In 'Joint Action and Development', Stephen Butterfill argues that if several agents' actions are driven by what he calls a "shared goal"—a certain pattern of goal-relations and expectations—then these actions constitute a joint action. This kind of joint action is sufficiently cognitively undemanding for children to engage in, and therefore has the potential to play a part in fostering their understanding of other minds. Part of the functional role of shared goals is to enable agents to (...) choose means that are appropriate to realising a goal with others rather than individually. By offering a counterexample, I show that the pattern of goal-relations and expectations specified by Butterfill cannot play this role. I then provide an appropriately conceptually and cognitively undemanding amendment with which the account can be saved. (shrink)

Glowacki offers many new directions for understanding and even eliminating the problem of war, especially creating positive interdependencies with out-group members. We develop Glowacki's intriguing proposition that in-group dynamics provide a route to peace by describing a prosocial motivational system, the caregiving system, that aligns individual interests and eliminates the need to use coercion to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

Shared decision-making has become a new focus of health policy. Though its core elements are largely agreed upon, there is little consensus regarding which outcomes to prioritize for policy-mandated shared decision-making.

This paper assesses the scope and limits of a widely influential model of goal-ascription by human infants: the shared-intentionality model. It derives much of its appeal from its ability to integrate behavioral evidence from developmental psychology with cognitive neuroscientific evidence about the role of mirror neuron activity in non-human primates. The central question raised by this model is whether sharing a goal with an agent is necessary and sufficient for ascribing it to that agent. I argue that (...) advocates of the shared-intentionality model underestimate both the distinction between the target and the goal of a goal-directed action and the gap between sharing and ascribing a goal. (shrink)

Mind reading (i.e. the ability to infer the mental state of another agent) is taken to be the main cognitive ability required to share an intention and to collaborate. In this paper, I argue that another cognitive ability is also necessary to collaborate: representing others’ and ones’ own goals from a third-person perspective (other-centred or allocentric representation of goals). I argue that allocentric mind reading enables the cognitive ability of goal adoption, i.e. having the goal that another agent’s (...) achieve p because and as long as another agent has that goal that p. Having clarified the relevance of mutual goal adoption for acting jointly, I argue that when an intention is shared between several agents, each individual has an intention in favour of the joint action and one in favour of a joint mode of reasoning. This mode of reasoning is allocentric reasoning. Finally, I elaborate on the consequences of this view for the scientific study of human collaboration. (shrink)

In the current debate on economic rationality, Amartya Sen's analysis of the structure of commitment plays a uniquely important role . However, Sen is not alone in pitting committed action against the standard model of rational behavior. Before turning to Sen's analysis in section 2 of this paper, I shall start with an observation concerning some of the other relevant accounts.

Knowledge sharing is critical for consulting companies to develop sustainable competitive advantages. While the importance of KS in the information communication technology sector has been proved, the assumed linear relationships in KS mechanisms are confronted with KS dilemmas: consultants’ intention to maximize personal gains from KS resulting in restrained KS efforts, for fear of losing value after sharing knowledge with colleagues. Drawing on motivation theory and goal orientation perspective, this study examines the roles of learning goal orientation and (...) incentive schemes in KS among ICT consultants. The multiple regression analyses of 389 consultants’ responses from 14 Chinese and 8 Korean ICT consulting companies demonstrated an inverted U-shape relationship between LGO and knowledge sharing; incentive schemes moderate this relationship. The findings shed light on the knowledge-sharing dilemma, with theoretical implications to research regarding goal-orientation, knowledge sharing, and managerial practices about the motivation and incentives of ICT consultants. (shrink)

Human beings act together in characteristic ways. Forms of shared activity matter to us a great deal, both intrinsically – think of friendship and love, singing duets, and the joys of conversation -- and instrumentally – think of how we frequently manage to work together to achieve complex goals. My focus will be on activities of small, adult groups in the absence of asymmetric authority relations within those groups. My approach begins with an underlying model of individual planning agency, (...) and then seeks a conceptual and metaphysical bridge from such individual planning agency to modest forms of sociality. (shrink)

