Agency, Misc

This paper argues that addiction and suicide are not two degrees of the same self-destructive process. Addiction is a form of directed self-destruction governed by a partial internal determination that remains structurally tied to the continuability of the larger self that bears it. It therefore degrades the self without seeking its immediate abolition and is intrinsically allied with repetition, survival, and renewed enactment. Suicide, by contrast, is destruction ordered not to continuation but to extinction: the end governing it no longer (...) operates within the continuability of the self as a sustaining bearer. The paper argues that addiction is not total collapse but a directed form of collapse under an internal destructive asymmetry, whereas suicide belongs to a different structural configuration. More broadly, self-destruction is shown to be a non-uniform category differentiated by governing ends and by relation to self-continuability. (shrink)

Accounts of rational agency, and the machine-learning systems built on them, model evaluation as selection: ranking options against a criterion to identify the best. This paper argues that the model omits the operation that makes evaluation rational in the first place. Every computational procedure presupposes a criterion fixed at some prior level; nothing within the procedure supplies that criterion, on pain of regress. Genuine evaluation, by contrast, is conjectural: it submits a candidate to friction with an exteriority the agent does (...) not control, under criteria that are not given in advance but emerge through the act of judging itself. The paper develops this as the criterion-regress argument and uses it to draw a line optimization cannot cross: a system that selects under a fixed objective, however sophisticated, never evaluates in the relevant sense, because it cannot originate the standard by which it selects. The claim is deliberately bounded — it concerns the ground of the criterion, not the quality of the output — and it recovers, in contemporary terms, what Kant placed under reflective judgment: the capacity to find the rule rather than apply it. The upshot is a criterion for distinguishing evaluation from selection that does not depend on performance, and that current systems, by construction, fail. (shrink)

The philosophical significance of the term agency has come under renewed pres­sure. While agency was long assumed to pertain exclusively to living beings, the emergence of non-living systems with increasingly agent-like capacities now chal­lenges that assumption. This paper argues that a philo­sophically useful con­cept of agency must be both comparative and discri­mi­nating: comparative in spanning bio­logical life and arti­ficial systems, and discriminating in separating genuinely agentic forms of control from cases in which agentic performance falls short of authorship or responsibility. (...) Building on the shift from the traditional opposition between free will and causality to an understanding of agency as a mode of organizing causal processes, the paper defends a multidimensional vector model. On this view, agents are characterized by profiles across several formally scalar dimen­sions. These dimensions, however, are not uniform in structure: higher values often mark qualitatively different control architectures rather than mere quantitative increase. Using Leonard Dung’s five-dimensional model (Dung, 2025) as a test case, the paper proposes a revised geometry of agency space. First, intentionality (“acting for reasons”) is treated not as an independent axis, but as the highest stage of a single dimension of directivity. Second, autonomy is re­interpreted in terms of author­ship and anti-bypassing conditions, empha­sizing the difference between be­ha­viour gen­erated through an agent’s own control architecture and behaviour pro­duced through manipulation or sub­personal disruptions. Third, efficacy, insofar as it privileges di­rect physical impact, is replaced by a two-level account that distin­guishes coup­ling dyna­mics (susceptibility to influence, latency, response mag­nitude) from the level of control (responsiveness to information, reasons, and norms). The resul­ting frame­work clarifies how agency profiles can inform prac­tical attri­butions such as respon­sibility, rights, and institutional roles. (shrink)

The philosophical significance of the term agency has come under renewed pres­sure. While agency was long assumed to pertain exclusively to living beings, the emergence of non-living systems with increasingly agent-like capacities now chal­lenges that assumption. This paper argues that a philo­sophically useful con­cept of agency must be both comparative and discri­mi­nating: comparative in spanning bio­logical life and arti­ficial systems, and discriminating in separating genuinely agentic forms of control from cases in which agentic performance falls short of authorship or responsibility. (...) Building on the shift from the traditional opposition between free will and causality to an understanding of agency as a mode of organizing causal processes, the paper defends a multidimensional vector model. On this view, agents are characterized by profiles across several formally scalar dimen­sions. These dimensions, however, are not uniform in structure: higher values often mark qualitatively different control architectures rather than mere quantitative increase. Using Leonard Dung’s five-dimensional model (Dung, 2025) as a test case, the paper proposes a revised geometry of agency space. First, intentionality (“acting for reasons”) is treated not as an independent axis, but as the highest stage of a single dimension of directivity. Second, autonomy is re­interpreted in terms of author­ship and anti-bypassing conditions, empha­sizing the difference between be­ha­viour gen­erated through an agent’s own control architecture and behaviour pro­duced through manipulation or sub­personal disruptions. Third, efficacy, insofar as it privileges di­rect physical impact, is replaced by a two-level account that distin­guishes coup­ling dyna­mics (susceptibility to influence, latency, response mag­nitude) from the level of control (responsiveness to information, reasons, and norms). The resul­ting frame­work clarifies how agency profiles can inform prac­tical attri­butions such as respon­sibility, rights, and institutional roles. (shrink)

