Yeah, yeah—we should totally get together for lunch sometime! Spoiler alert: they never got together for lunch sometime.
It is a familiar tale, one as old as time even, yet it stands astoundingly prevalent and unchallenged at our dear campus in Stanford, California. Myriad factors have led to the rise of Stanford flake culture, and even more ensure that it is not going anywhere without a fight; however, the consequences of this cultural phenomenon are as abundant as they are insidious. Although flake culture can be understood at a high level without any special knowledge about the metaphysics of human sociality, uncovering some of these underlying dynamics will help to illuminate how exactly it manifests in the human psyche and the nuances of how it breaks these intricate systems. I will touch briefly on Margaret Gilbert’s conceptions about shared intentional action (SIA) but will spend most of my time analyzing SIA through the lens of Bratman’s planning theory of intention and, by extension, his planning theory of SIA. In particular, I will focus on how certain cooperative activities lead to moral obligations to follow through on those activities, the value of those moral obligations, and how flake culture is messing this whole thing up. I will first discuss how in normal cases, shared intentional activity leads to moral obligations. Then I will describe the phenomenon of Stanford flake culture: what it is and how it persists. Finally, I will argue as to how flake culture interrupts this normal process of forming moral obligations from SIA and why this negatively affects the way we view ourselves and each other.
Firstly, it will help to define what we mean by SIA and moral obligation, albeit you could invent an entire field of philosophy just to take this question (which has already been done). For simplicity, I will only look at two of the most prevalent and convincing attempts to answer this question, Gilbert’s and Bratman’s, although I do not intend to explicitly defend or oppose these theories here.
Gilbert’s theory defines shared intentional action and the obligation that comes with it in one fell swoop by merely reducing SIA to a joint commitment. In her view doing something intentionally with someone else is equivalent to creating a commitment with that person that you will do that thing together (Gilbert). This view has the benefit of not needing to explain the SIA to obligation pipeline since they are one and the same; still, the kind of obligation that Gilbert considers here is not a moral one, so these joint commitments would not hold any normative power over our actions. The kinds of commitments that I am concerned with for this topic are moral ones, due to the fact that these are the kind that can easily be defeated by normalization of different moral values—as has happened in the case of Stanford flake culture. For this reason, I will only consider Bratman’s theory from this point forward, despite Gilbert’s elegant way of tying SIA to obligation.
According to Bratman, shared intentional action is merely an extension of individual intention (when explained by his planning theory of individual intention) with a few added characteristics. He defines an SIA to J as (1) I intend that we J, you intend that we J; (2) I intend that we J in part by way of your intention that we J (analogously for you); (3) I intend to J through mutual responsiveness and the meshing of subplans with you (analogously for you); (4) there is interdependence between each of our intentions that we J; (5) our intentions are out in the open or common knowledge (Bratman). Notice specifically how obligation is not a strict ingredient in Bratman’s recipe for SIA. He believes there are certain cases where it is possible to engage in SIA without having an obligation and cases where it is possible to have an obligation without SIA. Still, in the majority of normal cases, when we begin to form plans with someone, there seems to emerge a joint moral commitment to following through on the plans. How might this happen?
Bratman recognizes that shared intentional action usually forms through a variety of assurances—sentiments usually of the form “I will if you will”—that each have different contents and scopes (Bratman). Certain kinds of assurances, when combined with the induced reliance from the SIA, are promises which induce obligations which, contrary to Gilbert’s view, are moral obligations and are not constitutive of the SIA itself. These moral obligations are entirely separate from the SIA, yet they are able to add weight to it through our separate intentions to be moral individuals and to be people of our word. Through means-end coherence of these individual moral intentions, the means of following through on our original SIA is now elevated in virtue of achieve the end of adhering to our moral principles.
I speak about Stanford flake culture as though it is common nomenclature, but I will attempt to delineate the particular mentality I am speaking of. At Stanford, it is extremely common for students to not follow through on joint plans, and flake culture is this normalization of having low levels of commitment to activities involving other people. It’s existence makes sense—everyone at Stanford has filled their schedules to the brim trying to dip their toes in everything—but I believe that it is more of a result of convenience than purely a symptom of the typical Stanford lifestyle. It is convenient to be able to flake on any plans at any time for any reason. It’s also a type of defence mechanism whereby people can avoid being flaked on by flaking on the other person first. At Stanford, everyone participates in a competition for who can care the least and flake culture is the field upon which we play this sport.
Before I make my normative judgments about the merits of flake culture, let’s consider how flake culture literally disrupts the formation of shared intentional activity. As stated earlier, the formation of shared intention usually involves a series of assurances of the form “I will if you will.” A consequent of normalizing low commitment to shared activities is that these assurances transform from “I will if you will” to “I might if you will.” After years of students realizing that other people do not literally mean their assurances, everyone defaults to this claim of “I might if you will.” There still exists, at least initially, some concrete notion of shared intentional activity here since all involved people recognize a joint intention that is out in the open and there is a prima facie collective desire to mesh subplans and so forth. However, the assurances are generating this SIA are insufficient to generate a joint moral commitment of the kind that would strengthen this original SIA. Adding “might” to our intentions, even if it exists implicitly (which is normalized due to flake culture), liberates us from the moral baggage that comes with making actual commitments to one another.
On the surface, flake culture is an attractive concept. It is decidedly difficult and exhausting to choose to fully commit to another person, especially in an environment where it is expected that they will not do the same for you. Nonetheless, it is only through difficult decisions that we may lead a peaceful and fulfilling life.
Firstly, Stanford flake culture presents a practical threat to our ability to engage in shared activity. I have seen it in my friends, and I have seen it in myself. If it is true that “practice makes perfect,” then we are all training to become the perfect flaker complete with absolute avoidance of responsibility and optimal fear of commitment. Partaking in SIA is one of life’s greatest pleasures and every time we fail to follow through on our own desire to do so is a vote for a lonelier future. Secondly, flake culture deflates the importance of other people in our lives, inadvertently inflating our own egos. When we always give ourselves the opportunity to create excuses for bailing on our shared inetntions, we not only convince ourselves that other people are not worth the effort, but also that we are not people of our word. True confidence comes from sticking to your word; insecurity derives from us convincing ourselves we don’t do the things we want to.
This paper took a meandering course, and perhaps may have landed us outside of the theory of action, but sometimes this is the best way to reach meaningful conclusions. We started by looking at how shared intentional action can generate moral obligations. Although Gilbert’s view makes this connection simple, her particular joint commitments are not the moral kind, so instead we approached the topic from Bratman’s point of view. We looked at how a planning theory of shared intentional action can create the right kind of moral obligations, then how Stanford flake culture disrupts this process. Finally, I gave a brief argument as to why disrupting this process is a bad idea for our individual senses of self-confidence and our social fulfillment in life. This essay ended up being far more normative and anecdotal than I had anticipated, but these are the kinds of things that I have been thinking about in class, and these are the kinds of things I think about outside of class. Why not combine the two?
Bratman, Michael E."Shared Cooperative Activity," The Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 327-341.
Bratman, Michael E. “Shared Agency-A Planning Theory of Acting Together,” Lecture at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2013)
Gilbert, Margaret “Shared Intention and Personal Intentions” Philosophical Studies 144 (2009): 167-87