Shared decision-making involves health professionals and patients/clients working together to achieve true person-centred health care. However, this goal is infrequently realized, and most barriers are unknown. Discussion between philosophers, clinicians, and researchers can assist in confronting the epistemic and moral basis of health care, with benefits to all. The aim of this paper is to describe what shared decision-making is, discuss its necessary conditions, and develop a definition that can be used in practice to support excellence in (...) maternity care. Discussion between the authors, with backgrounds in philosophy, clinical maternity care, health care management, and maternity care research, assisted the team to confront established norms in maternity care and challenge the epistemic and moral basis of decision-making for caesarean section. The team concluded that shared decision-making must start in pregnancy and continue throughout labour and birth, with equality in discourse facilitated by the clinician. Clinicians have a duty of care for the adequacy of women's knowledge, which can only be fulfilled when relevant knowledge is offered freely and when personal beliefs and biases that may impinge on decision-making (defeaters) are disclosed. Informed consent is not shared decision-making. Key barriers include existing cultural norms of “the doctor knows best” and “patient acquiescence” that prevent defeaters being acknowledged and discussed and can lead to legal challenges, overuse of medical intervention and, in some areas, obstetric violence. Shared decision-making in maternity care can thus be defined as an enquiry by clinician and expectant woman aimed at deciding upon a course of care or none, which takes the form of a dialogue within which the clinician fulfils their duty of care to the client's knowledge by making available their complete knowledge (based on all types of evidence) and expertise, including an exposition of any relevant and recognized potential defeaters. Research to develop measurement tools is required. (shrink)

Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently (...) flexible to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action. (shrink)

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural (...) cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention. Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition. Key Words: collaboration; cooperation; cultural learning; culture; evolutionary psychology; intentions; shared intentionality; social cognition; social learning; theory of mind; joint attention. (shrink)

I defend the proposal that certain forms of work—specifically forms that are socially necessary but involve the imposition of considerable burdens—be shared between citizens. I argue that sharing burdensome work would achieve several goals, including a more equal distribution of the benefits and burdens of work, a greater appreciation of each other's labour contributions, and an amelioration of problematic inequalities of status. I conclude by considering three objections: that sharing burdensome work would (1) involve morally unacceptable constraints on freedom, (...) (2) be prohibitively inefficient, and (3) forbid mutually advantageous trades. I argue that none of these objections succeed. (shrink)

Research cannot be done by researchers alone. In most cases, additional resources are required, including human research participants, access to biodiversity for biological and genetic resources, or traditional knowledge. Benefit sharing has been part of global conventions and international ethics guidelines for over 25 years, predicated on the understanding that those who contribute to the research process and its outcomes should share in the benefits as a matter of fairness. This chapter explores the different understandings of benefit sharing in a (...) historical context, from the “Grand Bargain” of the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992 to the Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings in 2018, and examines the contemporary potential for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030) to facilitate benefit sharing. The discussion provides guidance to researchers, through examples and short case studies, on how to discharge the obligations of benefit sharing effectively and fairly, in pursuit of research integrity. (shrink)

Shared agency is of central importance in our lives in many ways. We enjoy engaging in certain joint activities with others. We also engage in joint activities to achieve complex goals. Current approaches propose that we understand shared agency in terms of the more basic phenomenon of shared intention. However, they have presented two antagonistic views about the nature of this phenomenon. Some have argued that shared intention should be understood as being primarily a structure of (...) attitudes of individual participants and their interrelations (Bratman, Searle, Tuomela and Miller). Others have claimed that shared intention should be regarded as being primarily a normative transaction which gives rise to interpersonal obligations (Gilbert). In contrast to these approaches, I propose a compromise view. I argue that shared intention involves a complex socio-psychological structure which ensures, in the absence of special circumstances, the existence of relevant moral obligations. My argument involves two main steps. First, I show that shared intention includes important relations of mutual reliance between the participants. Then, I argue that the existence of these relations of mutual reliance in shared intention helps us explain why, failing special circumstances, shared intention generates those obligations. This provides, in my view, a solution to the vexed question of the relation between shared intention and interpersonal obligations. (shrink)