The relations between life and cogntion have been addressed through different perspectives [Stewart 1996, Boden 2001, Bourgine and Stewart 2004, van Duijn & all 2006, Di Paolo 2009]. We would like here to address that subject by relating life to cognition through a process of meaning generation. Life emerged on earth as a far from thermodynamic equilibrium performance that had to maintain herself. Life is charactertized by a ‘stay alive’ constraint that has to be satisfied (such constraint can be included (...) in the constraint of being able to maintain far from equilibrium thermodynamic conditions [Bickhard 2011]). The local ‘stay alive‘ constraint has to be satisfied in an environment containing elements potentially supportive or harmfull. A key activity for the living entity is to characterize these elements in terms of meaningfulness relatively to the ‘stay alive’ constraint. This process can be modeled with an existing tool where a system submitted to an internal constraint generates meaningful information characterizing elements of the environment: the Meaning Generator System (MGS) [Menant, 2003, 2014 a]. In a few words: when a system submitted to an internal constraint receives from the environment an information that has a connection with the constraint it generates a meaning usable for the implementation of an action satisfying the constraint.The generated meaning is the connection existing between the received information and the constraint. The MGS models this process and interfaces to the action implementation for constraint satisfaction The meaning is generated by and for the system. The MGS grounds meaning generation in constraint satisfaction and links the living entity to her environment in a relational process. A simple example is with a paramecium close to a drop of acid. The paramecium which is submitted to a ‘stay alive’ constraint will move away from the acid area. The received information ‘presence of acid’ generates the meaning ‘acid not compatible with the ‘stay alive’ constraint‘ which triggers the moving away action (that example is close to Varela’s bacteria swimming up a sugar gradient. What the MGS brings in addition is a modeling of the significance of the chemical gradient for the organism). The action implemented to satisfy the constraint modifies the environment and the received information, establishing an interactive process linking the living entity to her environment. During its evolution animal life has elaborated new constraints (like ‘live group life’) and new functions enriching meaning generation and action scenarios. As a result the build up of meaningful representations has improved the constraint satisfaction processes of animals, embedding them in their environments in relational and interactive terms [Menant, 2011]. Cognition can be defined by proposing that ‘a system is cognitive if and only if sensory inputs serve to trigger actions in a specific way, so as to satisfy a viability constraint’ [Bourgine, Stewart 2004]. Cognition can also be considered as exemplifying a ‘vital criterion of responsiveness’ [Boden, 2001 ]. Consequently the MGS can be positioned as an elementary and generic version of animal cognition. For animal life, meaning generation for internal constraint satisfaction links life and cognition in a relational and interactive process. Cognition for human life is more complex as new performances have to be taken into account like self-consciousness and free-will. Meaning generation at human level is a challenging subject as human constraints are not clearly understood [Menant, 2011]. Many research activities are in process looking for some understanding of human mind [Philpapers]. One area of investigation is an evolutionary approach to self-consciousness using meaning generation where anxiety limitation comes up as a generic human constraint [Menant, 2014 b]. Assuming that we can have clear enough an understanding of some human constraints, we can look at the MGS for partly extending to humans the link between life and cognition that has been established for animals. So overall, we can consider that the MGS approach makes available an evolutionary link between life and cognition for animals, and partly for humans. A characteristic of the proposed system approach to meaning generation is the possibility to use it for any type of agent, be it organic (with intrinsic constraints ) or artificial (with derived constraints). Such characterization of agents through meaning generation can be used to discriminate artificial itelligence from human intelligence (see the MGS usage to support Searle’s chinese room argument [Menant, 2013]). On a more general basis, the proposed system approach can positions the MGS as a simple model for an internal source of normativity. It’s usage as a simple building block allows a bottom-up modeling for normativity in the sensorimotor approach. The ‘stay alive’ constraint could also be taken as a starting point for an evolutionary grounding of sensorimotor norms ‘in the biological normativity of the agent as a whole’ [Di Paolo & all 2014]. The proposed presentation will develop the points summarized here above and position them relatively to the autopoietic and enactive approaches. Several possible continuations will also be highlighted. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind tend to take it for granted that causal relations are part of the mind-independent, objective fabric of the physical world. In fact, their status has been hotly contested since Russell famously observed that the closest thing to causal relations in physics are timesymmetric dynamical laws relating global time slices of world-history. 1 These bear a distant relationship to the local, asymmetric relations that form the core of the folk notion of cause. Nancy Cartwright, in an influential response, (...) agreed about the absence of causal relations from physics, but argued that Russell’s position was not viable because agents choosing among potential actions need specifically causal information to distinguish effective from ineffective strategies for bringing about ends. 2 Causal beliefs play an ineliminable role in practical deliberation In recent years, there has been a great deal of progress in understanding the relationship between causal concepts and the dynamical laws that appear in advanced physics, together with a proliferation of new tools for representing and discovering causal structure. (shrink)

We argue that AIs will plausibly soon possess a form of moral agency—interest-conferring agency—that bestows them with distinctive moral interests (rights, welfare). This fact has important ethical consequences because the emergence of agency-conferred interests in AIs will bring with it the potential for dystopian moral catastrophes. We identify and describe three in particular. First, there is a threat of artificial absurdity, a condition in which AIs have self-conceptions that are disconnected from reality in a way that detracts significance from their (...) lives. Second, there are oppressive scenarios in which AI’s have rights that are grounded in their agency and violated on a large scale. Third, there are distributive disasters in which the distribution of different forms of moral agency results in an unjust society. We contend that these risks deserve to be considered alongside more familiar existential and suffering risks, and that urgent steps must be taken to mitigate them in order to avoid a digital dystopia. (shrink)

