Agency considered in the philosophical sense is the capacity of an agent to act in a world. The agency is considered as belonging to that agent, even if that agent be a ficticious character, or some other non-existent entity. The capacity to act does not at first imply a specific moral dimension to the ability to make the choice to act. Moral agency addresses issues of these type.

Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. It is normally contrasted to natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes. Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. ...

In this it is subtly distinct from the concept of free will, the philosophical doctrine that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined. Human agency entails the uncontroversial, weaker claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. How humans come to make decisions, by free choice or other processes, is another issue. Free-Will is a Japanese independent record label founded in 1986. ... Philosophy (from the Greek words philos and sophia meaning love of wisdom) is understood in different ways historically and by different philosophers. ... Doctrine, from Latin doctrina, (compare doctor), means a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the body of teachings in a branch of knowledge or belief system. ... Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. ...

The capacity of a human to act as an agent is personal to that human, though considerations of the outcomes flowing from particular acts of human agency for us and others can then be thought to invest a moral component into a given situation wherein an agent has acted, and thus to involve moral agency. If a situation is the consequence of human decision making, persons may be under a duty to apply value judgements to the consequences of their decisions, and held to be responsible for those decisions. Human agency entitles the observer to ask should this have occurred? in a way that would be nonsensical in circumstances lacking human decisions-makers, for example, the impact of Shoemaker-Levy into Jupiter. The classical definition of a person is a human being regarded as an individual. ... A moral is a one sentence remark made at the end of many childrens stories that expresses the intended meaning, or the moral message, of the tale. ... Moral agency is a term used to denote somebody that has a capacity for making moral judgments and for taking actions that comport with morality. ... Look up value in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Atmospheric characteristics Atmospheric pressure 70 kPa Hydrogen ~86% Helium ~14% Methane 0. ...

In certain philosophical traditions (particularly those established by Hegel and Marx), human agency is a collective, historical dynamic, more than a function arising out of individual behavior. Hegel's Geist and Marx's universal class are idealist and materialist expressions of this idea of humans treated as social beings, organized to act in concert. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ... Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was a German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ... Geist - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Universal class is a category derived from the philosophy of Hegel, redefined and popularized by Karl Marx. ... In philosophy, idealism is any theory positing the primacy of spirit, mind, or language over matter. ... This article primarily focuses on the general concepts of matter and existence. ...

See also

• Person
• Moral agency

The classical definition of a person is a human being regarded as an individual. ... Moral agency is a term used to denote somebody that has a capacity for making moral judgments and for taking actions that comport with morality. ...

References

• Elder, G. H. (1998). "The life course as developmental theory". Child Development, 69, 1: 1-12.