ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the pertinent concept of joint commitment, and offers some reasons for thinking that it plays a central role in human life. It explains the difference between basic and non-basic joint commitments: this is a difference in the process of joint commitment, not the product. A basic joint commitment comes about as follows: each of two or more people openly expresses his readiness jointly to commit them all in a certain way, and their having made the expressions is common knowledge. Non-basic joint commitments differ from basic joint commitments in that in order to create a non-basic joint commitment to do a certain thing as a body, it is not necessary that the parties express their readiness to do that thing as a body. One can argue that the parties to a joint commitment have associated obligations to one another to conform to the commitment.