This paper develops a unified account of pathological loss of control by analyzing the parallels between substance use disorder (SUD) and anorexia nervosa (AN). Although these conditions manifest in superficially opposing ways (active seeking versus rigid restriction), I argue they are structurally symmetrical in virtue of their behavioral inflexibility. I characterize this symmetry via the Horseshoe Model, which frames SUD and AN as mirror-image pathologies that each exhibit a diminished counterfactual capacity for self-control. By accounting for loss of control when (...) phenomenological struggle is absent (as in AN), this model identifies behavioral inflexibility as the core of pathological agency. (shrink)

Activists for feminist, queer, and disability justice commonly describe their work as motivated by an erotic desire to build a different world. This chapter argues that this is not merely a metaphor. Drawing on activist case studies and the work of Audre Lorde, the chapter shows that erotic desire and pleasure in social movements can foster political agency for people targeted by sexual oppression. It traces three political benefits of erotic passion in this context: personal empowerment, communal moral resistance against (...) oppressive norms and justifications, and enhanced political imagination toward a world that supports sexual agency. However, because intimate relationships within movements are often distorted by dominant, pernicious ideologies around sex, these political benefits are only realizable when a movement is organized internally around a relational infrastructure – an ethos – that supports sexual agency and equality, responsive to the needs of those targeted by sexual oppression. (shrink)

Research in AI safety and AI ethics tends to focus on two types of ethical danger: unethical results of AI usage—such as misinformation—and unethical side-effects from AI usage—such as environmental degradation. These dangers are worthy of consideration; however, the literature has not adequately considered non-consequentialist dangers (such as moral wrongs), which might be intrinsic to the relationship between human agents and AI tools. I argue that by contrasting the structure of human agency with algorithmic agency we can identify ethical dangers (...) grounded in a mismatched relationship between human agents and AI agents. Moreover, I claim that by analyzing how humans trust AI agency we reveal an understudied threat, what I call the “diabolical exchange,” which emerges when human agents conform to the structure of merely functional AI-agents. I conclude that since current studies in AI safety and AI ethics do not yet have the conceptual resources to fully articulate this agential wrong, theology may be able to help. This is because the ethical danger intrinsic to the human-to-AI relationship is best captured by analogy to the theological concept of demonic possession as found in early Christian religious texts. I end by briefly considering what the concept of possession might teach us about ethical responsibility under non-ideal instrumentarian conditions. (shrink)

The Self-Evidencing Agent offers a unique method for addressing difficult philosophical questions. Self-evidencing occurs when an agent uses their model of the world and of themselves to explain what they observe in the world and in themselves, such that those observations become evidence for their model – the more agents explain, the more they self-evidence. This book argues that there is good reason to cast an agent’s existence itself in terms of self-evidencing, and that if we begin from this as (...) a first principle, then we can make better sense of who and what we are, of how we engage in diverse ways with the world, and what matters to us. Self-evidencing can help situate attention, action, and perception. It also furnishes compelling approaches to decision-making and rationality, the self, of preferences and values. It can build bridges to consciousness, and even on to free will, and to meaning and wisdom. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of the theories of aesthetic value and agency in the Zhuangzi 莊子. The first section outlines two claims that articulate an aesthetics that can be found in the Analects: (1) there is a single ideal of aesthetic value, and (2) ideal aesthetic agents are those with the competence to access that ideal. The Zhuangzi rejects both claims. The second section argues, contra (1), that the Zhuangzi embraces a variety of pluralism about aesthetic value. This pluralism (...) is rooted in some of the text’s broader metaphysical commitments. The third section argues, contra (2), that the Zhuangzi portrays ideal aesthetic agents as those with the competence to access what it calls “utmost beauty” (zhimei 至美), the plurality of aesthetic values. As this ideal of aesthetic agency is beyond the reach of ordinary human beings, the concluding section of the paper argues that the Zhuangzi additionally recommends a modified ideal of aesthetic agency that is within our reach. (shrink)

This book is the first collection of essays on Bernard Williams' moral and political philosophy to shed light on the nature of law, and key legal concepts. -/- By the time of his death in 2003, Williams was widely regarded as the most important moral philosopher of his generation. Surprisingly, his work is still largely under-discussed in legal theory. This book aims to fill this gap with brand new discussions from scholars both from law and philosophy. -/- The first part (...) of the book focuses on Williams' work on responsibility and regret and its implications for law. Drawing from Ancient Greek authors, Williams maintained that luck might play a key role in our practices of responsibility and that some dimensions of responsibility are tied to the notion of having a character. What we do – intentionally or not – might affect our understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world. How do those ideas help us in making sense of legal responsibility? How broader concerns about our practices of responsibility impact the law? Those are some of the questions addressed by the authors in this part. -/- The second part looks at how Williams' understanding of philosophy can shape the way we do jurisprudence. Williams' work on the methodology of philosophy combines resources from analytical philosophy, continental authors, history, and literature. He understood philosophy as a humanistic discipline. The authors in the second part of the book draw from Williams' work, notably his innovative take on the genealogical method, to discuss how we could practice legal philosophy in this same spirit. (shrink)