Profit Sharing is one of the reinforcement learning methods. An agent, as a learner, selects an action with a state-action value and receives rewards when it reaches a goal state. Then it distributes receiving rewards to state-action values. This paper discusses how to set the initial value of a state-action value. A distribution function ƒ( x ) is called as the reinforcement function. On Profit Sharing, an agent learns a policy by distributing rewards with the reinforcement function. On Markov (...) Decision Processes (MDPs), the reinforcement function ƒ( x ) = 1/ L x is useful, and on Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), ƒ( x ) = 1/ L w is useful, where L is the sufficient number of rules at each state, and W is the length of an episode. If episodes are always long, the value of the reinforcement function is little. So the differences of rule values become little, and the agent learns little by using the roulette selection as an action selection. This problem is called as Learning Speed Problem. If the value of the reinforcement function for an action is very higher than its state-action value, an agent will not select other action. There is a problem when its action is not a optimal action. This problem is called as Past Experiences Problem. This paper shows that both Learning Speed Problem and Past Experiences Problem are caused by the bad setting between the initial values of a state-action values and the function values of a reinforcement function. We propose how to set the initial values of a state-action values at each state. The experiment shows that an agent can learn correctly even if the length of episode is large. And shows the effectiveness on both MDPs and POMDPs. Our proposed method focuses on the initialization of state-action values and does not limit reinforcement functions. So it can apply to any reinforcement function. (shrink)

This article argues that such large-scale cases of crowd behavior as the Mexican Wave ( La Ola) constitute forms of shared intentionality which cannot be explained solely with the use of the standard intentionalistic ontology. It claims that such unique forms of collective intentionality require a hybrid explanatory lens in which an account of shared goals, intentions, and other propositional attitudes is combined with an account of the motor psychology of collective agents. The paper describes in detail the (...) intentionalistic ontology of La Ola and discusses the conditions of cooperation it meets. The discussion allows the author to defend the view that large-scale collective intentionality can be based on automaticity to a significant degree: to properly understand such phenomena like La Ola, the idea of probabilistically interpreted decisions and propensities to act should give way to the automatic aspects of behavior. This paves the way for future studies in the philosophy of action to fully recognize the role of automatic performances at the level of collective actions just as they do for individual actions. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social norm psychology. More precisely, I want to show how the emergence of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make social normative judgments is connected to the lineage explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of the (...) developmental trajectory of this capacity. For this purpose, the thesis is organized as follow. In the first chapter, I make some methodological remarks and provide the general overview and plan for the dissertation. In the second chapter, I explain what my explanatory target is and why it matters. On the view I am defending, shared intentional psychology gives rise to a special form of psychology that enables us to engage in social normative thinking. These norms are represented as shared intentional states. Moral psychology, in contrast, is more diverse. For moral judgments define a quite heterogeneous class of mental states—although some moral judgments may involve the representation and execution of norms, certainly not all of them do. I show that although much of our distinctive social norm psychology can be explained within the framework of shared intentionality, moral judgments cannot be unified in the same way. In the third chapter, I provide the baseline of social-cognitive capacities that serve as starting point for my lineage explanation. I argue that hominin social cognition was for a very long period of our evolutionary history essentially a matter of low-level cognitive and motivational processes. On this picture, bottom-up affective processes regulated the social lives of early hominins without requiring any special top-down mechanism of normative thinking such as a capacity for understanding and representing social norms. In the fourth chapter, I argue that human-like social norm psychology evolved as a result of the selective pressures that gave rise to shared intentionality, especially the demands that came from collective hunting. Yet collective hunting was not the whole story of the evolution of shared intentionality, for our capacity to form shared intentional mental states emerged from the interplay between the selective pressures that led to cooperative breeding in humans as well as organized, goal-oriented, collective hunting. Thus, I propose an evo-devo account of shared intentionality and its normative dimension since I argue that explaining the evolution of this particular form of normative thinking crucially depends on information about the developmental trajectory of this capacity. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I focus on how social norms are acquired and how the way we learn them gives rise to some prototypical cluster of moral judgments. Thus, this chapter returns to some of themes and arguments of the first chapter by explaining how the distinction between moral judgments and nonmoral judgments can be culturally transmitted. (shrink)

