Shared Agency

Concept and Central Problems

Shared agency refers to cases in which two or more individuals intentionally act together—for example, when people walk together, play a duet, or carry a table. These activities appear to be more than just the sum of individual actions; they seem to form a joint action that can itself be evaluated as successful or unsuccessful, rational or irrational.

The central philosophical question is how to analyze the structure of such joint actions. Are they reducible to the intentions and actions of individuals, or do they involve a distinct kind of we-intention or group-level agency? Related questions include:

• What distinguishes genuinely acting together from merely acting in parallel?
• What kinds of intentions, beliefs, and commitments are necessary for shared agency?
• How does shared agency ground notions of collective responsibility and group obligations?
• Can organizations, corporations, or states be agents in their own right?

The topic lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, social ontology, and moral and political philosophy, and connects to empirical work in psychology and cognitive science on joint attention and coordination.

Major Theoretical Approaches

Philosophical accounts of shared agency are often grouped into individualist and collectivist approaches, with additional debates about the role of planning and normativity.

Individualist and Planning-Based Views

Individualist accounts attempt to explain shared agency entirely in terms of facts about individual agents and their attitudes.

A prominent individualist model is Michael Bratman’s planning theory. On this view, two people share agency when:

• Each has an intention of the form “I intend that we J (perform a joint activity J),”
• Each intends that these intentions mesh with the other’s plans,
• Each intends that they coordinate in ways appropriate to J,
• These attitudes are common knowledge between them.

Bratman analyzes shared agency using the same planning structures that underlie individual long-term action: intentions are organizing states that support coordination, negotiation, and mutual adjustment. The resulting “shared cooperative activity” remains fully grounded in the attitudes of individuals, without positing irreducible group minds.

Other individualist approaches vary the details—some emphasize common knowledge and mutual responsiveness, others focus on joint commitments among individuals—but they share the goal of explaining joint action without invoking metaphysically robust group agents.

Collectivist and Non-Reductive Views

Collectivist or non-reductive accounts maintain that some aspects of shared agency cannot be fully captured by individual attitudes alone. They introduce forms of we-intentions or group agents that are not reducible to I-intentions.

Margaret Gilbert’s influential view centers on joint commitments. According to Gilbert, when individuals form a plural subject—“we who are doing X”—they jointly commit to act as a body. This joint commitment entails mutual obligations and entitlements that none of the individuals could create alone. The commitment is:

• Irreducible: not the same as each separately intending to do X,
• Normatively robust: it grounds rights to demand conformity and to rebuke or feel resentment in case of non-compliance.

On more explicitly ontological collectivist views, some groups (e.g., corporations, political bodies) are treated as agents in their own right, with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions. These views draw on work by authors such as Christian List and Philip Pettit, who argue that group decision procedures can yield consistent, reason-responsive states that satisfy criteria for agency.

Minimal or Deflationary Accounts

Some philosophers adopt minimalist or deflationary treatments of shared agency. They hold that the appearance of a unified “we” is largely a matter of:

• Coordinated behavior,
• Stable mutual expectations,
• Practical convenience in description.

On such views, the metaphysical and psychological apparatus of robust group agents or special we-intentions is unnecessary. Shared agency is simply a way of talking about patterns of interaction between individuals who track and respond to one another.

Normativity, Responsibility, and Applications

Debates about shared agency have important implications for normativity, responsibility, and real-world social practices.

Normative Structures and Mutual Obligations

Many accounts, especially those influenced by Gilbert, emphasize that shared agency is not just a pattern of coordination but also a normative structure. When people form a joint commitment or shared intention:

• They may acquire obligations to one another (for example, not to unilaterally abandon the joint action),
• They may gain standing to make demands, complaints, or apologies,
• They may establish a framework of trust that stabilizes cooperation.

Planning-based views like Bratman’s treat these norms as emerging from the functional role of shared plans: given coordination needs and mutual expectations, certain patterns of deference, negotiation, and promise-like behavior become rationally required.

Collective and Distributed Responsibility

Shared agency also bears on questions of moral and legal responsibility:

• When a team succeeds, is the success attributable to the group, the individuals, or both?
• When a group causes harm—such as in corporate wrongdoing or collective negligence—can the group itself be responsible, or only its members?

Collectivist and group-agent theorists often support the idea of collective responsibility, where the group as such is a proper subject of moral evaluation. Individualist theorists typically explain responsibility in terms of individual contributions and participatory intentions, sometimes allowing for distributed or shared blame and praise without positing robust group agents.

Connections to Social Science and Practice

Philosophical work on shared agency interacts with:

• Cognitive science and psychology: studies of joint attention, shared intention in early childhood, and coordination mechanisms,
• Economics and political science: models of collective choice, coordination games, and institutional design,
• Law and ethics: debates over corporate personhood, liability, and the legitimacy of treating organizations as agents.

Applications range from explaining everyday coordination (walking together, playing music) to understanding complex institutional agency in governments, firms, and online collectives. Across these contexts, the central concern remains how to make sense of a “we who act” in a world of individual human minds.