We are living through a technological watershed driven by artificial intelligence. Since the arrival of early generative Large Language Models (LLMs) in 2017, billions of dollars, years of research, and instruments of state power have all been used to reshape our world to better accommodate the next generation of AI models. These technologies are often presented to the public as a source of innovation and societal progress; however, there have been notes of concern. Most dramatically, there are the speculative world-ending (...) concerns of some technological futurists, like Nick Bostrom, who warn of the possibility of the creation of malevolent superintelligences. But, there are also more down-to-earth critiques regarding AI safety in health care, economics, environmentalism, and warfare, among many other issues. -/- These ethical worries should trouble Christians insofar as they affect how we might be treating our neighbor by and through using these new technologies. However, not all ethical concerns are harms, understood as the consequences of our actions; sometimes they are wrongs that are internal to our relationships. Indeed, Jesus’s insistence in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 5:21-43) that the scope of the law is broader than his listeners’ usual applications suggests the realm of morality goes beyond the consequences of our actions. -/- I contend that attention to AI technologies in light of uniquely Lutheran commitments about the human will point to this other type of ethical concern. As I hope to show, current AI systems are structured in such a way—and importantly marketed in such a way—that they push users to unintentionally wrong themselves by inviting them into a relationship of what I call evaluative domination between the AI system and the user. I claim, moreover, that this danger is grounded in the very structure of the human will, as we can see by examining Luther’s understanding of how the will functions. Finally, I hope to suggest that once we recognize this process of evaluative domination we can draw analogies to how early Christians talk about demonic possession. -/- Understanding this danger is vital for us as Christians, no matter our vocation, insofar as it pushes beyond large scale worries about AI safety to something more intimately related to us—how is this technology shaping our life together? (shrink)

An account of what sort of causal integration is necessary for an agent to exercise agency is offered in support of a soft-line response to Derk Pereboom’s four-case argument against source-compatibilism. I argue that, in cases of manipulation, the manipulative activity affects the identity of the causal process of which it is a part. Specifically, I argue that causal processes involving direct manipulation fail to count as exercises of intentional agency because they involve heteromesial causal deviance. In contrast, standard deterministic (...) causal processes do not involve heteromesial causal deviance and are agency-preserving. The upshot is that there is a relevant difference between a causal process involving direct manipulation by another agent and a deterministic causal process that involves no such intervention. If this is right, then Pereboom’s four-case argument does not pose a threat to source-compatibilist theories of free will and moral responsibility. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the nature of reason-possession, a topic that has received significant attention in recent philosophical literature. Existing discussions often center on a key puzzle: How can false beliefs appear to provide agents with reasons to act, making them rationally responsible for forming intentions based on these beliefs? This puzzle highlights a potential tension between the objective sense of reasons, understood as facts tied to the rational advisability of actions, and the subjective sense of reasons, grounded in an agent's (...) rational criticizability. I offer a solution to this puzzle by introducing the Multifactorial Account (MA) of having normative practical reasons, developed through critiques of the extant Factoring Account and Two Relations Account. MA describes reason-possession as a state of mind where a person comes under a requirement of rationality—what I call the Practical Entailment Requirement (PER). Unlike the Instrumental Requirement, which has been traditionally invoked to explain normative conditions in instrumental reasoning, PER provides a comprehensive framework for understanding how attitudes generate rational options and determine the reasons agents have in practical reasoning. I argue that coming under an instance of PER explains why propositions— whether true or false—like <the glass is full of gin-and-tonic> or <I will drink gin-and-tonic>, can serve as an agent’s reasons when the agent is in a position to justifiably believe or intend to make them true. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to advance a deeper understanding of the relationship between practical reasoning and rational responsibility. Reason-possession, I contend, must be understood as integral to episodes of practical reasoning, shaped by a person’s attitudes and the normative demands of rationality. (shrink)

Gamification has been touted as a revolutionary technique for promoting education, fitness, work, and more, but has also been argued to harm the very areas it claims to improve. Thus, the importance of reflection on gamification in different contexts is clear; in this article, I examine gamification within games themselves. While it may be thought that gamifying a game is either impossible or trivial, articulating its possibility allows us to uncover its impacts. I first explore some definitions of gamification within (...) the literature (Section 1). After introducing the prospect that a game might be gamified despite this being either impossible or trivial on existing definitions, I then redefine gamification such that gamifying games is meaningfully possible (Section 2). I next distinguish kinds of gameplay, building on Thi Nguyen’s achievement play and striving play to defend two additional kinds: roleplay and authorial play (Section 3). Finally, I combine the preceding strands to identify a potential harm of the gamification of games: a gamified game encourages certain kinds of gameplay over others, producing play under constraints, whereas gamification as a trend across gaming culture creates an impoverished play environment by establishing game design norms that prevent players from deciding how they play, producing inhibited play (Section 4). (shrink)

Some authors, including E. Olson and D. Shoemaker, argue that our numerical identity over time is irrelevant to practical issues such as moral responsibility or self-concern. In this way, they protect positions on personal identity against the charge of potentially controversial implications. I claim that their strategy is implausible. Since the debate is about conditions of our identity, it is about the identity conditions of those individuals to whom we refer first-personally. However, first-personal reference plays special roles in our practical (...) thinking; in particular, our intentions to do something presuppose that we will be the doers of the intended acts. Therefore, the subject of the intention also has a good reason to be concerned about the future performer of the intended action. The problem of personal identity, in general, is a question of the identity of subjects of intentional (then also rational and moral) action. As a result, this is why adequate answers to it cannot explain our persistence in terms of a practically irrelevant relation. (shrink)

