Modest Sociality and Social Practices: The Inadequacy of Sociality Based on

Max Weber's account of social action can be seen as a paradigmatic example of individualistic methodology in understanding human sociality. Weber sees action to be about the individual's subjective meaning, or intention, attached to behaviour (Weber 1978, p. 4; cf Schutz 1967, Gilbert 1992, Ch. II and Greenwood 2003, p. 100). Action is social when it takes into account the behaviour of others (ibid.). From this, Weber defines social relationships in the following way:

The term 'social relationship' will be used to denote behavior of a plurality of actions insofar as, in its meaningful content, the action of each takes account of that of the others and is oriented in these terms (ibid, p. 26).

One way to make sense of Weber's understanding of 'subjective meaning' is in terms of commitments and intentions of the individual (Schutz 1967, p. 6). Weber maintains that we can give a full account of sociality wholly through the means of individual intentions and their 'taking account' of and their 'orientation towards' the behaviour of others.

Weber's definition can indeed be useful in distinguishing between cases of non- social and social actions without asserting that any action involving others is by definition social. In fact, there are several actions involving others, for Weber, which are not considered social action proper. First, there are cases where an individual sees others not as actors, as a 'you', but as an inanimate object, as an 'it'. An example of this, for Weber, might be when a cyclist navigates through a crowd seeing people as things to be avoided. If there is a collision, it can be seen as a “natural event” (Weber 1978, p. 23). A second, similar case, would be when a large number of people open their umbrellas when a rain shower begins (ibid.). This is not a social action for Weber. The individuals are reacting not to other people but to some natural event, i.e., raining. Finally, there is mere imitation. This is when

one is learning to do something by observing a stranger (Greenwood 2003, p. 100). This, for Weber, is not social action because it is only causally determined by the others action and not “meaningfully oriented” to the other persons behaviour (Weber, p. 24).

Social actions, then, must be individual actions meaningfully oriented to others actions. For example, if we are going to walk down the street together, the meaning, or our intentions, must be oriented towards the other doing the same. If we are merely walking down the street next to each other then our actions are not meaningfully oriented towards each other. The logic of this Weberian account is that for two individuals to be acting socially, both need to meaningfully orientate their actions to the other’s meaningful actions.

There are many obscurities in Weber's account and it is unclear if his distinction between social and non-social actions holds on closer inspection. The important point for us is the methodological individualism which underlies Weber's account. He wants to understand how social action is possible without bringing in resources other than the 'meaningful behaviour' of individual actors.

Bratman's planning theory of joint action is a contemporary version of Weber's social action account. The benefit of looking at Bratman's account is its clarity and sophistication while still being wedded to the basic methodological assumptions of Weber's account. By investigating Bratman's account we will see the limits of this individualism as well as see more clearly a fundamental problem with Darwall's account of authority, viz., Darwall's difficulty accounting for how individuals are bound together in not moral cases.

It should be pointed out that Bratman is up front that his account is individualistic. It focuses on:

the shared intentional activities of small, adult groups in the absence of asymmetric authority relations within those groups, and in which the individuals who are participants remain constant over time (Bratman 2014, p. 7).

However, he does think that his account can provide a basis for an extension to

larger institutional agents like corporations or governments, institutions with hierarchical authority relations, with potential flux in the list of their members, and, perhaps with an embedded distinction between those participants who are officials of the institution and those who are not (ibid., p. 8).

We will see two fundamental objections to this modest sociality strategy. First, there is the problem of persistence. How is it that individual persons, as free and equal, are bound together in shared cooperative activity? By looking closely at this issue, it will be come evident that individualistic accounts face a dilemma. Either, they will not get beyond small group activities to institutions which necessarily have normative force, or, they will need to bring in resources from outside of their account which will be less parsimonious than a non-individualist account – parsimony being a major reason one would want an individualist account in the first place.

Second, there is the problem of the 'own-action', or mineness, condition that seems to be a necessary condition for intentional states. This is a question about how it is possible for one to practically reason for another, something that seems to be happening in cases of authority in that authoritative commands are meant to bring closure to one's practical reasoning as well as give the addressee a new normative reason for action. Before turning to these two issues, we need to set out more clearly what Bratman's account looks like.

Bratman gives us 3 conditions for joint action in his “Shared Intention Thesis”: We intend to J if and only if:

1. (a) I intend that we J and (b) you intend that we J.

2. I intend that we J in accordance and because of 1a, 1b, and meshing subplans of 1a and 1b; you intend that we J in accordance with and because of 1a, 1b and meshing subpans of 1a and 1b.

3. 1 and 2 are common knowledge between us. (Bratman 1999b, p. 121)

towards. Notice that what holds two individuals together in a Bratman-type shared intention is that both individuals intend that 'we J' – both individuals are meaningfully orientated towards the other in terms of the content of their individual intentions.

I do not want to argue that Bratman-like shared intentions are not a real phenomenon. They might very well be an important part of our everyday lives. It is quite possible that if two individuals driving down a road in opposite directions happen upon a small downed tree which is blocking the road that their actions are coordinated in something like Bratman's shared intention thesis (cf. Tuomela 2007, pp. 115-116). The individuals involved are simply intent on solving a small scale practical problem, move the tree so they can continue to drive. Neither can accomplish this alone and can easily be accomplished by cooperation. The idea would be that such one off encounters do not have time or persistence to generate anything like the normativity which we find in social action which are extended in time. I will not claim that Bratman's account cannot explain such small scale interactions. The target here is on the larger scale interactions which Bratman hopes to be able to extend his account to.

In the following, I will be arguing that there is a strong parallel between Bratman's account of joint action and Darwall's account of authority relations. Both begin with individualistic understandings of non-hierarchical relationships and intend to build out from these to hierarchical accounts (Darwall 2013a, p. 167). What I intend to show in the following is that this becomes highly problematic in trying to understand how individuals become bounded to the others in an institution. Bratman thinks that this type of bond “might issue in downstream interactions that induce […] obligation-based interdependence” (Bratman 2014, p. 72). However, it is unclear how this will happen and why it is the case that 'obligation-based interdependence' should be understood in the way

Bratman suggests. The target here is to look at the individualistic logic behind this account and show why this type of account is inadequate for the relationship of authority which is embedded in institutions. Let us now turn to the problem of bindingness and persistence of joint intentions.

2. The persistence Interdependence of Shared Agency and the Problem of