Human interactions are often improvised rather than scripted, which suggests that efficient coordination can emerge even when collective plans are largely underspecified. One possibility is that such forms of coordination primarily rely on mutual influences between interactive partners, and on perception–action couplings such as entrainment or mimicry. Yet some forms of improvised joint actions appear difficult to explain solely by appealing to these emergent mechanisms. Here, we focus on collective free improvisation, a form of highly unplanned creative practice where both (...) agents' subjective reports and the complexity of their interactions suggest that shared intentions may sometimes emerge to support coordination during the course of the improvisation, even in the absence of verbal communication. In four experiments, we show that shared intentions spontaneously emerge during collective musical improvisations, and that they foster coordination on multiple levels, over and beyond the mere influence of shared information. We also show that musicians deploy communicative strategies to manifest and propagate their intentions within the group, and that this predicts better coordination. Overall, our results suggest that improvised and scripted joint actions are more continuous with one another than it first seems, and that they differ merely in the extent to which they rely on emergent or planned coordination mechanisms. (shrink)

In recent years, developmental psychologists have increasingly been interested in various forms of prosocial behavior observed in infants and young children—in particular comforting, sharing, pointing to provide information, and spontaneous instrumental helping. We briefly review several models that have been proposed to explain the psychological mechanisms underpinning these behaviors. Focusing on spontaneous instrumental helping, we home in on models based upon what Paulus :77–81, 2014) has dubbed ‘goal-alignment’, i.e. the idea that the identification of an agent’s goal leads (...) infants to take up that goal as their own. We identify a problem with the most well-known model based upon this idea, namely the ‘goal contagion’ model. The problem arises from the way in which the model specifies the content of the goal which is identified and taken up. We then propose an alternative way of specifying the content of the goal, and use this as a starting point for articulating an alternative model based upon the idea of alignment, namely the ‘goal slippage’ model. By elucidating the difference between goal contagion and goal slippage, we contribute to the articulation of experimental criteria for assessing whether and when the mechanisms specified by these two models are at work. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that when democratic states act wrongly, they should bear the costs of the harm they cause. However, since states are collective agents, their financial burdens pass on to their individual citizens. This fact raises important questions about the proper distribution of the state’s collective responsibility for its unjust policies. This article identifies two opposing models for sharing this collective responsibility in democracies: first, in proportion to citizens’ personal association with the unjust policy; second, by giving each (...) citizen an equal share of the costs. Proportional distribution is compatible with the principle of fairness. And yet, both in the literature and in political praxis we find many supporters for the equal sharing of the costs of unjust policies in democracies. How can equal distribution be defended on normative grounds? This article develops a defense that is grounded in citizens’ associative obligations. I argue that, at least in some democracies, one of the intrinsic values of the civic bond revolves around the joint formation and execution of worthy political goals. This social good generates the political associative obligation to accept an equal distribution of the costs of unjust policies. (shrink)