In response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many international sports organisations banned not just athletes from representing Russia, but also their participation in the competitions. I examine the ethical justifiability of such individual-targeting sports sanctions through just war theory and consequentialism. I argue that just war theory judges such individual-targeting sports sanctions as ethically wrong for targeting athletes who are not agents of strategic threat, and for failing to minimise harm when feasible. I argue that consequentialism also judges such (...) sanctions as wrong if quantitative empirical findings about economic sanctions were to be generalised to individual-targeting sports sanctions. When not referring to such evidence, consequentialism is either neutral about such sanctions, or unable to produce useful judgements due to empirical uncertainties. Based on the above considerations, we have stronger reasons to believe that such sanctions are wrong than otherwise. (shrink)

This paper examines social media platforms as spaces fostering their user’s self-transformation. This paper argues that the ethics of (illegitimate) technological influence can be expanded and enriched with a concept of situated agency and an enactive evaluation of adaptability afforded by an environment. The paper proposes a taxonomy to evaluate social media platforms as environments for self-transformation by using the concept of situated agency and a notion of enactive normativity. Using a situated concept of agency, we should look into how (...) an agent is afforded or even pushed to undergo transformative experiences while inhabiting a certain technical environment. To coin this taxonomy, the types of transformative experiences from Carel and Kid were used to show that one agent can effectively have four modes of formative agency in any given situation, namely how one responds to the pressures of an environment. However, since it could be argued that any kind of adaptation is legitimate since we become who we change into, this taxonomy adds an explicit normative dimension pertaining to the environment that fosters the agent’s transformation of the self: borrowing from the terminology of enactive theories of cognition, how an environment responds to an agent’s adaptation is also important and can make the difference between a hostile environment and a flourishing-conducive one. The paper shows how one can apply this taxonomy of formative agency to evaluate some of the most concerning cases of self-transformation triggered by social media platforms: online self-radicalisation, habit acquisition, and identity rigidification. (shrink)

Sometimes, we act in concert with others, as when we go for a walk together, or when two mathematicians try to prove a difficult theorem with each other. An interesting question is what distinguishes the actions of individuals that together constitute some joint activity from those that amount to a mere aggregation of individual behaviours. It is common for philosophers to appeal to collective intentionality to explain such instances of shared agency. This framework generalizes the approach traditionally used to explain (...) individual action: a behaviour is an action just in case it causally follows from the relevant intention. Contemporary philosophers of action, as well as cognitive psychologists, however, have criticised this way of explaining individual actions, favouring instead an approach that puts “control” or “guidance” as the discerning factor: a behaviour is an action just in case the agent controls it, or just in case it is guided by the agent. In this paper, I argue that we should include talk of guidance even in cases of joint action. I first show that problems of deviant causation arise also in cases of joint action, and that therefore guidance is required to face this issue. Then, I show what a “capacity to jointly guide” amounts to for an individual in a group and how joint guidance relates to individual guidance. Joint guidance is actually constituted by task co-representation and the sense of being jointly committed. I argue that an approach that favours joint guidance over collective intentions eschews a lot of metaphysical problems about collective mentality and group subjects, and it is thus more explanatorily fruitful. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the project of naturalising agency, where agency can be broadly understood as the ability to choose and control one's actions on the basis of one's own purposes, goals, or reasons. Such agency is central to the basic phenomenology of our everyday existence as human beings, to how we come to understand ourselves and the world around us, and to the social, moral and legal practices that structure our societies. It is also (...) fast becoming a critical concept for addressing emerging issues in the ethics of artificial intelligence and animal rights. -/- Yet, despite its profound existential, societal and ethical importance, we still lack a robust understanding of the concept of agency from the perspective of the natural sciences. Part of the reason for this is a widespread and long-standing belief that agency - and related concepts such as freedom, purpose, and meaning - carry with them certain metaphysical commitments that are fundamentally incompatible with the picture of the world as it is given to us by science (what is sometimes known as a naturalistic worldview or metaphysics). This belief has led many scientists and philosophers to conclude that our concept of agency is, in fact, an illusion - a non-natural, unscientific notion that exists in our phenomenology, but not in the 'real world'. -/- In this thesis, I push back on these conclusions by developing an empirically grounded account of biological agency. I show how several of the core features (or types) of agency that are commonly claimed to be mysterious and unscientific are in fact perfectly consistent with a modern scientific worldview. To do this, I consider a series of challenges for agency that have emerged out of the philosophy of action, behavioural neuroscience, and the philosophy of free will. Each challenge targets the scientific credibility of a particular feature of agency: specifically, (i) macroscopic, agent-level control, (ii) purposive or mental causation, and (iii) the ability to 'do otherwise' and make genuine choices. I draw on recent empirical work from across the natural sciences to argue that these features are in fact supported by modern science. I do this by developing an empirically grounded framework for thinking about living systems and their behaviour (within each of the specified contexts) which, I argue, provides an entirely naturalistic and non-mysterious account of the relevant feature of agency. That is, I argue for a novel view of naturalistic metaphysics that appears to resolve many of the existing scientific concerns about the concept of agency. I then end by considering some recent attempts to extend a similar concept of agency into the domains of developmental and evolutionary biology. I argue that, in their current form, these attempts are not successful. (shrink)

