Agency as responsiveness

Abstract

In this article I seek to de-tether the idea of agency from the epistemic pursuits of philosophers and legal scholars working on adaptive preferences and moral responsibility. What is common to such scholars is a move away from conceptualising agency as individual acts of conscious deliberation. While I support a shift in the way agency is understood, I do not find in their work an account of locating and promoting agency as a primary good. For instance, while findings from various psychological sciences are endorsed for their objective findings on individuals, there is little guidance on what such findings mean for how people negotiate social spaces. As a first step, I suggest that an appropriate paradigm for agency would be responsiveness rather than adherence to responsibility. I then proceed to identify properties of a responsiveness paradigm, concentrating on transpositional deliberation, mediation and intelligibility.