How Not To Do Things With Others: A Buddhist Account of Shared Agency

Abstract: Unlike Western philosophers, classical Buddhist thinkers largely remained silent about sociopolitical issues and did not develop explicit frameworks for theorizing them. The present article reconstructs a Buddhist account of shared action based on select passages from works by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. It outlines the structure of individual action, according to Vasubandhu, and identifies three conditions that need to be satisfied for a joint activity to take place. This model, I suggest, is reductive in seeing joint action as an aggregation of individual actions, and it differs from Western treatments of shared agency in several respects. Primarily, Vasubandhu’s paradigm rests on an extended structure of action; it is guided by an internalist standard of moral evaluation that emphasizes the consequences of shared actions for the acting members, and it is centrally concerned with how individuals can extricate themselves from social entanglements and gain control over their actions.