Agency

In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity. The philosophy of action provides us with a standard conception and a standard theory of action. The former construes action in terms of intentionality, the latter explains the intentionality of action in terms of causation by the agent’s mental states and events. From this, we obtain a standard conception and a standard theory of agency. There are alternative conceptions of agency, and it has been argued that the standard theory fails to capture agency (or distinctively human agency). Further, it seems that genuine agency can be exhibited by beings that are not capable of intentional action, and it has been argued that agency can and should be explained without reference to causally efficacious mental states and events.

Debates about the nature of agency have flourished over the past few decades in philosophy and in other areas of research (including psychology, cognitive neuroscience, social science, and anthropology). In philosophy, the nature of agency is an important issue in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, the debates on free will and moral responsibility, in ethics, meta-ethics, and in the debates on the nature of reasons and practical rationality. For the most part, this entry focuses on conceptual and metaphysical questions concerning the nature of agency. In the final sections, it provides an overview of empirically informed accounts of the sense of agency and of various empirical challenges to the commonsense assumption that our reasons and our conscious intentions make a real difference to how we act.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency/

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AI

Agency is the capacity of an entity to act intentionally and to be the source of its actions.

Core points:

Agency means that an action is yours rather than something that merely happens to you. It involves control, intention, and accountability.

In philosophy, agency is typically contrasted with: mere behavior (reflexes, compulsion, automatism), and actions fully explained by external forces (natural laws, coercion, social pressure).

Key distinction:

Agency is not the same as free will. One can have agency without metaphysical free will. Compatibilists argue that as long as actions flow from an agent’s beliefs, desires, and reasons—even if those are causally determined—the agent still has agency.

Central questions about agency include: When is a person responsible for an action? How do biology, psychology, and social structures limit agency? Do animals, children, or AI have agency, and in what sense?

In short: Agency concerns who acts, not whether the agent is ultimately free from causation.

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Wikipedia

Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. In some contexts, the exercise of agency is linked to questions of moral responsibility, and may pertain to questions of moral agency.

Agency may either be classified as unconscious, involuntary behavior, or purposeful, goal directed activity (intentional action). An agent typically has some sort of immediate awareness of their physical activity and the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing. In ‘goal directed action’ an agent implements a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior.

Human agency entails the claim that humans make decisions and enact them on the world, independent of whether it is deterministically or through free will. This is in contrast with objects reacting to natural forces, devoid of any thinking capacity. In this respect, agency does not necessitate free will.

The philosophical discipline in charge of studying agency is action theory. In certain philosophical traditions (particularly those established by Hegel and Marx), human agency is a collective, historical dynamic, rather than a function arising out of individual behavior. Hegel’s Geist and Marx’s universal class are idealist and materialist expressions of this idea of humans treated as social beings, organized to act in concert. There is ongoing debate, philosophically derived in part from the works of Hume, between determinism and indeterminacy.

Structure and agency forms an enduring core debate in sociology. Essentially the same as in the Marxist conception, “agency” refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices, based on their will, whereas “structure” refers to those factors (such as social class, but also religion, gender, ethnicity, subculture, etc.) that seem to limit or influence the opportunities that individuals have.

Read the rest here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)