Overview
“Agency” refers to the capacity to act. In everyday terms, we might use agency to describe an individual’s autonomy.
To imprison someone is to deprive them of the agency to freely move and participate in society. As children grow, they feel a stronger sense of agency over the environment around them through both experience and brain development. Medical euthanasia gives people with terminal health conditions the agency to decide a more peaceful or pleasant end to their life.
Because action is central to our human understanding of change in the world, agency and its related concepts (such as free will) are central to practically every metaphysical framework that’s applicable to human experiences. We can find discussions about thoughts, intentions, actions, and agency in the works of Aristotle.
Philosophers tend to break down agency into types including:
-
intentional agency
-
unintentional agency
-
mental agency
-
shared agency
-
collective agency
-
relational agency
-
artificial agency
Commentary
Agency is potentially the thorniest aspect of discussing the ethics and metaphysics of addiction.
Consider that we might label an instance of someone having sex with someone who passed out drunk as sexual assault, but we would pursue criminal charges against someone who passed out drunk behind a wheel. In both cases, someone clearly has impaired agency, but we might feel very differently about how that connects to responsibility and accountability. Susan Dimock addresses this issue in 2012 by noting that we can expand our concept of agency beyond someone’s choices in the present moment. If someone goes to a bar while intending to drive themselves home after, it seems fair to hold them responsible for the consequences after that even if their agency later was impaired. If someone goes to a bar and gets blackout drunk, they didn’t preemptively consent to having sex with anyone, so we can still examine it as sexual assault that violates consent.
Addiction by its modern definition involves compulsions that are thought to impair agency by interfering with standard reward pathways and compulsions. We might not want to say someone planned to develop a substance use disorder, but neither can we say that someone has no agency in addressing the way the deal with their substance use patterns, which can include denial of more severe usage and association with consequences. In many Alcoholics Anonymous groups and related literature, addiction is described as a “disease of the will” that has to be remedied with embracing the will of a Higher Power. The Serenity Prayer is often recited at the end of the meetings precisely to define the limitations of individual human agency in the universal order.