Mind the Economy/Justice 172

Planning together

We may well be perfectly capable of drawing up a collective plan and yet fail to agree on it together

by Vittorio Pelligra

27 September 2026

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9' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

9' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

There are people whose every move we can practically predict, and with whom, nevertheless, we have nothing in common. I know that my neighbour leaves every morning at eight o’clock, that at five past eight he vacates his parking space, and I can even organise my day around this fact: wait for him to leave, go down straight afterwards, and take his space. His routine dictates mine. It’s a bit unsettling, I must admit.

But remember that the inhabitants of Königsberg set their watches by Immanuel Kant’s unfailing afternoon walk, the punctuality of which was so legendary that it marked the rhythm of the entire city’s life. Every day, the philosopher followed the exact same route with almost mechanical regularity. It is said that he missed this sacred appointment only twice in his entire life. One of these occasions was due to the utter rapture he experienced whilst reading Rousseau’s *Emile*; the other was when he learnt that the Revolution had broken out in France. Be that as it may, the important point is that if my neighbour, like Kant, were to change his habits, then I, along with the inhabitants of Königsberg, would be forced to change ours as well. Even though my neighbour and I do not even know one another, just as most of the philosopher’s fellow citizens had never had anything to do with him.

Last week we left our discussion of Michael Bratman’s ideas more or less at this point: facing this minor difficulty of joint planning. Because if, for example, my neighbour and I decide to go to the airport together, he’ll have to come and pick me up at eight, and I’ll try to be ready by eight. We’ll load the suitcase and set off. In this case too, my behaviour depends on his, and his on mine. But now, if he doesn’t turn up, I don’t simply think that something has happened that forces me to change my plan. I don’t just think that Rousseau’s *Emile* is a great book or that the French Revolution is, all things considered, a significant event; I also think that something has gone wrong with our plan.

It is that ‘ours’ that creates the problem

It would be all too easy to settle the matter by saying that we want the same thing. Wanting the same thing does not necessarily mean wanting it together. Two people may both want to catch the last taxi waiting outside the station or the last available table at a restaurant. But that makes them competitors, not allies. They may even both want a certain thing to happen. For example, that the street where they live is cleaned regularly, or that the temperature during this long summer will eventually start to drop. But this coincidence of desires does not produce any kind of ‘togetherness’ between them. Nor does mutual dependence produce it. Bratman chooses to address this matter whilst maintaining that it is not necessary to invent new philosophical constructs. Intentions, plans and mutual expectations are enough, the philosopher tells us, to understand the profound nature of our capacity – or incapacity – to act together. There is no need to assume any collective subject called ‘we’. Intentions remain individual. What changes is the way in which they are constructed and linked together. Let us suppose, then, that we have to paint a house together. I intend that we paint it and you intend that we paint it. The plural matters. But it does not yet matter enough. I might be thinking of doing it next Saturday, whilst you, on the other hand, are thinking of doing it on Sunday. I might be imagining starting with the exterior, whilst you’ve already bought everything needed for the interior. We could be in perfect agreement on the aim and in perfect disagreement on everything else. We’d have a ‘we’ in the sentence, yet in reality two different plans.

Doing different things together

It is here that Bratman introduces a term that isn’t exactly elegant, but an idea that is, in fact, very elegant: ‘meshing’. Our respective plans must be able to fit together. They do not have to be identical; indeed, they usually aren’t. If we’re carrying a table up the stairs, I have to do exactly what you aren’t doing. If you lift on one side, I support on the other; if you step back, I step forward; if you can’t see the doorframe, I must see it for both of us. Working together does not mean doing the same thing. It means doing different things that make sense in relation to one another, because they are mutually functional towards the goal we wish to achieve. This is the leap that interests Bratman. My plan no longer ends at the boundaries of my own action. It contains a space for yours. And yours contains a space for mine. Take the two researchers whom, in last week’s example, we left grappling with an article. One collects the data; the other prepares the statistical analysis. It seems like a normal division of labour. But the first must collect data in a format that makes possible the analysis the second intends to carry out. The second must choose an analysis compatible with the nature of the data that the first can actually collect. If one decides to change the sample, the other may be forced to modify the model. If the second researcher discovers that the model requires a variable that has not been collected, the problem is no longer theirs alone. It has become a problem for the paper and therefore, in a very real sense, for both of them. This is a curious feature of shared plans: they can give rise to shared problems.

It doesn’t mean that every decision has to be made together. If that were the case, doing anything together would be almost impossible. To organise a conference, there’s no need to meet up to decide who will ring the restaurant, which font to use on the poster or at what time to order the bottles of water. Just like the individual plans we analysed last week, shared plans are also incomplete. They leave gaps. They delegate. They separate tasks. They allow each person to solve part of the problem independently. But there is a limit to this autonomy. I can choose the restaurant on my own, but I cannot choose a restaurant a hundred kilometres away from the conference venue without my decision being taken into account in the others’ plans. I can write my part of the article independently, but I cannot alter the basic data the day before the deadline whilst pretending that it is still just ‘my part’. The more our plans interlock, the more certain decisions cease to be solely mine, even whilst continuing to be made independently.

