Joint abilities : a relational approach

Abstract

Moral and political philosophy as well as public discourse is rife with talk about joint abilities: we are able to mitigate climate change, alleviate world poverty, or end a pandemic through social distancing and high vaccination rates. However, despite its common usage, the concept of joint ability has received surprisingly little attention in the philosophical literature. What exactly does it mean to say that we can or cannot do something together? According to the dominant conception of joint ability, a joint ability is best understood as the ability of a plurality of agents. I argue that plural property accounts of joint ability violate one of the central tenets of the metaphysics of abilities, namely that abilities relate agents to actions. I offer an alternative analysis of joint abilities. I propose to understand joint abilities as relations in which two (or more) agents stand to each other. The relational model offers a way of understanding our talk about joint abilities in moral and political debates, and it does so while preserving a conceptual continuity between individual and joint abilities.