Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman

This anthology consists of ten essays that engage with various aspects of Michael Bratman’s philosophy of action, framed by a brief introduction by the editors and a substantive response to the essays by Bratman. The first four essays by Richard Holton, Alfred Mele, Kieran Setiya, and David Velleman are related to the core of Bratman’s planning theory of intention, whereas the next four essays by Jay Wallace, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and Michael Smith, Elijah Millgram, and Christine Korsgaard deal with issues concerning self-governance, autonomy and identification. The last two essays, by Margaret Gilbert and Scott Shapiro, focus on Bratman’s account of shared agency. Korsgaard’s essay, which is based on her keynote at the Collective Intentionality VII conference in Basel 2010, touches on the topic of group agency. As far as I am aware, all essays except Velleman’s and Shapiro’s are published here for the first time.1 I will here focus on the essays that relate to Bratman’s work on shared agency. In “The Nature of Agreements: A Solution to Some Puzzles about ClaimRights and Joint Intention,” Gilbert presents a joint commitment account of agreements and uses it to explain the nature of claim-rights associated with everyday agreements as well as intentional joint action. A claim-right is a right to the performance of some action φ that a person X has against another person Y. Gilbert argues that such a claim-right and its associated directed obligation is, at least when associated with an agreement, grounded in X and Y’s joint commitment to some plan P, where the action φ is Y’s contribution to the realisation of P. A joint commitment is formed when “each party expresses to the others his