In recent years the formerly quite strong interest in patient compliance has been questioned for being too paternalistic and oriented towards overly narrow biomedical goals as the basis for treatment recommendations. In line with this there has been a shift towards using the notion of adherence to signal an increased weight for patients’ preferences and autonomy in decision making around treatments. This ‘adherence-paradigm’ thus encompasses shared decision-making as an ideal and patient perspective and autonomy as guiding goals of care. (...) What this implies in terms of the importance that we have reason to attach to (non-)adherence and how has, however, not been explained. In this article, we explore the relationship between different forms of shared decision-making, patient autonomy and adherence. Distinguishing between dynamically and statically framed adherence we show how the version of shared decision-making advocated will have consequences for whether one should be interested in a dynamically or statically framed adherence and in what way patient adherence should be assessed. In contrast to the former compliance paradigm (where non-compliance was necessarily seen as a problem), using observations about (non-)adherence to assess the success of health care decision making and professional-patient interaction turns out to be a much less straightforward matter. (shrink)

For-profit managed care organizations face decisions about cost sharing that can involve a tradeoff between the interests of investors and the interests of patients. No successful business can ignore the interests of its investors, but moral philosophy points to ethical reasons for managed care organizations to make patients’ health, rather than investors’ profit, their primary goal. One reason is the ethical obligation of all businesses to avoid wrongful exploitation of vulnerable customers. An insurance company’s cost-sharing policy can exploit customers (...) either by collecting an unfairly large amount of money from them or by unfairly deterring them from making claims for resources they medically need. Another reason stems from the fact that managed care organizations’ profits derive in part from the existence of artificial barriers to access to medicine, notably including patents. Putting a fence around a water well in the desert is legitimate only if doing so facilitates a financial arrangement that maximizes people’s access to water they need. Likewise, patents and other artificial barriers to access to medically necessary drugs are legitimate only if they are used to help finance access to medical resources people need. For these reasons, managed care organizations should make cost-sharing decisions that maximize the sustainable availability of effective drugs to patients who need them. (shrink)

This essay introduces some of the many interests, methodologies, and goals that the philosophical tradition of classical American philosophy, usually referred to as pragmatism, shares with feminist theories. Because pragmatism developed along with the emergence of departments of philosophy in the United States, it also begins recovering the shared history of some of the first women to receive philosophy degrees. It claims that women in and out of the academy influenced pragmatism and shows how contemporary feminist philosophers continue to (...) challenge and appropriate it. (shrink)

Various kinds of consumer-driven reforms have been attempted over the last 20 years in an effort to rein in soaring costs of health care in the United States. Most are based on a theory of moral hazard, which holds that patients will over-utilize health care services unless they pay enough for them. Although this theory is a basic premise of conventional health insurance, it has been discredited by actual experience over the years. While ineffective in containing costs, increased cost-sharing as (...) a key element of consumer-driven health care leads to restricted access to care, underuse of necessary care, lower quality and worse outcomes of care. This paper summarizes the three major problems of U.S. health care urgently requiring reform and shows how cost-sharing fails to meet that goal. (shrink)

Research programs regularly compete to achieve the same goal, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA or the construction of a TEA laser. The more the competing programs share information, the faster the goal is likely to be reached, to society's benefit. But the "priority rule"—the scientific norm mandating that the first program to reach the goal in question receive all the credit for the achievement—provides a powerful disincentive for programs to share information. How, then, (...) is the clash between social and self interest resolved in scientific practice? This paper investigates what Robert Merton called science's "communist" norm, which mandates universal sharing of knowledge, and uses mathematical models of discovery to argue that a communist regime may be on the whole advantageous and fair to all parties, and so might be implemented by a social contract that all scientists would be willing to sign. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that to address structural injustice, individuals should participate in collective actions organized by civil society organizations, but the role and the normative status of CSOs are rarely discussed. In this paper, we argue that CSOs semi-perfect our shared obligation to address structural injustice by defining shared goals as well as taking actions to further them. This assigns a special moral status to CSOs, which in turn gives rise to our duty to support them. Thus, (...) we do not have full discretion when deciding whether to join collective actions or not. Under certain conditions, we can even be forced by others to do our share. (shrink)

