A Gradualist Metaphysics of Agency

Abstract

Suppose that you just ate a meal. Having satisfied your hunger, you find yourself craving a beer and realize that there is no beer left in the fridge. You know that the corner store has a good selection of beers, so you walk to the store to get some. At the same time that you finish your meal, your cat finishes eating. Being in the habit of cleaning himself after eating, he looks for a comfortable place and gets to work cleaning his face. Both you and your cat are exercising agency. In your case, you do so when you take a walk to the store to get some beer. In the case of your cat, he exercises agency when he looks for a place to groom and sets to grooming himself. It is clear that even if what you two are doing can be done in automatic mode there is a difference between the walking and the grooming on the one hand, and the process of digesting your respective meals on the other. And yet in all these cases you and your cat are always doing something. In this respect, the walking, the grooming, and the digesting, are cases of agency. In the case of walking and grooming, you and your cat exhibit intentional agency; and in the case of digesting you each exhibit a very modest species of (quasi-) agency. This generous understanding of agency is controversial, to say the least. Some action theorists will reject the idea that non-human animals like cats can be true agents while some other action theorists will take the further step of insisting that in cases like digestion there is simply no agency at all since no one is really doing anything.