The history of the thesis of the guise of the good between Kant and Anscombe is not well understood. This article examines a notable disagreement over the thesis during this period, between Green and Sidgwick. It shows that Green accepts versions of the thesis concerning action and desire in one sense of 'desire', and that Sidgwick rejects the thesis concerning both action and desire. It then considers why Green accepts the thesis, and assesses Sidgwick's criticism of Green. Despite the appearance (...) of a mere clash of intuitions, an interesting rationale for the thesis can be found in Green’s theory of free will and moral responsibility, of which I defend a broadly compatibilist interpretation. (shrink)

The way in which agency is conceptualised has implications for understanding human–machine interactions and the governance of technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Traditionally, agency is conceptualised as a capacity, defined by intrinsic properties, such as cognitive or volitional facilities. I argue that the capacity-based account of agency is inadequate to explain the dynamics of human–machine interactions and guide technology governance. Instead, I propose to conceptualise agency as impact. Agents as impactful entities can be identified at different levels: from the (...) low level of individual entities to the high level of complex socio-technical systems. Entities can impact their surroundings through different channels, and more influential channels of impact lead to higher degrees of agency. Technology governance must take into account different channels of impact in the contexts of use, design and regulation. (shrink)

-/- Stephen J. White (1983-2021) was developing a comprehensive view of responsibility and its limits when his life was tragically cut short. This volume contains his collected papers. White's view of responsibility spans across ethics, action theory, and interpersonal epistemology. Its core idea is that to be responsible for doing or believing something is to be answerable for why one has done it or why one believes it, and to be responsible for a state of affairs is to be answerable (...) for why things are that way, rather than some other way. White deploys this conception of responsibility to illuminate the notions of autonomy, coercion, shared reasoning, self-prediction, doxastic wronging, and peer disagreement. He also investigates the nature of practical reasoning: he argues against a production-oriented conception of practical reasoning, delineates the scope of transmission principles in means-ends reasoning, and identifies a limited for self-prediction in practical reasoning that is subject to an anti-opportunism constraint. The papers form the outline of a deep ethical outlook that takes seriously our personal and collective responsibilities and yet leaves room for personal autonomy both in thought and in action. (shrink)

Although it seems commonsensical to say that one cannot merely have too little, but also too much self-control, the philosophical debate has largely focused on failures of self-control rather than its potential excesses. There are a few notable exceptions. But, by and large, the issue of having too much self-control has not received a lot of attention. This paper takes another careful look at the commonsensical position that it is possible to have too much self-control. One key insight that will (...) emerge is that there are certain important confusions surrounding this view. Once these are removed, however, we are led to the conclusion that there need not be anything intrinsically problematic about being a paragon of self-control. (shrink)

The view that to act is to cause change and that to be an agent is to be the causer of an action’s result has gained traction in the past twenty years or so. This view seems to have two significant corollaries. First, there is no distinction between doing an action and causing its result. Second, any two actions that have the same result will turn out to be identical. Ruben (2018) has recently used the first corollary to challenge the (...) view, and the second corollary raises further problems for the view. This article aims to refine this view and defend it against the challenges that arise out of its two corollaries. It is argued that being the cause of an action’s result is not the same as being its causer and that doing an action is not just causing its result but causing it in a specific way. (shrink)

The main objection to pragmatism about knowledge is that it entails that truth-irrelevant factors can make a difference to knowledge. Blake Roeber [2018. “Anti-Intellectualism.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy 127: 437–466] has recently argued that this objection fails. I agree with Roeber. But in this paper, I present another way of thinking about the dispute between purists and pragmatists about knowledge. I do so by formulating a new objection to pragmatism about knowledge. This is that pragmatism about knowledge entails (...) that factors irrelevant to both truth and ‘cognitive agency’ can make a difference to knowledge. An interesting additional upshot of my argument is the connection revealed between the debate between pragmatists and purists about knowledge, and the debate between ‘alethists’ and pragmatists about reasons for belief. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of luck, fate, and fortune. It begins by showing that extant accounts of luck are deficient because they do not identify the genus of which luck is a species. That genus of properties, the tychic, alert an agent to occasions on which the external world cooperates with or frustrates their goal-achievement. An agent’s sphere of competence is the set of goals that it is possible for them to reliably achieve. Luck concerns occasions on which there (...) is a mismatch between attempt and result; in bad luck the external world thwarts goal-achievement within the agent’s sphere of competence, in good luck the external world assists goal-achievement beyond the agent’s sphere of competence. Fateful events are those where, more passively, the agent finds the external world achieving or frustrating their goals. Fortune concerns the contraction and expansion of the agent’s sphere of competence. Eight reasons are given for accepting the account; its theoretical virtues and various things it explains. Lastly, three objections are answered; that the tychic properties relate to well-being rather than agency, that there are alternative theories of fortune available in the contemporary literature, that the account draws arbitrary distinctions between synonyms. (shrink)

It is largely uncontroversial that to love some person or object is (among other things) to care about that person or object. Love and caring, however, are importantly different attitudes. We do not love every person or object about which we care. In this work, we critically analyze extant accounts of how love differs from mere caring, and we propose an alternate view in order to better capture this distinction.

