Agency as Interpretation: A Theoretical Framework for Responsibility, Moral Burden, and Suffering

Contemporary discussions of agency, responsibility, and suffering often treat action, moral ownership, and self-authorship as psychologically or metaphysically basic. This article argues that such categories are better understood as interpretive constructions built upon a more fundamental level of occurrence. It develops a metatheoretical framework of Principled Alteration and Assumed Agency in which reality is described, at its most basic level, as alteration under principle, while action, agenthood, free will, responsibility, morality, and much of enduring suffering arise through interpretive attri- bution. Within this framework, free will is reclassified as an attributed form of inward authorship rather than an ontologically primitive source of occurrence, and responsibility is treated as a bounded but socially powerful structure of ownership rather than an absolute metaphysical burden. The article’s central psychological claim is that suffering often exceeds direct pain because adverse alteration becomes moralized, personalized, remembered, and integrated into self-referential narratives of authorship and worth. By distinguishing immediate pain from interpretively intensified suffering, the frame work offers a theoretical account of how selfhood, blame, guilt, and reflective burden are constructed within human experience. The article positions this model in relation to debates on free will, responsibility, selfhood, moral evaluation, and anti-doership, and argues that theoretical and philosophical psychology can better understand burden formation when interpretive agency is not mistaken for the fundamental grammar of occurrence. Keywords: agency; responsibility; suffering; selfhood; free will.