Both Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Baylor Johnson hold that under current circumstances, individuals lack obligations to reduce their personal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Johnson argues that climate change has the structure of a tragedy of the commons, and that there is no unilateral obligation to reduce emissions in a commons. Against Johnson, I articulate two rationales for an individual obligation to reduce one's greenhouse gas emissions. I first discuss moral integrity, which recommends congruence between one's actions and positions at the (...) personal and political levels. Second, I draw on a Confucian, relational conception of persons to offer a critique of the collective action/tragedy of the commons framework itself. Under the relational conception, commons problems can be reconceptualised so as to dissolve the stark contrast between the individually and the collectively rational. This perspective can inform our approach to climate change and help reconcile individual and political action to mitigate it. (shrink)

Collective Action, Philosophy and Law brings together two important strands of philosophical analysis. It combines general philosophical inquiry into collective agency with analyses of specific questions about plural entities and activities in the legal domain. These are issues of growing interest in areas of philosophy like action theory and social ontology, as well as in philosophy of law. The book contains thirteen original chapters written by an international team of leading philosophers and legal theorists, and is (...) divided into four clear parts: The nature of law and of legislative intention Practical reasoning and duties Causality, blameworthiness, and responsibility Citizens, states, and institutions. These sections cut across, and build on, different accounts to advance the debate on classical and new issues in collective agency. Each part also features legal-philosophical analyses that draw on general accounts of collective agency to cast new light on the law, descriptive as well as normatively. Collective Action, Philosophy and Law is the first major interdisciplinary and multi-authored work bridging legal and philosophical approaches to collective agency. As such, it is essential reading for students and researchers of philosophy of law, ethics, political philosophy, jurisprudence, and legal theory. (shrink)

Enormous harms, such as climate change, often occur as the result of large numbers of individuals acting separately. In collective action problems, an individual has so little chance of making a difference to these harms that changing their behavior has insignificant expected utility. Even so, it is intuitive that individuals in many collective action problems should not be parts of groups that cause these great harms. This paper gives an account of when we do and do (...) not have obligations to change our behavior in collective action problems. It also addresses a question insufficiently explored in the literature on this topic: when obligations arising out of collective action problems conflict with other obligations, what should we do? The paper explains how to adjudicate conflicts involving two collective action problems and conflicts involving collective action problems and other sorts of obligations. (shrink)

A collective action problem exists not only in offensive warfare, but also in defensive situations. The collective action problem is dealt with in the same way in offensive and defensive warfare: by strong leadership, discipline, rewards and punishments, strong group identification, strict religiosity, and intolerance of deviants. This behavior is explained in terms of evolutionary psychology.

This paper is about the status of collective actions. According to one view, collective actions metaphysically reduce to individual actions because sentences about collective actions are merely a shorthand for sentences about individual actions. I reconstruct an argument for this view and show via counterexamples that it is not sound. The argument relies on a paraphrase procedure to unpack alleged shorthand sentences about collective actions into sentences about individual actions. I argue that the best paraphrase procedure (...) that has been put forward so far fails to produce adequate results. (shrink)

While a large amount of work has been done to understand public good and to construct conceptual models explaining the antecedents of collective action, current literature is flawed in that most of them only examine the lower-level public good and attribute people's participation in collective action to external variables. It pays little to the developmental nature of collective action. Utilizing Ken Wilber's theory of integral psychology, this paper proposes a holistic definition of public good, (...) emphasizing its different levels of development. The paper also introduces an integral model of collective action that explains the antecedents of collective action in terms of not only the external individual behavior and social factors but also the internal aspects of individuals, organization, and society. (shrink)

usually brings to mind images of picket signs held by laborers striking for better wages and benefits. Collective action, however, need not be limited to the withholding of labor. Nor need it involve only the working or middle classes, as airline pilots have recently demonstrated. Finally, collective action need not have as its only purpose the self-interest of the group. Collective action does, however, always involve a joining together of individuals united by common goals (...) or interests in order to consolidate power for the purpose of negotiating with another group or entity. Examples of collective action obviously include striking, other withholding labor actions, and slowdowns, but can also include many other activities. for example, have been threatened or used by house officer organizations in the past. In a paper strike, patient care continues but without documentation, and thus, the institution suffers from absent or delayed financial remuneration. (shrink)

We argue that conceptual analyses of collective action should be informed by game-theoretic analyses of collective action. In particular, we argue that Ariel Rubenstein’s so-called ‘Electronic Mail Game’ provides a useful model of collective action, and of the formation of collective intentions.

