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This paper explores the implications of a Civil Economy approach to consumer ethics, by addressing the idea that Antonio Genovesi’s (1713–1769) notion of mutual assistance can be understood in terms of collective intentionality or team reasoning. I try to give reasons for this idea by a careful examination of Genovesi’s conception of social life and human agency and by reading it through the lens of team reasoning. I argue that this understanding of mutual assistance may imply broad constraints over agents’ choices whenever they conflict with the good of society. Then I explore the implications of a mutual assistance approach to market ethics in a global society, where conflicting views of good and different group affiliations are possible.

In ordinary discourse, a single duty is often attributed to a plurality of agents. In Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals, Stephanie Collins claims that such attributions involve a “category error”. I critically discuss Collins’ argument for this claim and argue that there is a substantive sense in which non-agential groups can have moral duties. A plurality of agents can have a single duty to bring about an outcome by virtue of a capacity of each to practically reason about what they ought to do together. I also argue that Collins’ attempt to give a reductive account of such “we-reasoning” fails.

The paper studies the connections between philosophical action theory and planning methods in artificial intelligence. It proposes a method of cooperative planning in which agents select actions using a combination of planning and team reasoning. Whereas several standard approaches to multi-agent planning start from individuals' plans and try to combine them into a group plan, the proposed method starts from constructing a group plan from which the individuals derive their sub-plans. The former method is labelled I-mode planning and the latter we-mode planning. The basic idea of the proposed we-mode planning method is that the agents conceive themselves as a group agent that selects the best plan specifying the actions of all individual agents who then carry out their parts in the group plan. We-mode planning is suited for human-robot cooperation in situations in which the participants have a shared goal and a shared plan evaluation function, and can observe each others' actions. The method is expected to lead in some cases to more human-like robot behaviour and more efficient execution of joint actions in human-robot teams.

Do responsibility voids exist? That is, are there situations in which the group is collectively morally responsible for some outcome although no member can be held individually morally responsible for it? To answer these questions, I draw a distinction between competitive and cooperative decision contexts based on the team-reasoning account of cooperation. Accordingly, I provide a reasoning-based analysis of cooperation, competition, moral responsibility, and, last, potential responsibility voids. I then argue that competitive decision contexts are free of responsibility voids. The conditions for the existence of responsibility voids in cooperative decision contexts depend on the type of uncertainty the group faces, either external or coordination uncertainty.

We consider how conceptions of the self and identity from the philosophical literature can help us to understand identity disturbance in borderline personality disorder (BPD). We present 3 philosophical approaches: connectedness, narrative, and agency. We show how these map on to 3 different ways in which the self can be temporally extended. The connectedness approach is dominant in philosophy, and the narrative approach has been used by psychiatry, but we argue that the lesser‐known agency approach provides a promising way to theorize some aspects of identity disturbance in BPD. It relates the 2 diagnostic criteria of identity disturbance and disinhibition and is consistent with evidence of memory deficits and altered self‐processing in BPD patients.

A particular problem of traditional Rational Choice Theory is that it cannot explain equilibrium selection in simple coordination games. In this paper we analyze and discuss the solution concept for common coordination problems as incorporated in the theory of Team Reasoning (TR). Special consideration is given to TR's concept of opportunistic choice and to the resulting restrictions in using private information. We report results from a laboratory experiment in which teams were given a chance to coordinate on a particular pattern of behavior in a sequence of HiLo games. A modification of the stage game offered opportunities to improve on the team goal through changing this accustomed pattern of behavior. Our observations throw considerable doubt on the idea of opportunistic team reasoning as a guide to coordination. Contrary to what TR would predict, individuals tend to stick to accustomed behavioral patterns. Moreover, we find that individual decisions are at least partly determined by private information not accessible to all members of a team. Alternative theories of choice, in particular cognitive hierarchy theory may be more suitable to explain the observed pattern of behavior.

The present study investigates how group-cooperation heuristics boost voluntary contributions in a repeated public goods game. We manipulate two separate factors in a two-person public goods game: i) group composition (Selfish Subjects vs. Conditional Cooperators) and ii) common knowledge about group composition (Information vs. No Information). In addition, we let the subjects signal expectations of the other’s contributions in the experiment’s second phase. Common knowledge of Selfish type alone slightly dampens contributions but dramatically increases contributions when signaling of expectations is allowed. The results suggest that group-cooperation heuristics are triggered when two factors are jointly salient to the agent: (i) that there is no one to free-ride on; and (ii) that the other wants to cooperate because of (i). We highlight the potential effectiveness of group-cooperation heuristics and proposesolution thinkingas the schema of reasoning underlying the heuristics. The high correlation between expectations and actual contributions is compatible with the existence of default preference to satisfy others’ expectations (or to avoid disappointing them), but the stark end-game effect suggests that group-cooperation heuristics, at least among selfish players, function ultimately to benefit material self-interest rather than to just please others.