Mind the Economy/Justice 173

Choosing from amongst other people’s plans

by Vittorio Pelligra

4 October 2026

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8' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

8' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

The meeting is scheduled for eight o’clock in the morning. A decision that may seem entirely harmless. For some, it will simply mean leaving home half an hour earlier. But for those of you who have to take your children to school, however, it means having to reorganise the whole family’s timetable. You’ll need to find someone to cover for you or, quite simply, you’ll have to miss the meeting. The plan is the same for all colleagues. But it isn’t equally easy for everyone to go along with it. Who decided on that plan? Who had the chance to challenge it? Not everyone involved will have the same power to draw it up or amend it.

Over the last two Mind the Economy we have seen how Michael Bratman attributes a far more important role to our ability to plan than ordinary language might suggest. Drawing up a plan does not simply mean preparing a sequence of actions in advance. Plans allow us to extend our capacity for action over time, so that we do not have to start afresh every morning deciding who we want to be and what we want to do. The intentions we formed yesterday place constraints on today’s choices and, precisely for this reason, make possible what we might call ‘personal continuity’. We have also seen that this architecture does not concern the individual alone, but is fundamentally social in nature. Two people can plan together when their intentions are interdependent and their respective sub-plans are sufficiently compatible. There is no need to imagine a collective mind superimposed on individual minds in order to observe a ‘we’ acting in concert. It is enough to understand how our planning abilities can ‘mesh’ with one another.

However, taking the example of the meeting, a problem arises that had hitherto remained in the background. To say that two plans must be compatible does not yet explain how that compatibility is achieved. If my plan and yours do not fit together, one of them will have to change. The theory can tell us under what conditions joint activity becomes possible, but it remains silent on the costs that such compatibility entails. The issue becomes even more apparent when we move from elementary forms of cooperation to the analysis of complex organisations. In Shared Agency (Oxford University Press, 2014), Bratman considers deliberately simple examples: two people painting a house, a choir singing together, a group having a conversation. His aim is to isolate the minimal structure of shared action. In reality, we spend a considerable part of our lives immersed in far less simple forms of interaction. A company, a hospital, a school, a government department – all situations in which coordination involves hundreds or thousands of people who often do not know one another, hold different positions, have access to different information and, above all, do not participate in the same way in determining what the organisation will do. This is the problem that Bratman places at the centre of his subsequent work, Shared and Institutional Agency (Oxford University Press, 2022), in which he attempts to extend his theory of planning to organised institutions. The underlying intuition remains the same. The capacity that enables a person to organise their behaviour over time and allows several people to act together can also help to explain much larger and more enduring social structures. However, the scale changes, and as the scale changes, phenomena become visible that might have remained hidden in a walk, a duet or painting a house together.

Plans within other plans

Let’s think about a hospital. Treating a patient requires the coordination of a vast number of activities. It is necessary to establish shifts, protocols, priorities, diagnostic pathways and criteria for access to services. Some of these decisions are made long before the doctor meets the patient. When the meeting takes place, both naturally retain some scope for choice. The doctor decides how to use the time available, what questions to ask, and which aspects to explore in greater depth. For their part, the patient decides what to say, whether to follow a prescription, and whether to agree to a test. But many of the conditions within which those choices are made have been decided elsewhere. This observation becomes particularly interesting if we return to a fundamental feature of Bratman’s theory. Plans are almost always partial. When we decide to organise a trip, we usually decide which flight to take, which cities to visit and where to stay. The choice of where to have lunch or dinner, which museum or monument to visit first, and what to do at 3 pm on the second Tuesday of the holiday remains to be decided. An initial decision opens up a series of subsequent problems and, at the same time, closes off others. If we have decided to go to Lisbon, Berlin will no longer be, at least for that trip, a viable alternative. We proceed by progressively refining the plan, trying to ensure the various parts remain consistent and adapting it when circumstances require it.

Something similar happens within organisations, with one crucial difference: the people who draw up the overall plan, those who flesh it out in detail, and those who have to adapt to it may all be different individuals. Senior management sets a target. A manager translates this into performance indicators. A manager organises the work required to achieve them, and employees adjust their day-to-day activities accordingly. Everyone plans, but they do not plan the same thing. Above all, a decision taken at one level alters the range of options available at subsequent levels. There is nothing necessarily unfair about any of this. It would be difficult to imagine complex organisations in which every decision had to be taken by everyone. The division of labour also applies to the task of decision-making. Competence, responsibility and speed can provide excellent reasons for entrusting certain choices to some people rather than others. But precisely because plans progressively narrow the scope of possibilities, their distribution takes on a significance that is not merely organisational, but political. It is not just a matter of technical efficiency, but often one of social justice.