Honoring Russell Hardin’s seminal contributions to the study of collective action, this paper describes several collective action problems faced by the citizens of American colonies and states in the years leading up to 1787, and demonstrates how they occasionally and temporarily managed to overcome them. In particular, the paper considers the cooperative or non-cooperative behavior of colonies and states in three arenas: contributions of soldiers and money in wars; participation in the non-importation, non-exportation, and non-consumption movements (...) directed against Great Britain; and trade relations among the states after independence. I observe that whereas farmers, planters, and artisans were willing to forsake their self-interest, under the influence of quasi-moral or social norms, merchants and politicians were not. Finally, I conclude that cooperation was rooted in the anger and enthusiasm of the first movers, who triggered the conditional cooperation of other citizens, and could easily unravel. (shrink)

Collective action processes in complex, multiple-use common-pool resources (CPRs) have only recently become a focus of study. When CPRs evolve into more complex systems, resource use by separate user groups becomes increasingly interdependent. This implies, amongst others, that the institutional framework governing resource use has to be re-negotiated to avoid adverse impacts associated with the increased access of any new stakeholders, such as overexploitation, alienation of traditional users, and inter-user conflicts. The establishment of “platforms for resource use negotiation” (...) is a way of dealing with complex natural resource management problems. Platforms arise when stakeholders perceive the same resource management problem, realize their interdependence in solving it, and come together to agree on action strategies for solving the problem (Röling, 1994). This article sets the scene for a discussion in this Special Issue about the potential of nested platforms for resource use negotiation in facilitating collective action in the management of complex, multiple-use CPRs. The article has five objectives. First, we define “collective action” in the context of this paper. Second, we discuss the importance of collective action in multiple-use CPRs. Third, we introduce the concept of platforms to coordinate collective action by multiple users. Fourth, we address some issues that emerge from evidence in the field regarding the role and potential of nested platforms for managing complex CPRs. Finally, we raise five discussion statements. These will form the basis for the collection of articles in this special issue. (shrink)

This 1989 volume presents a theory of capitalist collective action and a case study of the pre-World War II American coal industry to which the theory is applied. The author examines the irony of capitalist firms that do not want to compete with each other, but often cannot avoid doing so. He then explains under what conditions businesses would be able to organize their competition and identifies the economic and political factors that facilitate or inhibit this organization. The (...) case study not only illustrates the theory, but demonstrates how the competitive relations of capitalist firms are critically important determinants of their political behavior. The author argues that the traditional Marxist concern with conflict between workers and capitalists should be supplemented with a concern for the competitive conflicts among capitalists. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the manner in which analyses of the action of single agents have been pressed into service for constructing accounts of collective action. Specifically, I argue that the best analogy to collective action is a class of individual action that Carl Ginet has called 'aggregate action.' Furthermore, once we use aggregate action as a model of collective action, then we see that existing accounts of collective (...) action have failed to accommodate an important class of (what I shall call) 'unintentional collective actions.'. (shrink)

Philosophers and economists write about collective action from distinct but related points of view. This paper aims to bridge these perspectives. Economists have been concerned with rationality in a strategic context. There, problems posed by “coordination games” seem to point to a form of rational action, “team thinking,” which is not individualistic. Philosophers’ analyses of collective intention, however, sometimes reduce collective action to a set of individually instrumental actions. They do not, therefore, capture the (...) first person plural perspective characteristic of team thinking. Other analyses, problematically, depict intentions ranging over others’ actions. I offer an analysis of collective intention which avoids these problems. A collective intention aims only at causing an individual action, but its propositional content stipulates its mirroring in other minds. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze notions of common good and of the state in late 19th century British social liberalism and their relation to collective action of the citizens. The author shows that British social liberals argued for a type of state that uses top down strategy to encourage collective action in order to transform individuals into a socially responsible groups, i.e. good citizens. The paper focuses on philosophical works of F. H. Bradley, (...) ethics of T. H. Green and political philosophy of B. Bosanquet, analyzing their efforts to reconceptualize ideas of classical liberalism and utilitarian doctrine of the individual, society and the state in light of emerging influence of leftist social movements. The author argues that the works of British social liberals are a foundation of the state and society which will dominate liberalism in the second half of 20th century, i.e. the idea of the welfare state. (shrink)

