The distinct moral importance of acting together

This review essay engages with Garrett Cullity’s argument that there is a fundamental moral norm of cooperation, as articulated in Concern, Respect, & Cooperation (2018). That is to say that there is moral reason to participatein collective endeavours that cannot be reduced to other moral reasons like promoting welfare. If this is plausible, all the better for solving collective action dilemmas like climate change. But how should we understand a reason of participation? I supplement Cullity’s own account by appealing to the notion of ‘team reasoning’ in game theory. Even if not an adequate notion of rationality, adopting the team stance—deriving individual reasonto act from what a group may together achieve—may well have distinct moral importance.

Feeling Joint Ownership of Agency: The Normative Aspect of Agency Transformation

Team reasoning is the idea that we can think as a ‘we’ and this can solve some coordination dilemmas, such as Hi-Lo. However, team reasoning can only solve the dilemmas it is intended to solve if the conditions for team reasoning warrant the belief that others will also perform team reasoning and these conditions cannot render team reasoning otiose. In this paper, I will supplement the theory of team reasoning by explaining how agency transformation also involves a change in the normative attitude. To do this, I will use the theory of affordances, which is the idea that the environment provides ways to interact with it. I will argue that when a person perceives as a group member, she associates herself and the other members with the group’s mosaic of affordances. This triggers a feeling of joint ownership of the agency. It is the feeling that it is up to us to deal with the situation, so we feel entitled to demand each other to cooperate. It warrants the belief that others are team-reasoners without rendering team reasoning otiose. This means that the agency transformation (from I to we) involves a change in the normative attitude.

Cooperation, fairness and team reasoning

This paper examines two strands of literature regarding economic models of cooperation. First, payoff transformation theories assume that people may not be exclusively motivated by self-interest, but also care about equality and fairness. Second, team reasoning theorists assume that people might reason from the perspective of the team, rather than an individualistic perspective. Can these two theories be unified? In contrast to the consensus among team reasoning theorists, I argue that team reasoning can be viewed as a particular type of payoff transformation. However, I also demonstrate that many payoff transformations yield actions that team reasoning rules out.