Cooperation therefore has a curious structure. It divides up the work whilst, at the same time, intertwining decisions. It allows me to take on fewer tasks precisely because I can rely on you to take care of the others. I don’t book the flights because you do. You don’t prepare the slides because I do. Specialisation sets us free. But the very thing that frees us on the one hand makes us dependent on the other. If you don’t book the flights, my plan falls through. If I don’t prepare the slides, your work will be in vain. And this explains why, for Bratman, the notion of ‘compatibility’ is not enough. Each of us must be willing, within certain limits, to make our own behaviour dependent on that of the other. If the table tilts, I correct the movement. If you slow down, I slow down. If we discover it won’t fit through the door, I don’t stubbornly keep pushing my end just because ‘that’s my part’. The shared plan is reflected in the way we react to what happens. We move from ‘compatibility’ to ‘interdependence’. We do not have one mind in two bodies. We have something less mysterious and, perhaps precisely for that reason, more interesting: two minds that each allow a part of the other’s plan to enter into their own practical reasoning.

A light-hearted ‘we’

At this point, a sense of déjà vu might arise. Haven’t we already been down this road, analysing Margaret Gilbert’s thinking? Haven’t we already encountered two people walking together and discovered that their walking becomes a shared action when a joint commitment arises between them? Yes, but the question back then was different. Gilbert focuses primarily on what happens between people when they form a plural subject. If we decide to go for a walk together, our decision alters the normative position of each of us in relation to the other. I cannot simply abandon you halfway, just as I might have changed the route of a solitary walk without consulting you. Joint commitment generates expectations, obligations and mutual authorisations. Michael Bratman looks elsewhere. Let us imagine, then, that the commitment exists. How do we now go about walking together? We must choose a compatible route, adjust our pace, decide whether or not to cross the road, and stop when the other person stops. We may be very closely bound by our commitment yet completely unable to coordinate our plans. The obligation still does not tell us how to carry out what we have committed to doing. This is where Bratman lightens the burden of ‘us’. There is no need to attribute a separate mind to the group, nor to assume that every shared activity necessarily generates the entire normative structure envisaged by Gilbert. All he requires are individual agents equipped with the capacity to plan, appropriate intentions, mutual knowledge and plans that can ‘mesh’ together. That is no small thing. And yet it does not require us to transform the grammatical plural into a new person. The advantage of this approach becomes clear when we try to broaden our perspective a little. Much of our shared life consists of activities that are too organised to be mere coincidences of behaviour and too ordinary to require the solemn constitution of a collective subject on every occasion. We prepare a dinner, write an article, organise a trip. Each of us remains an autonomous centre of deliberation, yet part of what each of us decides can only be understood by looking at what others have decided and at what we have decided to do together. Bratman’s ‘we’ does not erase the ‘I’. It forces it to make room.

Who suits whom?

And it is precisely that space that brings us back to the question of justice – the one that matters most to us. In last week’s ‘Mind the Economy’, we saw that not everyone has the same opportunity to build plans stable enough to stand the test of time. Some can make decisions today, reasonably confident that the essential conditions of their project will still be in place tomorrow. Others must treat every decision as provisional because their future is constantly dependent on decisions beyond their control. Now the problem becomes more complicated. Because even when we do something together, it is not necessarily the case that we all make the same amount of room for one another. Two plans may fit together perfectly because we have built them together. But they may fit together just as perfectly because one has been forced to mould itself to the other. A manager may set timetables, targets and procedures and ensure that a hundred people organise their own plans accordingly. The coordination may be flawless. The individual plans may fit together perfectly. No one, looking at the result, would necessarily see the problem. We need to look inside the fit. Who decided what form those plans should take? Who was able to keep their decisions open, and who had to finalise theirs to fit in? Who can change their plans, forcing others to change theirs? Who has the power to determine when one or more of the individual plans must be modified?

Addressing these issues does not suddenly turn Bratman’s theory into a theory of justice. But it does offer us an unusual perspective from which to examine some of them. There are, in fact, those who can make plans and those who must necessarily adapt to the plans of others. There are those who can afford to leave certain possibilities open, and those who must close them off because the decisions of others have already restricted their own scope of choice. This is perhaps the most interesting point to which Bratman’s approach leads us. Acting together does not mean dissolving individuals into a collective subject. It means constructing, amongst their plans, a structure robust enough that what each person does depends, in part, on what others do. The ‘we’ does not take the place of the ‘I’. It becomes part of the ‘I’s’ planning. And it is precisely for this reason that the interlocking can be more or less symmetrical, more or less imposed, more or less capable of leaving each person the space to construct their own part of the plan.

But there is still a problem

We may well be perfectly capable of devising a collective plan and yet fail to agree on it together. This is the problem that Rousseau describes through his parable of the ‘deer hunt’. Everyone would be better off cooperating, but all it takes is for each person to think separately about what is in their own best interests for cooperation to fail, due to a lack of mutual trust. Bratman has explained to us how our intentions and plans can clash. It remains to be seen from which perspective we choose the plan that will bring them together. Do we reason as individuals, each seeking our own best course of action, or do we see ourselves as members of a group asking what is best to do together? It is from this question that we shall begin our analysis of Michael Bacharach’s contribution. Moving from ‘what should I do?’ to ‘what should we do?’ may seem like a minor shift. Yet it is, in fact, a philosophically radical shift. Sometimes the path we are to take together is already there, right in front of us. It is the vantage point from which we view it that prevents us from seeing it clearly.