Agency as Resolution: A First-Principles Clarification of Determinism and Normativity.

Debates concerning free will and normativity often assume that agency must function as an additional causal force capable of interrupting deterministic explanation. This assumption generates two persistent problems: the compatibility of choice with a deterministic world, and the derivation of normative “oughts” from descriptive facts. I argue that these problems arise from a category mistake. Agency is not a causal input but a distinct logical role: the act of practical resolution. I identify the Hindsight Fallacy—the retrospective illusion that because an action is explainable after the fact, it was not a genuine choice at the time of deliberation. By recognising the temporal asymmetry between forward-looking resolution and backward-looking explanation, free will and normativity are shown to be orthogonal to, rather than in competition with, causal explanations.