Parallels between joint action and biological individuality
1 : Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol
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There exist many definitions of human joint action, or of what makes a group similar to an individual. However, they do not agree and are not directly reducible to one another. This multiplicity is due to a lack of constraints on them. I argue that they should at least meet an efficiency constraint: any account of joint action has to justify how it reliably leads agents to cooperation. This can be done by exploring the analogy between definitions of joint action and of biological individuality. Although there is no consensus as to how to define a biological individual, its main possible components have been identified: genetic similarity, division of labour, presence of policing, result of group selection, unit of adaptation, etc. Crucially, the relations between these properties are significantly better understood than those between the components of human joint action. Moreover, there exist pairwise analogies between many of them: genetic similarity/shared property, division of labour/mutually consistent plans of action, policing/normative commitments, group selection/team reasoning, etc. As a result, we can import some insights of the biological literature to define what a joint action is, and when a group is similar to an individual.
