Agency (philosophy)

Agency is the capacity to act intentionally and bring about change in the world. Philosophical accounts ask what makes an action attributable to an agent and how freedom, reasons, and causes shape it.

Action: An event or process performed by an agent, often understood as intentional or guided by reasons. Agency is the capacity that makes actions attributable to an agent.
Free will: The capacity to choose or act in ways that are not wholly determined by prior conditions. Agency is often treated as a condition or component of free will.
Belief–desire model: A model explaining action through the interaction of an agent's beliefs and desires. It describes how an agent's view of the world and goals can produce action.
Moral responsibility: The status of being appropriately answerable or liable for an action or its consequences. Whether someone acted as an agent often determines whether responsibility applies.
Animal agency: The capacity of nonhuman animals to pursue goals, make choices, and affect their surroundings. It tests whether agency requires capacities unique to human reasoning.
Intention: A mental state that represents a goal or commits an agent to acting toward it. Intentions help distinguish deliberate action from accidental behavior.
Determinism: The thesis that every event is necessitated by prior conditions together with the laws of nature. It raises the question whether determined actions can still count as genuine agency.
Davidson's theory of action: Donald Davidson's account of actions as events caused and rationalized by an agent's primary reasons. It gives a prominent causal explanation of how reasons bring about actions.
Moral agency: The capacity to make choices that are subject to moral evaluation. It is the ethically focused form of the broader capacity for action.
Artificial intelligence: The design and study of computational systems that perform tasks associated with intelligence. AI systems prompt questions about whether goal-directed behavior amounts to agency.

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