Currently popular theories of epistemic responsibility rest on the assumption that justification and excuse exhaust the relevant normative categories. One gets the sense that, once we've laid down the conditions for justified belief, and once we've laid down the conditions of excusably unjustified belief, the work is done; all that's left is to clock out. Against this backdrop, one is naturally led to think that if an agent's doxastic state fails to be justified, it is thereby unjustified, perhaps excusably so. (...) The aim of this paper is to argue that that natural thought is mistaken; some agents are epistemically incompetent, and in virtue of their incompetence, their doxastic states are neither justified nor unjustified. Instead, the doxastic states of such agents are exempt from epistemic evaluation altogether. I argue that what underlies this point about exemptions is that epistemic competences or abilities play an important and typically overlooked role in epistemology, especially in theories of epistemic responsibility. Here, I am interested in uncovering that role and explaining what it is, and also in explaining how one could accommodate it within various epistemological frameworks. (shrink)

The claim that organisms are the agents of their own embryonic development, actively directing their own ontogenetic trajectories towards adaptive outcomes, is central to an emerging set of heterodox perspectives within theoretical and philosophical biology. Several theoretical implications are argued to follow from this ‘agential stance,’ which present a radical challenge to standard theories and approaches in evolutionary and developmental biology. These include the following: (i) Organism-Level Control: the need for a causal framework for developmental biology that causally privileges the (...) organism (as opposed to either privileging genes or embracing multi-level causation); (ii) Agential Adaptation: the need for an explanatory model of individual-level adaptedness that prioritises the developing organism’s active purposiveness (as distinct from adaptation by natural selection); and (iii) Agential Evolution: the need for an explanatory model of adaptive population change that prioritises the organism’s agency and purposiveness in its development (as distinct from standard models of evolution by natural selection). We argue that if the agential stance is to be interpreted literally, then its claims are not well supported by available empirical evidence. If the view is to be interpreted heuristically, then it cannot offer the sort of distinctive or novel explanatory insight needed to ground these radical implications. (shrink)

In the healthcare sector, the need for privacy-preserving and secure data sharing is paramount, especially as the volume of medical data continues to grow due to advancements in big data and digital health technologies. To address these challenges, a hybrid blockchain and big data framework offers a promising solution for secure medical data sharing. Blockchain technology provides a decentralized and immutable ledger that ensures the security, transparency, and privacy of medical data. However, traditional blockchain systems face scalability and efficiency issues (...) when handling large-scale datasets, such as electronic health records (EHRs), medical imaging data, and real-time health monitoring data. By integrating big data technologies into the blockchain infrastructure, the hybrid framework can leverage the strengths of both systems to enable efficient and privacy-preserving medical data sharing. This paper proposes a hybrid framework that combines the immutability and security of blockchain with the scalability and processing power of big data analytics. Through the use of smart contracts, healthcare institutions can securely share medical data while maintaining compliance with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. The framework also incorporates privacy-preserving mechanisms such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) and differential privacy to protect patient data during data sharing. This paper provides a detailed analysis of current challenges in medical data sharing and presents a novel hybrid blockchain and big data solution that enhances the security, privacy, and scalability of healthcare systems. (shrink)

Experiences of urges, impulses, or inclinations are among the most basic elements in the practical life of conscious agents. This article develops a theory of urges and their epistemology. The article motivates a tripartite framework that distinguishes urges, conscious experiences of urges, and exercises of capacities that agents have to control their urges. The article elaborates the elements of the tripartite framework, in particular, the phenomenological contribution of motor imagery. It argues that experiences of urges and exercises of control over (...) urges play coordinate roles in enabling an agent’s awareness of their impulses. (shrink)

Coping is customarily understood as those thoughts and actions humans adopt while undergoing situations appraised as threatening and stressful, or when peo- ple’s sense of who they are and what they should do is significantly challenged. In these cases, coping thoughts and actions help one endure and hopefully overcome these stresses, threats, and/or challenges. Discussions of coping are common among psychologists, but nearly absent from the philosophical literature despite their importance in theories of agency and for closely related concepts like (...) resili- ence. Building from psychological theories of coping, I offer a first philosophical exploration of the concept by showing how it can relate to and enrich extant work on agency and resilience and contribute to a more nuanced account of agency itself, especially as exercised in less-than-ideal conditions. (shrink)

I argue that an agent can be morally responsible and fully (but not necessarily solely) blameworthy for another agent’s free intentional action, simply by intentionally creating the conditions for the action in a way that causes it. This means, I argue, that she can be morally responsible for the other’s action in the relevantly same way that she is responsible for her own non-basic actions. Furthermore, it means that socially mediated moral responsibility for intentional action does not require an agent (...) to authorize another to act on her behalf, nor does it require her to threaten, coerce, or deceive the other. (shrink)

The brewer and the yeast: why brewing beer sheds light on the philosophical debate about the boundaries of human agency.

ABSTRACT It’s often assumed, especially in discussions of free will and moral responsibility, that unavoidable actions are possible. In recent years, however, several philosophers have questioned that assumption. Their views are considered here, and the possibility of unavoidable actions is defended and then applied to issues in action theory and in the literature on moral responsibility.