Collective action occurs when people voluntarily join with one another for obtaining collective goods, such as rights and equality, that institutions fail to provide or bloc them from getting. Collective action has to overcome obstacles due to free riding, recruitment, participation, costs of organizing, and social control by the opposition. Collective actions range from episodic protests and hostile crowds to sustained social movements and civil strife.Collective action theory in the tradition of methodological (...) individualism assumes that individuals make adaptive decisions under uncertainty, contingent on expectations about the decisions of peers, opponents and bystanders. The four key variables of participation are number of participants, costs of participation, the value of the collective good, and the production function for different tactics and modes of contestation.The reduction of uncertainty is achieved by strategies of resource mobilization, selective incentives, solidarity, bloc mobilization, political opportunity, shared culture, mass media effects, signaling of information, and pace setter-follower diffusion dynamics. The theory explains unconventional political and social advocacy in democratic and autocratic regimes, from routine politics, strikes, demonstrations, hostile crowds to social movements and other modes of confrontation. (shrink)

This paper offers some refinements to a particular objection to act consequentialism, the “causal impotence” objection. According to proponents of the objection, when we find circumstances in which severe, unnecessary harms result entirely from voluntary acts, it seems as if we should be able to indict at least one act among those acts, but act consequentialism appears to lack the resources to offer this indictment. Our aim is to show is that the most promising response on behalf of act consequentialism, (...) the threshold argument, cannot offer a fully general prescription about what to do in cases of collective action. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Observations on Collective Action Approaches to Collective Action The Personal Intentions Approach The ‘We ‐ Intentions’ Approach The Joint Commitment Approach Concluding Remarks Further reading.

In this paper the author deals with collegial judicial decisions as a form of human action. The scope is, however, limited to three questions: What is the structure and the status of the general theory of action; Is this theory applicable to such performative acts as judicial decisions; and finally, Is it possible to speak about action in connection with collective agents such as collegial courts? The author defends the thesis that general theory of action (...) as such is applicable to collective action, too, because the difficulty is not in the structure of that theory, or in its “individual character,” but specifically in the notion of “collective will.” This kind of “will” is epistemologically always a result of a political procedure, and speaking about the “collective will” presupposes the analysis of these procedures, because in practice they and only they formulate “collective motives,”“collective beliefs” and the like. (shrink)

There is a common intuition that genocide is qualitatively distinct from, and much worse than, mass murder. If we concentrate on the most obvious differences between genocidal killing and other cases of mass murder it is difficult to see why this should be the case. I argue that many cases of genocide involve not merely individual evil but a form of collective action manifesting a collective evil will. It is this that explains the moral distinctiveness of genocide. (...) My view contrasts with one put forward by Claudia Card, though we both agree that the notion of ‘‘social death’’ plays a significant role here. (shrink)

We argue that, in order to explain the relative strengths of our reasons to contribute to different collective endeavours, approaches to the ethics of collective action must understand the strengths of our reasons to make a given contribution as proportional to its expected benefits, or its chances of bringing about benefits in proportion to their magnitudes. The view that most clearly meets this proportionality requirement is the expected consequences approach, which identifies our reasons to perform an act (...) with its expected benefits. We contend that views other than the expected consequences approach must similarly proportion the expected degrees of what they take to be reason-giving features of a contribution – such as its virtuousness, appropriate expression, support by considerations of fairness, or helping without making a difference – to the contribution’s expected benefits. The proportionality requirement explains why we should spend more time participating in strategic social, political, and labour movement activities, while avoiding unproductive conflicts and merely performative activities. We conclude that the proportionality requirement, and the ability of views other than the expected consequences approach to meet it, are important for thinking and communicating about the ethics of collective action in ways that are simultaneously most compelling and most strategic. (shrink)

This essay juxtaposes the South Asian system of social hierarchies, conceptualized by Babasaheb Ambedkar as “graded inequality” with “serial relations” as conceptualized by Jean-Paul Sartre. Collective action against casteism faces internal problems. The complex psychological dynamics preserved over millennia through caste systems prevent solidarities across castes. The notion of “seriality” helps us to understand the material limitations placed by scripted functional roles on collective action. Internal divisions arising from prioritizing a caste or class perspective can be (...) resolved with a better understanding of how “exigencies of sociality” create an ambiguous unity. A key lesson from Sartre is that it is only through praxis that consciousness remains open to the attractions of solidarity. Cultural otherness disconnected from the materiality of class (or gender) is a distortion. Conceiving of classes as historically determined while ignoring caste-being makes any analysis of revolutionary action incomplete. Reading Ambedkar and Sartre together opens the way for a genuinely historical materialist account of collective action against graded inequality. (shrink)