In this study meal sharing is used as a way of quantifying food transfers between households. Traditional food-sharing studies measure the flow of resources between households. Meal sharing, in contrast, measures food consumption acts according to whether one is a host or a guest in the household as well as the movement of people between households in the context of food consumption. Our goal is to test a number of evolutionary models of food transfers, but first we argue that (...) before one tests models of who should receive food one must understand the adaptiveness of food transfers. For the Ye’kwana, economies of scale in food processing and preparation appear to set the stage for the utility of meal sharing. Evolutionary models of meal sharing, such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism, are evaluated along with non-evolutionary models, such as egalitarian exchange and residential propinquity. In addition, a modified measure of exchange balance—proportional balance—is developed. Reciprocal altruism is shown to be the strongest predictor of exchange intensity and balance. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of communicative action from the point of view of communication as a cooperative enterprise. It is argued that this is communication both on the basis of shared collective goals and without them. It is also argued that people can communicate without specifically formed illocutionary communicative intentions. The paper concludes by comparing the account given in the paper with Habermas’s theory of communicative action.

In vitro fertilization with reception of oocytes from partners allows lesbian mothers to share biological motherhood. The gestational mother receives an egg from her partner who becomes the genetic mother. This article examines the ethics of IVF with ROPA with a focus on the welfare of the woman and the resulting child, on whether ROPA qualifies as a “legitimate” medical therapy that falls within the goals of medicine, and on the meaning and value attributed to a biologically shared bond (...) between parents and child. We also contrast IVF with ROPA with egg donor IVF for heterosexual couples and intrafamilial live uterus transplantation with IVF, and show how Swedish legislation makes certain ways of sharing biological bonds out of place. In Sweden, IVF with ROPA is illegal, egg donor IVF for heterosexual couples is allowed and practiced as is sperm donor IVF for lesbians, and live uterus transplantation is performed within a research project. But is ROPA really ethically more problematic than these other cases? The article argues that IVF with ROPA gives rise to fewer ethical questions than does live uterus transplantation with IVF and, in some cases, egg donor IVF. (shrink)

Pietraszewski provides a compelling case that representations of certain interaction-types are the “cognitive primitives” that allow all tokens of group-in-conflict to be represented within the mind. Here, I argue that the folk concept GROUP encodes shared intentions and goals as more central than these interaction-types, and that providing a computational theory of social groups will be more difficult than Pietraszewski envisages.

Dickie (2020) presents an argument against the traditional, broadly Gricean view of conversation. She argues that speakers must sometimes be more specific than required for sharing knowledge on a topic of common concern. Her proposed solution is to claim that the goal of conversation is not just sharing knowledge but also sharing cognitive focus. In response, I argue that her proposal faces both conceptual and empirical difficulties, and that the traditional view can handle the problem of non-specificity by acknowledging (...) that in order to sustain mutual trust, conversational participants should be less than optimally efficient. (shrink)

Two major philosophical movements have sought to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and their environment(s): environmental ethics and enactivism. Surprisingly, they virtually never refer to or seek inspiration from each other. The goal of this analysis is to bridge the gap. Our main purpose, then, is to address, from the enactivist angle, the conceptual backbone of environmental ethics, namely the concept of intrinsic value. We argue that intrinsic value does indeed exist, yet its "intrinsicality" does not boil down (...) to being independent of the interests and needs of humans. Rather, it is brought forth by what we callshared enactionof an axiological domain. The latter is built upon such core posits of enactivism as autonomy, enaction, participatory sense-making as well as the most recent concept of loving as knowing proposed by Hanne De Jaegher. (shrink)

How do firms make sense of creating shared value projects? In their sense-making processes, do they extend the meaning spectrum to include human rights? What are the dominant cognitive frames through which firms make sense of CSV projects, and are some frames more likely to have transformative power? We pose these questions in the context of small-scale firms in a low-to-middle income country—a context where CSV policies have been promoted extensively over the last decade in the expectation of improved (...) economic competitiveness, growth, and sustainable development processes. We employ a grounded theory approach to identify three dominant cognitive frames used by our respondents to make sense of CSV. The most prevalent frame prioritizes economic over social and environmental goals, and considers social, environmental, and human rights benefits to trickle down from economic growth and wealth generation. In the second frame, economic actors follow a win–win logic according to which environmental sustainability is pursued only if there are clear and foreseeable economic payoffs. The third frame is a niche that emphasizes the attainment of certain human rights goals, despite a perceived lack of immediate economic returns. Our work casts doubt on the capacity of CSV projects to stimulate sustainable development processes without radically changing entrepreneurs’ cognitive frames from growth first to humanizing the business. (shrink)

