H. P. Grice: Conversation and Cooperative Rationality

Many discussions of rationality start with the assumption that all rationality must be conceived of as individual: Individual agents are acting on intentions with contents that might at most be parallel (in Sellars’s terminology) but cannot be shared. Drawing on the work of Gilbert, Sugden, Tuomela, and others, I argue in this chapter that there is a notion of cooperative rationality that is not reducible to individual rationality, and that the moral point of view can only be justified from the standpoint of cooperative rationality—not individual rationality. Further, Sellars’s account of we-intentions goes hand in hand with an account of cooperative rationality to present a cohesive picture of the moral point of view. I conclude by discussing what rationality requires when individual and team rationality conflict and make some brief comments on relativism and supererogation.