This article considers the dispute between moral economy and rational peasant theories of agrarian societies in application to problems of collective action. The moral-economy theory holds that traditional peasant society is organized cooperatively through shared moral values and communal institutions; while the rational-peasant theory maintains that peasant society shows the mark of rational individual calculation, leading to free-rider problems that undermine successful collective action. This article offers an abstract model of a traditional village and assesses the (...) applicability of recent qualifications of the collective action argument to this model. It will emerge that the social characteristics of the traditional village embody features that facilitate collective action by rational peasants. (shrink)

Writers on collective action are in broad agreement that in order for a group of agents to form a collective intention, the members of that group must have beliefs about the beliefs of the other members. But in spite of the fact that this so-called "interactive knowledge" is central to virtually every account of collective intention, writers on this subject have not offered a detailed account of the nature of interactive knowledge. In this paper, we argue (...) that such an account is necessary for any adequate analysis of collective intention. Furthermore, we argue that an application of Robert Aumann's theory of interactive knowledge may be used to address several puzzling features of collective intention. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Some concepts of collective action have been examined. It is found that collective action is formed as a result of interaction of individuals within the group, collective etc. Such social environment in which collective action appears, is the educational process, which aims to provide protection, safety and educational needs of direct interaction between the preschool children and children of younger school age. The forms of work: group and collective, have been analyzed. It (...) is found that acting in a group or team, the participants of educational process gather around the common goal, collective action, that occurs, becomes the value in the process of achieving this goal. That is, it encourages the collective, group to act in the given direction. This action is accompanied by the interaction, due to which raises the phenomenology of collective, above- and beyond the individual. It is based on the formation in the mind of each individual subject of communication the subjective model of the content and the process of interaction, which seems to be shared with other participants (the subject feels as if its co-author) and the presence of which can be displayed in the form of a general image of the subject of interaction that occurs in interpersonal space and fills it. (shrink)

This article examines the phenomenon of collective or aggregate civil litigation, manifested in different forms as a class action, representative action, or group action. Different countries have adopted different models of collective civil litigation. This diversity presents a challenge in drawing comparisons, and raises the need to study the different techniques involved. This article summarizes the adoption of a technical perspective. Following this, the article reviews the availability and limitations of the research techniques in relation (...) to what we want. It discusses the questions of goals of collective procedures, levels of need, technical modes of operation, and evaluation. The ultimate goal is to be able to compare different techniques and decide which ones might work best and in what circumstances or types of situation. There is plenty of research to be done in this field. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of proxy agency in the context of collective action. It takes the case of a group announcing something by way of a spokesperson as an illustration. In proxy agency, it seems that one person or subgroup's doing something counts as or constitutes or is recognized as (tantamount to) another person or group's doing something. Proxy agency is pervasive in institutional action. It has been taken to be a straightforward counterexample to an appealing (...) deflationary view of collective action as a matter of all members of a group making a contribution to bringing about some event. I show that this is a mistake. I give a deflationary account of constitutive rules in terms of essentially collective action types. I then give an account of one form of constitutive agency in terms of constitutive rules. I next give an account of status functions—of which being a spokesperson is one—that also draws on the concept of a constitutive rule. I then show how these materials help us to see how proxy agency is an expression of the agency of all members of the group credited with doing something when the proxy acts. (shrink)

In light of the magnitude of interpersonal harm and the risk of greater harm in the future, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued for pharmacological enhancement of moral behaviour. I discuss moral bioenhancement as a set of collective action problems. Psychotropic drugs or other forms of neuromodulation designed to enhance moral sensitivity would have to produce the same or similar effects in the brains of a majority of people. Also, a significant number of healthy subjects would have (...) to participate in clinical trials testing the safety and efficacy of these drugs, which may expose them to unreasonable risk. Even if the drugs were safe and effective, a majority of people would have to co-operate in a moral enhancement programme for such a project to succeed. This goal would be thwarted if enough people opted out and decided not to enhance. To avoid this scenario, Persson and Savulescu argue that moral enhancement should be compulsory rather than voluntary. But the collective interest in harm reduction through compulsory enhancement would come at the cost of a loss of individual freedom. In general, there are many theoretical and practical reasons for scepticism about the concept and goal of moral enhancement. (shrink)