Who has to adapt?

Let’s take the example of the 8 o’clock meeting again. That time is not in itself unfair. It may, for various reasons, be the only viable option. It may have been chosen with everyone’s needs in mind. What really matters is that the compatibility between the collective plan and individual plans is not cost-free, and those costs may be distributed differently amongst different people. The same mechanism operates on a much larger scale when a university changes the organisation of its teaching, a company introduces a new assessment procedure, or a public authority moves a particular service online. A plan may be perfectly coherent and yet require some people to adapt or make greater sacrifices than others.

This also allows us to view in a different light the requirement that Bratman defines as meshing, the harmonisation of the sub-plans of those acting together. In last week’s Mind the Economy, we saw why this meshing is necessary. If we want to paint a house together, we cannot organise our actions in ways that are mutually incompatible. But the need for meshing does not imply a criterion for distributing the adjustments required to achieve it. My plan may fit in with yours, yours with mine, or we may both have to give something up. From the point of view of the feasibility of shared action, the three solutions may be equivalent. From the point of view of justice, however, they are clearly not. This is perhaps one of the points at which a theory devised to explain planning and action ends up raising a profoundly political question. Freedom is not merely about the number of choices we can make once the plan has been defined. It also concerns, at least in part, the possibility of participating in its formulation. One may have considerable autonomy in deciding how to carry out a task and very little autonomy in deciding which task should be carried out. One may be free to choose between many alternatives which, however, have been selected for us by others.

This is not a new problem. A few weeks ago, whilst discussing the views of Raimo Tuomela, we came across a similar issue regarding the agenda. An assembly can be perfectly democratic in the way it chooses between two proposals, yet far less democratic in the way it determines that only those two proposals are worthy of discussion. Bratman’s theory allows us to observe the same phenomenon from a different perspective. Every inherited plan is also a set of decisions that have already been taken. Acting within it means still being able to choose many things, but not all those that could have been chosen before the plan was formulated.

In the final pages of Shared and Institutional Agency, Bratman makes an observation that brings this discussion even closer to the theme of justice. Planning capacities, he writes, can be regarded, in Rawls’s terms, as a form of ‘primary good’. A significant reduction in these capacities would have profound consequences for the ability to lead one’s life autonomously, because it is through plans that we govern our conduct over time, coordinate our actions with those of others and participate in the organised activities of institutions. Bratman does not build a theory of justice upon this observation. We may, however, ask ourselves what happens when the capacity to plan is distributed asymmetrically – not as a psychological faculty, but as a social possibility. People may possess exactly the same capacity to form intentions, devise plans and pursue them over time, yet find themselves in very different positions with regard to the plans that govern their lives. Some help to set the objectives, whilst others merely decide how to adapt to them. There are those who can revise the rules and others who, by contrast, can only make choices within the given rules.

Inequalities do not relate solely to income, status or authority. There is also an inequality in the power to determine the plans to which others must then adapt their behaviour. Whether and to what extent this asymmetry is justifiable depends on how it arises, the extent to which it can be challenged and revised, and who bears the costs. Bratman does not address these issues directly, but his theory enables us to bring them into focus.

From ‘I’ to ‘we’

At this point, an even more fundamental question remains to be addressed. So far, we have assumed that a common plan exists and have asked ourselves how it might coordinate the actions of different people. But where does that plan come from? Why should people with different interests come to regard a certain action as something worth doing together? It is this question that will lead us, over the coming weeks, to explore the work of the economist and game theorist Michael Bacharach. In Rousseau’s famous ‘deer hunt’ example, several hunters can only catch a deer if they cooperate and no one fails to carry out their assigned task. Each hunter, however, may be tempted by a hare passing by. A smaller prey which, unlike the stag, can be caught independently, without having to rely on cooperation with others. The need for coordination, which the ‘stag hunt’ example highlights, is, however, only part of the problem. The perspective from which we view the situation also matters. We can consider what is best for us, given the choices of others, or we can consider what is best for us collectively. It is on this shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ that Bacharach’s reflection will focus.

With Bratman, we have seen how individual intentions can combine to give rise to collective action. Bacharach takes the question even further back, investigating what happens when we stop looking at the problem from the perspective of each individual separately and start looking at it from the perspective of a ‘we’.