Why is interaction so simple? This article presents a theory of interaction based on the use of shared representations as “coordination tools” (e.g., roundabouts that facilitate coordination of drivers). By aligning their representations (intentionally or unintentionally), interacting agents help one another to solve interaction problems in that they remain predictable, and offer cues for action selection and goal monitoring. We illustrate how this strategy works in a joint task (building together a tower of bricks) and discuss its requirements (...) from a computational viewpoint. (shrink)

What is required for several agents to intentionally φ together? I argue that each of them must believe or assume that their φ-ing is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Various analogies between intentional singular action and intentional joint action show that this doxastic single end condition captures a feature at the very heart of the phenomenon of intentional joint action. For instance, just as several simple actions are only unified into a complex intentional singular activity if (...) the agent believes or assumes that there is a single end that each action is directed to, so several agents’ actions are only unified into an intentional joint activity if each agent believes or assumes that there is a single end that each intends to contribute to. Influential accounts of intentional joint action, including Christopher Kutz’s and Michael Bratman’s, implicitly include this condition only if participants must intend to contribute to the end under the same conception. While such a requirement successfully rules out some counterexamples, it also makes the accounts unable to appropriately accommodate and explain clear cases of intentional joint action that they ought to be able to accommodate and explain. (shrink)

The patient preference predictor is a computer-based algorithm devised to predict the medical treatment that decisionally incapacitated patients would have preferred. The target paper argues against various criticisms to the effect that the use of a PPP is inconsistent with proper respect for patient autonomy.1 In this commentary, I aim to add some clarifications to the complex relationship between autonomy and the PPP. First, I highlight one way in which the decision of a surrogate designated by the patient realises respect (...) for patient autonomy in a way that PPP cannot realise by introducing the idea of shared agency. Second, I show how the attempt to predict someone’s hypothetical choice can be disrespectful to her autonomy. Following the treatment decision of a surrogate designated by the patient counts as a way of respecting the patient’s own autonomy. Designating someone as one’s surrogate is a case of entrusting her with the task of making important life decisions on one’s behalf. To entrust someone with a certain matter is to assign her the responsibility for that matter based on the trust that she will take a good care of it. When a patient entrusts a surrogate decision-maker, what is the matter that she is trusted to take a good care of? In many contexts, the surrogate is r egarded as an epistemic proxy, one who is likely to know the patient’s preferences the best. It is often thought that the point of practising surrogate decision making is to respect the patient’s autonomy by following what the patient most likely would have preferred. Using a PPP in the decision-making process has the same goal of making a more accurate prediction of the patient’s treatment preference. However, at least in some cases, designating the patient’s intimates or ones she loves and cares …. (shrink)

Philosophers have proposed accounts of shared intentions that aim at capturing what makes a joint action intentionally joint. On these accounts, having a shared intention typically presupposes cognitively and conceptually demanding theory of mind skills. Yet, young children engage in what appears to be intentional, cooperative joint action long before they master these skills. In this paper, I attempt to characterize a modest or ‘lite’ notion of shared intention, inspired by Michael Bacharach’s approach to team–agency theory in (...) terms of framing, group identification and team reasoning. I argue that the account of shared intentions this approach yields is less cognitively and conceptually demanding than other accounts and is thus applicable to the intentional joint actions performed by young children. I also argue that it has limitations of its own and that considering what these limitations are may help us understand why we sometimes need to take other routes to shared intentions. (shrink)