The concept of solidarity is of central importance to the political sense of collective action. But it is a curious fact that solidarity is virtually unmentioned across the large and growing literature in philosophical collective action theory. Instead, we see discussions of collective action overwhelmingly focus on epistemic conditions and group-level correlates of individual action explanations such as collective intentions, collective beliefs, and so on. The aim of this paper is to (...) elucidate the relationship between solidarity and collective action theory. I will try to answer two questions: (1) What is it about the structure of accounts of collective action that seems to preclude discussions of solidarity and related concepts; and (2) How can solidarity be made to play a useful role in those accounts? (shrink)

Watersheds constitute a special case of multiple-use common pool resources (CPRs). In a textual sense, watersheds tend to be mosaics of privately owned and managed patches of land. At the same time, however, watersheds are also ecosystems in which multiple resources and people interact through an infinity of bio-physical processes. Through such interaction, new watershed-level qualities emerge that, together with other factors, condition watershed users' continued resource use and access. In this perspective, watersheds become common-pool resources. Hence, watershed users do (...) not only manage their individual plots, crops, forests, etc., knowingly or not, they manage landscape patterns and bio-physical processes that transcend their private property. In this context, drawing on experiences gained through participatory action research in a micro-watershed in the Andean hillsides of southern Colombia, this paper describes a process aimed at fostering collective watershed management. The paper illustrates the importance of platforms as a mechanism for negotiating and coordinating collective action by multiple users and discusses the issues of representation on such platforms as well as the importance of third party facilitation. (shrink)

The possibility of collective action is essential to human freedom. Yet, as Rousseau famously argued, individuals acting together allow themselves to depend on one another’s choices and thereby jeopardize one another’s freedom. These two facts jointly constitute what I call the normative problem of collective action. I argue that solving this problem is harder than it looks. It cannot be done merely in terms of moral obligations; indeed, it ultimately requires putting in place a full-fledged system (...) of contract rights. The point has important ramifications for contract theory. The role that contract rights play in reconciling collective action and freedom turns out to be crucial to understanding how—and by whom—these rights can legitimately be enforced. It also explains why expectation damages should be the standard remedy for breach of contract. (shrink)

This paper argues that the intentional actions of collective entities, such as corporations and agencies, are not necessarily joint intentional actions by several members of those collectives. I briefly summarize the social action theories of John Searle, Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, and Seumas Miller, which I argue are all theories of joint action. I then describe a case based loosely on events from the 2008 financial crisis in which an intentional collective action is (...) performed by a corporation due to the actions of two employees who have no knowledge of one another, and therefore cannot be engaged in a joint intentional action. I argue that this shows that, contrary to what joint action theorists are committed to, every intentional collective action does not entail the existence of a joint intentional action. Finally, I suggest that we should look for a weaker notion of coordination than that employed by joint action theories, and that this might be provided by examining the command structures of organizations. (shrink)

Many moral theories hold individuals responsible for their marginal impact on massive patterns (for instance overall value or equality of opportunity) or for following whichever rules would realise that pattern on the whole. But each of these injunctions is problematic. Intuitively, the first gives individuals responsibility for too much, and the second gives them responsibility for too little. I offer the outlines of a new approach to ethics in collective action contexts. I defend a new collaborative principle that (...) assigns recognisably worthwhile responsibilities to agencies wherever possible. This principle supports a fractal model of moral responsibility, one that favours restructuring divisions of labour in ways that enhance the prospects of recognition at every level of social organisation. This essay is programmatic: starting from a conjecture about the moral significance of recognition, it sketches a new way of approaching a range of collective action problems that combines the importance of the perspectives of both moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Unemployed and informal workers seem an unlikely source of large-scale collective action in Latin America. Since 1997, however, Argentina has witnessed an upsurge of protest and the emergence of unusually influential federations of unemployed and informal workers. To explain this puzzle, this article offers a policy-centered argument. It suggests that a workfare program favored common interests and identities on the part of unemployed workers and grassroots associations, allowing them to overcome barriers to collective action. State responses (...) to demands for workfare benefits generated a pattern of protest and negotiation that strengthened those groups and dramatically expanded social policy. (shrink)

