Social-Contractarian Money

State capacity, stable currencies, and well functioning financial systems seem to be ‘package deals’ – one cannot have one without having all. I show that the intimate functional links among states, monies, and financial systems, ubiquitous across history and geography as they are, are not accidental. I do so by analytically ‘deriving’ first law and the polity, then money and finance, from a temporally extended implicit covenant that is both grounded in and facilitative of ongoing joint agency among persons. This lends to state and money alike their shared normative and, once formally systematized, legal character. I indicate throughout how this shared genesis, function, and normative character keep state, money, and ultimately finance practically ‘joined at the hip’, and manifest how polity and economy, indeed our very political and productive selves, are thus joined as well. To recognize and to ‘own’ this, I conclude, is not only to see that ‘the public’ must take a far more explicit role in finance, but also in a sense finally to own our own selves.

Advising Duos and Joint Agency

This final chapter aims to show that the actions of those who trust moral advice can have moral worth. Some adviser-advisee duos are joint agents. The activity of this joint agent displays moral understanding, autonomy, and all the other goods had by individual moral agents. To show this, this chapter argues 1) that highly informal duos can exhibit joint agency, 2) that joint agents can be constituted by individuals whose contributions are highly idiosyncratic, 3) that a commander and a commandee can exhibit joint agency, 4) that an adviser and an advisee can likewise exhibit joint agency, and finally 5) that their actions can be morally evaluated and have moral worth. This chapter ends with a conclusion about the value of studying plural agency.

Habit and Skill in the Domain of Joint Action

Dichotomous thinking about mental phenomena is abundant in philosophy. One particularly tenacious dichotomy is between “automatic” and “controlled” processes. In this characterization automatic and unintelligent go hand in hand, as do non-automatic and intelligent. Accounts of skillful action have problematized this dichotomous conceptualization and moved towards a more nuanced understanding of human agency. This binary thinking is, however, still abundant in the philosophy of joint action. Habits and skills allow us agentic ways of guiding complex action routines that would otherwise overwhelm our reflective capacities. In this paper, I look at how theories of skill, habit, and know-how in individual action can inform a non-dichotomous account of joint action. I argue that a fuller understanding of joint agency has to understand not only group know-how, but also the role of attention and the highly integrated types of control that allow agents to act together.

Motor coordination and strategic cooperation in joint action

Naturalistic joint action usually requires both motor coordination and strategic cooperation. However, these two fundamental processes have systematically been studied independently. We devised a novel collaborative task, combining different levels of motor noise with different levels of strategic noise, to determine whether sense of agency (the experience of control over an action) reflects the interplay between these low-level (motor) and high-level (strategic) processes. We also examined how dominance in motor control could influence prosocial behaviours. We found that self-agency was particularly dependent on motor cues while joint agency was particularly dependent on strategic cues. We suggest that the prime importance of strategic cues for joint agency reflects the co-representation of co-agents’ interests during the task. Furthermore, we observed a reduction of prosocial strategies in agents who exerted a dominant motor control over the joint action, showing that the strategic dimension of human interactions is also reliant on low-level motor features.

Reappropriating the Balkan Route: Mobility Struggles and Joint-Agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina

In this article the authors question how the EU’s enlistment of the post-Yugoslav states into the EU’s border regime has exacerbated local nationalisms. They also question how, on the other hand, migrant struggles to cross this territory have intersected with local movements against nationalism and silenced political alternatives. They use the notion of joint-agency, that is, the co-articulation of mobility struggles and anti­nationalist struggles, in ex-Yugoslavia to read the recent history of the route across the region generally and the current predicament in Bosnia and Herzegovina in particu­lar. This alternative reading facilitates an understanding of the potential of struggles for freedom of movement to reanimate a critique of the coloniality of power in the EUropean borderlands such as the Balkans.