Agency

The termagency refers to the extent to which individuals have the capacity to choose the action that they take. Human agency involves the proposition that individuals both make choices, irrespective of how they come to make them, and enact them. Such a proposition brings morality into play: If a situation has arisen because of human decision making, then those making such decisions may legitimately be held responsible and value judgments may be made in light of the actions taken.

The central debate concerning agency is the extent to which that which is outside the individual human being (the collective, discourse, structure, etc.) overrides that individual's capacity for agency. One argument would be, for instance, that even though someone subjectively believes or feels that he or she is making a decision, this decision is more accurately seen as arising out of the cultural, political, historical, and linguistic context which the individual inhabits. Put crudely, there is tension between, on the one hand, the individual being said to make choices with intentionality in light of the freedom that he or she has, with these choices leading to actions, and, on the other, the contention that there is no such freedom and no such choice, but determinism and inevitability, with the individual acting in accordance with structures, society, and the individual's environment.