IB Philosophy 1.4.2 Agency Notes

What Is Agency?

1. Topic 1.4.1 examined self-consciousness and its relationship to personhood. This topic extends the inquiry by asking whether agency, the capacity to act intentionally, is what truly distinguishes persons from other kinds of beings.
2. If personhood requires the ability to choose and act, then the question of who or what possesses agency becomes central to the sub-theme of 1.4.
3. In its broadest sense, agency refers to the capacity of a being to initiate actions based on its own intentions, desires, or reasons. An agent does not merely react to the environment.
4. It acts upon the environment with some degree of purpose. This distinguishes agents from objects such as stones or rivers, which move according to physical causation alone.
5. Aristotle, in De Anima, distinguished between different levels of soul: the nutritive (plants), the sensitive (animals), and the rational (humans). For Aristotle, only beings with a rational soul possess full agency, because only they can deliberate about ends and choose actions on the basis of reason.
6. Aristotle’s three-level hierarchy becomes concrete when we compare: a sunflower tracking the sun (nutritive soul, growth and self-maintenance), a dog learning to sit on command (sensitive soul, perception, desire, locomotion), and a student deliberating over whether to study philosophy or medicine (rational soul, the capacity to reason about abstract possibilities). Only the third, Aristotle argues, constitutes genuine agency.
7. The existentialist tradition places agency at the very centre of human existence. Jean-Paul Sartre argued in Existentialism is a Humanism that human beings are “condemned to be free”: we are agents who must constantly choose and who cannot escape the burden of choice.
8. For Sartre, agency is not an optional feature of personhood, it is the defining condition of being human. Sartre’s famous example of the student illustrates radical agency: a young man during the Occupation must choose between joining the resistance and staying home to care for his ailing mother.
9. No moral theory can decide for him: Kantian duty (the obligation to do what reason demands, regardless of personal cost) points in both directions at once, and utilitarian calculation (weighing who benefits most overall) gives no clear answer either. He is ‘condemned’ to choose freely, and in choosing, he constitutes himself as the kind of person he is.
10. However, the concept of agency raises difficult boundary questions. If agency requires intentional action, what counts as an intention?
11. Simple organisms respond to stimuli in complex ways, and some artificial intelligence systems produce outputs that resemble purposeful behaviour. The question is whether such behaviour constitutes genuine agency or merely its simulation.

Wiredu's Framework and the Broader Implications of Agency

1. Kwasi Wiredu, whose account of personhood as degrees was introduced in 1.4.1, offers a useful framework here. If personhood admits of degrees, then perhaps agency does too: some beings may possess more or less agency depending on their cognitive complexity, social participation, and capacity for moral reasoning.
2. Consider the contrast: a toddler reaching for a hot stove acts on impulse without deliberation. A chimpanzee using a stick to extract termites exercises learned, goal-directed behaviour.
3. An adult deciding to change careers after years of reflection exercises full deliberative agency. Wiredu’s graduated framework captures these differences without drawing a sharp line between persons and non-persons.
4. The IB syllabus asks two pointed questions:
   1. "Could animals or machines be considered persons?" and
   2. "What are the implications of classifying an entity as a person?"
   3. Both questions depend on how we understand agency, because the answer determines which beings deserve moral consideration, legal rights, and social recognition.
5. Agency also connects to the overarching Unit 1 question, "What does it mean to be human?" If agency is uniquely human, then discovering it in animals or machines would challenge the distinctiveness of human existence. If agency is a matter of degree, then the boundary between human and non-human becomes blurred.
6. The relationship between agency and freedom will be explored further in 1.6.1 (Freedom and Determinism). For now, the key point is that agency presupposes some capacity for self-directed action, and the philosophical debate centres on whether this capacity is unique to humans or shared more widely across the natural and artificial world.
7. Understanding agency is therefore essential for evaluating arguments about animal rights, artificial intelligence, and the moral status of various beings. The sections that follow examine each of these debates in detail.