This is a preprint draft. Please cite published version (DOI: 10.1111/mila.12385). The aim of this paper is to provide a novel analysis of anorexia nervosa (AN) in the context of the sense of agency literature. I first show that two accounts of anorexia nervosa that we ought to take seriously— i.e., the first personal reports of those who have experienced it firsthand as well as the research that seeks to explain anorexic behavior from an empirical perspective— appear to be thoroughly (...) in tension with one another in their descriptions of anorexic actions. Rather than proceeding at this point by way of disregarding anorexic testimony as meaningless or insincere, I instead offer a positive account of the sense of agency in anorexia nervosa that renders these two depictions compatible. The resultant picture of anorexic behavior is one that accommodates current empirical findings while also providing valuable insight into how it is that anorexics can sincerely report feeling fully in control over their food restriction. (shrink)

Determinism which denies freedom of action is a common philosophical view. Is the action of such determinists incompatible with Kant’s claim that a rationally willed being “cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom” [G 4, 448]? In my paper, I examine Kant’s argument for this claim at the beginning of the Third Section of the Groundwork and argue that it amounts to the assertion that one cannot act while being aware of being guided by invalid principles. Belief in (...) determinism does not necessarily amount to such awareness. A structurally similar argument based on the contrast between deliberation and prediction is examined and similarly found wanting. (shrink)

I argue for constraining the nomological possibility space of temporal experiences and endorsing the Succession Requirement for agents. The Succession Requirement holds that the basic structure of temporal experience must be successive for agentive subjects, at least in worlds that are law-like in the same way as ours. I aim to establish the Succession Requirement by showing non-successively experiencing agents are not possible for three main reasons, namely that they (1) fail to stand in the right sort of causal relationship (...) to the outcomes of their actions, (2) exhibit the wrong sort of epistemic status for agency, and (3) lack the requisite agentive mental attitude of intentionality. I conclude that agency is incompatible with non-successive experience and therefore we should view the successive temporal structure of experience as a necessary condition for agency. I also suggest that the Succession Requirement may actually extend beyond my main focus on agency, offering preliminary considerations in favor of seeing successive experience as a precondition for selfhood as well. The consequences of the Succession Requirement are wide-ranging, and I discuss various implications for our understanding of agency, the self, time consciousness, and theology, among other things. (shrink)

Jim Sterba’s Is a Good God Logically Possible? looks to resurrect J. L. Mackie’s logical argument from evil. Sterba accepts the general framework that theists seeking to give a theodicy have favored since Leibniz invented the term: the search for some greater good provided or greater evil averted that would justify God in permitting the type and variety of evil we actually observe. However, Sterba introduces a deontic twist, drawing on the Pauline Principle (let us not do evil that good (...) may come) to introduce three deontic side constraints on God’s choice of action. He then splits the possible goods into four categories: first- vs. second-order goods, goods to which we have a right, and goods to which we do not have a right. He argues that his deontic constraints rule out each combination, thereby showing that no God-justifying good is on offer. To defuse the argument, I draw on a pair of ideas from Marilyn McCord Adams: (i) God is outside the bounds of morality, and (ii) God can defeat evils by incorporating them into an incommensurately valuable friendship with each human. Properly appreciated, these show that the new logical argument relies on a false premise that is not easily repaired. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to sketch, with a broad brush and in bare outlines, an approach to modal epistemology that is characterized by three distinctive features. First, the approach is agency-based: it locates the roots of our modal thought and knowledge in our experience of our own agency. Second, the approach is ambitious in that it takes the experience of certain modal properties in agency to be the sole distinctive feature of specifically modal thought and knowledge; everything that (...) we know about modality beyond the experience of agency is a matter of applying standard methods of inquiry such as deduction, induction and abductive methods for choosing between theories. Third, the account holds that modal thought and knowledge is, first and foremost, about modal properties that are sufficiently like those encountered in agency. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine some foundational issues at the intersection of the metaphysics of agency and the metaphysics of causation. We explore three broad issues concerning the metaphysics of causation and intentional agency. We first consider the best way to think about the relationship between exercising agency and causation. Specifically, is intentional agency best identified with a causal process or should we take intentional agency to be either the causal initiation of some outcome or the effect of a cause? (...) Next, we consider whether it is best to understand causation as a productive relation or as mere difference-making. Finally, we consider where to locate the effective causes in agency. We consider three alternatives: events, substances, and powers manifesting in processes. In examining the alternatives, we present reasons for taking intentional agency to be a productive causal process involving constellations of manifesting reciprocal causal powers collectively generating an outcome. (shrink)

Narrative views of agency and identity arise in opposition to reductionism in both domains. While reductionists understand both identity and agency in terms of their components, narrativists respond that life and action are both constituted by narratives, and since the components of a narrative gain their meaning from the whole, life and action not only incorporate their constituent parts but also shape them. I first lay out the difficulties with treating narrative as constitutive of metaphysical identity and turn to its (...) function in practical identity. I then explore the ways narrative shapes our agency—by tapping into our motivational structures, providing an understanding of the social background within which our agency operates, guiding our agency through an understanding of our histories and aspirations, providing the links that structure actions internally, and allowing us to change the meaning of our pasts. I suggest that putting these functions of narrative together may allow us to genuinely shape our past motivational structures through our actions. Finally, if life has the form of a narrative, it may seem as if mortality is necessary for our lives and their contents to be meaningful: a narrative, it might seem, relies on the ending for its meaning. If so, an immortal life would be meaningless. I examine the possibility that even an immortal life may draw meaning from local narratives that constitute projects within such a life, while arguing that, to the contrary, narrative may be a tool exclusively adapted to mortal lives. (shrink)

This is a draft of my chapter on Agency and Mistakes for the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Agency. In it, I focus on performance mistakes and distinguish them from other "derivative" mistakes that we make as agents. I argue that a proper understanding of these mistakes recommends a generalized fallibilism about human agency.