Many consequentialists argue that you ought to do your part in collective action problems like climate change mitigation and ending factory farming because (i) all such problems are triggering cases, in which there is a threshold number of people such that the outcome will be worse if at least that many people act in a given way than if fewer do, and (ii) doing your part in a triggering case maximises expected value. I show that both (i) and (...) (ii) are false: Some triggering cases cannot be solved by appeal to expected value, since they involve infinities, and some collective action problems are not triggering cases, since they involve parity. However, I argue that consequentialism can still generally prohibit failure to do your part in those collective action problems where we believe that so acting would be impermissible. (shrink)

Several important questions in applied ethics – like whether to switch to a plant-based diet, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or vote in elections – seem to share the following structure: if enough people ‘cooperate’ and become vegan for example, we bring about a better outcome; but what you do as an individual seems to make no difference whatsoever. Such collective action problems are often thought to pose a serious challenge to consequentialism. In response, I defend the Reactive Attitude (...) Approach: rather than focus only on the deontic status of (non-)cooperative acts – as existing consequentialist responses mostly do – consequentialists should also focus on when to praise or blame individuals. For example, even if your veganism does not change the overall outcome, consequentialists might still recommend praising you for your cooperative behavior. I make a consequentialist case for including praise and blame in our ethical practices around collective action and argue that doing so helps us capture important intuitions. I develop and defend these arguments by drawing on recent instrumentalist theories of blame and responsibility. (shrink)

Collective action is a much-discussed topic today, but not in the historiography of philosophy. Therefore, I would like to contribute a little bit to our understanding of the history of this concept by exploring the political philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. A compelling interpretation of his treatise On Kingship emerges when we read it not, as is often the case, in terms of his moral perfectionism, but as expressing the idea that the political community is an artificial and distinct (...) subject of agency. Thus, the political philosophy of On Kingship turns out to be congenial to contemporary approaches to collective action. (shrink)

Examining the concept of clientelism in analysis of participatory processes, we investigate how collective and individual action are articulated in practices in the case of participatory budgeting in Recife, Brazil. We use ethnographic work to look how collective actors mobilize within the PB process in Recife and show that PB’s territorial and redistributive nature provides fertile ground for informal exchanges to be entrenched in institutional processes at the micro level. Microsocial interactions between political entrepreneurs, intermediaries, and ordinary (...) participants in Recife participatory practice are shaped by two processes: individualization of political loyalties and territorialization of politics. These, we argue, allow informal exchanges to coexist with institutionalized forms of collective action. PB presupposes that participants engage in local struggles and introduces competition and inequalities among them, as access to resources is conditioned by their ability to mobilize and enter into informal interactions that underlie political exchanges within PB. (shrink)

This article examines the phenomenon of collective or aggregate civil litigation, manifested in different forms as a class action, representative action, or group action. Different countries have adopted different models of collective civil litigation. This diversity presents a challenge in drawing comparisons, and raises the need to study the different techniques involved. This article summarizes the adoption of a technical perspective. Following this, the article reviews the availability and limitations of the research techniques in relation (...) to what we want. It discusses the questions of goals of collective procedures, levels of need, technical modes of operation, and evaluation. The ultimate goal is to be able to compare different techniques and decide which ones might work best and in what circumstances or types of situation. There is plenty of research to be done in this field. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between identity, emotion, and feminist collective action. Based on interview research, the analysis confirms the central importance of anger in collective action and its particular significance for feminist identity and activism. As an emotion thought deviant for women, the anger inherent in feminist collective action frames created problems for participants in terms of relationships with partners, friends, and work colleagues. Participants performed emotion work to deal with negative responses to (...) their feminist identity, but this depleted emotional energy and created stress. Participation in movement events provided much-needed emotional support and an outlet for deviant emotions. (shrink)

I defend the view that individual agents have instrumental moral reasons for and against contributing to collective actions. I distinguish three versions of this view found in the literature and argue that only one withstands scrutiny: the version on which each individual contribution to a collective action is a cause of the latter’s large-scale outcomes. The central difficulty with this view is its apparent incompatibility with leading theories of causation. Against these theories I motivate a general structural (...) principle about causation which enables instrumentalism to deliver the intuitively correct verdicts about individual agents’ moral reasons in cases of collective action. (shrink)