Episode 22: Ben Laurence discusses collective action
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What is collective action and why do philosophers doubt its existence?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman. And I'm Mark Hopwood. With us today is Ben Lawrence, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and he is here to talk with us about collective action. Ben Lawrence, welcome.
Thanks, I'm glad to be here.
So I take it that by collective action we mean something that a group of people does rather than something that a individual person does. I guess probably some philosophers have doubted that there is such a thing as a collective action. You know, you might think that there's just such a thing as an action performed by an individual, but so do you think that groups of people can do things?
Certainly. I think they obviously can do things. I mean, we regularly and without pause can join plural subjects with verbs of action, um, we have no problem doing this. I think that it's true that there are certain sort of disturbing features in our thoughts, certain intellectual pressures we're under, which can lead us to ask how such a thing is so much as possible, and it can lead us to Want to maybe not deny that groups of people can act together as a group, but to try to sort of analyze this fact away and sort of tame it. So to try to provide an analysis on which it's analyzed in terms of a whole bunch of different things, each of which can be understood purely in sort of individualistic or solitary terms.
I think this is a mistake. when we do that we lose out on what's distinctive and interesting and important about collective action.
So I guess the idea there would be something like, you know, I don't know, five people are building a wall and maybe the thought would be something like, Well, we can just understand what it is for five people to build a wall solely in terms of what each of the individuals are doing. All it is is a bunch of individual people laying bricks.
I mean maybe I could say something about what what sort of pressures lead people to want to analyze this phenomenon away. And that might give people a sense of um some ways in which people do doubt the reality of collective action. So I think there are various sources that account for the pressure to sort of do away in our thing. with this. One I think just comes from economics and the sort of reasoning about markets that economists do and the sort of bleed over of that into the social sciences and popular consciousness. But I think another source, a distinctively philosophical source, is an element of psychologism, and by that I mean a certain kind of story about how solitary action happens, on which the way you understand what it is for a solitary action to happen is you treat it as a a kind of process in the world that is caused by the psychological states of individual agents.
So you have a picture where the it's a very intuitive where the mind is a kind of repository for sort of beliefs and desires, and that you will understand what a solitary action is by viewing it as a kind of event that is caused in the right way by those elements in the mind. So, I mean if you start with this picture, which I think is actually a a bad picture of solitary action, but it's a very intuitive one, and if you start with that, the collective action will seem on the face of it puzzling because you will be thinking that the analogous thing to say would be that there is a group mind in which various mental attitudes are housed which in cases of acting together cause the individual agents to do the things they do.
And there's a sort of thought that that's there's something kind of spooky or strange about that.
How do economic and psychologistic pressures shape our view of group actions?
And I mean there are various ways we could try to characterize that, but it it just it seems kind of weird to think that when we do something as simple as build a wall together, that there is sort of hovering behind that a sort of group mind with mental states that is causing what the individual people are doing. And so I think this kind of psychologism lends itself to a kind of scepticism.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is collective action and why do philosophers doubt its existence?
0:19–4:23
2
How do economic and psychologistic pressures shape our view of group actions?
4:23–7:58
3
Why is the ‘group‑mind’ explanation considered problematic for collective action?
7:58–12:15
4
What distinguishes genuine collective action from coincidental individual actions?
12:15–15:37
5
How does the Swedish‑diplomat example illustrate a real case of collective action?
15:37–18:22
6
What role do purposive explanations play in explaining actions of a plural agent?
18:22–21:19
7
How does the collective‑action framework affect ethical and political reasoning?
21:19–24:42
8
Why might rejecting collective reasons lead to extreme libertarian conclusions?
24:42–29:10
Speakers
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