While capitalism has proven to be one of the most efficient economic engines in modern history, the goal of simply pursuing profit has, according to many, left some of society’s needs unmet if not further challenged. In 2006, Porter and Kramer developed the notion that corporations could and should pursue a higher goal of capitalism including “creating shared value” as a means to improve performance and bridging the gap that developed between corporations and society. The concept was (...) welcomed within both academia and the corporate world for the amount of energy it has generated, its potential to improve capitalism and repair what Brigley referred to as the “fractured contract”. However, it is being equally critiqued for lacking in definitional clarity causing inconsistent strategy, and lacking in originality vis-a-vis existing concepts such as Corporate Social Responsibility. This paper proposes corporate virtue as a form of CSV, by identifying two theories which demonstrate how corporate virtue meets the definitional requirements of CSV and helps both the corporation and society fulfil unmet needs. (shrink)

In February 2020, the British Society for the History of Science hosted its first entirely digital conference via Twitter, with the dual goals of improving outreach and engagement with international historians of science, and exploring methods of reducing the carbon footprint of academic activities. In this article we discuss how we planned and organized this conference, and provide a summary of our experience of the conference itself. We also describe in greater detail the motivations behind its organization, and explore the (...) good and bad dimensions of this relatively new kind of conferencing. As the climate crisis becomes more acute and, in turn, the pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of academic activities increases, we argue that digital conferences of this style will necessarily become more central to how academia operates. By sharing our own experiences of running such a conference, we seek to contribute to a rapidly growing body of knowledge on the subject that might be drawn on to improve our practices going forward. We also share some of our own ideas about how best to approach digital conference organization which helped us to make the most of this particular event. (shrink)

Shared Decision-Making is a widely accepted model of the physician–patient relationship providing an ethical environment in which physician beneficence and patient autonomy are respected. It acknowledges the moral responsibility of physician and patient by promoting a deliberative collaboration in which their individual expertise—complementary in nature, equal in importance—is emphasized, and personal values and preferences respected. Its goal coincides with Pellegrino and Thomasma’s proximate end of medicine, that is, a technically correct and morally good healing decision for and with (...) a particular patient. We argue that by perfecting the intellectual ability to apprehend the complexity of clinical situations, and through a perfection of the application of the first principles of practical reason, prudence is able to point toward the right and good shared medical decision. A prudent shared medical decision is therefore always in keeping with the kind of person the physician and the patient have chosen to be. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that to address structural injustice, individuals should participate in collective actions organized by civil society organizations (CSOs), but the role and the normative status of CSOs are rarely discussed. In this paper, we argue that CSOs semi-perfect our shared obligation to address structural injustice by defining shared goals as well as taking actions to further them. This assigns a special moral status to CSOs, which in turn gives rise to our duty to support them. (...) Thus, we do not have full discretion when deciding whether to join collective actions or not. Under certain conditions, we can even be forced by others to do our share. (shrink)

While the economic and environmental dimensions of the triple bottom line have been covered extensively by management theory and practice, the social dimension remains largely underrepresented. The resource-based view of the firm and the natural resource-based view of the firm are revisited to lay the theoretical foundation for exploring how the social dimension might be addressed. Social capabilities are then explored by looking at the social entrepreneurship literature and illustrative cases with the purpose of elaborating RBV toward a social resource-based (...) view of the firm. Three illustrative cases, which represent social businesses located in catastrophe-ridden Haiti, show how capabilities are used to overcome challenging constraints. The goal for the social entrepreneur is to employ the appropriate capabilities to ensure economic success, a positive environmental impact, and social benefits that leave the local community in a better position than without the business. Just as NRBV is a previous elaboration of RBV, so can SRBV be an elaborated theoretical foundation for future research. The components of a theory are systematically addressed by extending the range of variables, extending the domain, and offering propositions on variable relationships and outcome predictions. By highlighting the social capabilities of social entrepreneurs, this research illuminates the micro-foundations of corporate social responsibility, emphasizing the value of individual level analyses. (shrink)