intentional joint action and intention.
Consider individual action. Bratman has good arguments for holding that actions can
be intentional under a description even when no intention specifies that description;
and he also holds that agents incapable of intending may nevertheless perform intentional
actions.
So it is conceivable that not all intentional joint action will involve intention.
In that case, the Simple View may not even be a fully general account of intentional
joint action.
I’m not going to pursue these issues yet, but we will come back to them.
For now I just want to note that, for all its simplicity, the Simple View raises some
tricky questions.
For now I am treating the Simple View as offering necessary and sufficient conditions
for intentional joint action, because I want to start with an ambitious claim.
But reflecion on the relation between intention and intentional action may force us to back
down later.
Explain: deviant causal chains.
