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Agency is a philosophical concept of the capacity of an agent to act in a world. The agency is considered as belonging to that agent, even if that agent represents a fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the choice to act, therefore moral agency
Moral agency

Moral agency is a person's responsibility for making morality judgments and taking actions that comport with morality....
 is a distinct concept.

n agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.






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Agency is a philosophical concept of the capacity of an agent to act in a world. The agency is considered as belonging to that agent, even if that agent represents a fictitious character, or some other non-existent entity. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the choice to act, therefore moral agency
Moral agency

Moral agency is a person's responsibility for making morality judgments and taking actions that comport with morality....
 is a distinct concept.

Human agency

Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. It is normally contrasted to natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic
Determinism

Determinism is the philosophy proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causality determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. With numerous historical debates, many varieties and philosophical positions on the subject of determinism exist from traditions throughout...
 processes. In this respect, agency is subtly distinct from the concept of free will
Free will

The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and Causality, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic....
, the philosophical doctrine
Doctrine

Doctrine is a codification of beliefs or "a body of teachers" or "instructions", taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system....
 that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined
Determinism

Determinism is the philosophy proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causality determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. With numerous historical debates, many varieties and philosophical positions on the subject of determinism exist from traditions throughout...
. Human agency entails the uncontroversial, weaker claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. How humans come to make decisions, by free choice or other processes, is another issue.

The capacity of a human to act as an agent is person
Person

The term person in common usage means an individual human being. In the fields of law, philosophy, medicine, and others, the term also has specialised context-specific meanings....
al to that human, though considerations of the outcomes flowing from particular acts of human agency for us and others can then be thought to invest a moral
Moral

A moral is a message conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim....
 component into a given situation wherein an agent has acted, and thus to involve moral agency
Moral agency

Moral agency is a person's responsibility for making morality judgments and taking actions that comport with morality....
. If a situation is the consequence of human decision making, persons may be under a duty to apply value
Value (personal and cultural)

A personal and cultural value is a relative ethic value, an assumption upon which implementation can be extrapolated. A value system is a set of consistent value and measures....
 judgments to the consequences of their decisions, and held to be responsible for those decisions. Human agency entitles the observer to ask should this have occurred? in a way that would be nonsensical in circumstances lacking human decisions-makers, for example, the impact of Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter....

In philosophy

In certain philosophical traditions (particularly those established by Hegel and Marx
Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a Germanphilosophy, political economy, historian, sociologist, humanism, political theorist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism....
), human agency is a collective, historical dynamic, rather than a function arising out of individual behavior. Hegel's Geist
Geist

Geist is a German language word that does not translate very well into English. It is usually translated as mind, spirit, or ghost but can also be associated with drive or motivation....
 and Marx's universal class
Universal class

Universal class is a category derived from the philosophy of Hegel, redefined and popularized by Karl Marx. In Marxism it denotes that Social class of people within a stratified society for which, at a given point in history, self interested action coincides with the needs of humanity as a whole....
 are idealist and materialist expressions of this idea of humans treated as social beings, organized to act in concert.

See also

  • Philosophy of action
  • Agent
    Agent

    An agent is either:* an entity that is capable of action* someone who acts on behalf of another person or group....