Reasons, awareness, and we-agency

Matters collective are receiving increased attention. Philosophers discuss concepts such as we-action, we-want, we-intentionality, and in general how to understand psychological states and agency prefixed the first person plural we. I will be concerned with we-agency in particular, and I will be focusing on one issue of we-agency specifically; namely, what kind of reasons it involves, and in what sense it “involves” reasons. The two central claims of the paper are, first, that we-agency involves a special kind of reason: All individual part-actions of a we-action must be performed for a we-reason. By a we-reason, I understand a reason such that the agent wants what she does to realize an end together with others; she wants to do it as part of what a we does. This positive claim, it will be seen, is quite uncontroversial. Secondly, we-actions need not involve reasons that any participating agent is aware of as a we-reason. In other words, consciousness of what one does as part of what a we does is not conceptually implied in we-action.