Deciding Together

I begin, in Section 1, by specifying the type of joint deliberation I have in mind and drawing a preliminary contrast between it and pure strategic bargaining. In Section 2, I argue that joint deliberation, thus understood, essentially involves certain conditional, conative attitudes on the part of the deliberators, and that these attitudes are further constrained by requirements of mutual, non-instrumental concern. In Section 3, I explore different ways in which we can fail to live up to this requirement. I then argue, in Section 4, that the constraint imposed by our mutual concern commits us to a form of mutual answerability for our shared reasons, which functions to block mutual acceptance of reasons in cases where such acceptance would manifest a lapse in concern, by either party, for the normative significance of either party’s individual preferences and interests. Throughout most of the paper, I treat deliberators’ mutual concern as deriving from relations of friendship or love. In Section 5, however, I suggest that a commitment to deliberative mutuality of the sort I describe may in fact arise in a broader range of relationships. I argue, first, that some relationships that fall short of friendship or love may nonetheless involve robust mutual concern and, second, that we might sometimes be committed to deliberating with one another as if we were in such a relationship even when we are not.