 A fourth criticism of Gilbert’s view targets the scalability of the conception of joint commitment and plural subjects. Gilbert affirms this at great length and claims that even political communities (or societies) can be understood along those lines, thus arguing for a view of which she takes traditional social contract theory to be one version (cf. Gilbert 2006, part II). The merits of such a contractualist approach need not be discussed in the present context, but the underlying claim that one can extrapolate from the basic case of joint action runs into difficulties when it is viewed in combination with Gilbert’s claim that joint commitments cannot be rescinded unilaterally, but only jointly by all of the individuals who undertake it (cf. Gilbert 2009: 182). This feature of the account may seem counterintuitive already in cases of rather spontaneous small-scale joint actions, such as when I meet a colleague on the way to the lecture hall and we fall into walking together for a bit. But the larger the scale, the more implausible this implication becomes. Are we to accept, by way of reductio, that one member of a political community can hold all others to a social contract (Baltzer 2002)?