Agency - Dimensionen und Anwendbarkeit eines Begriffs

The philosophical significance of the term agency has come under renewed pres­sure. While agency was long assumed to pertain exclusively to living beings, the emergence of non-living systems with increasingly agent-like capacities now chal­lenges that assumption. This paper argues that a philo­sophically useful con­cept of agency must be both comparative and discri­mi­nating: comparative in spanning bio­logical life and arti­ficial systems, and discriminating in separating genuinely agentic forms of control from cases in which agentic performance falls short of authorship or responsibility. Building on the shift from the traditional opposition between free will and causality to an understanding of agency as a mode of organizing causal processes, the paper defends a multidimensional vector model. On this view, agents are characterized by profiles across several formally scalar dimen­sions. These dimensions, however, are not uniform in structure: higher values often mark qualitatively different control architectures rather than mere quantitative increase. Using Leonard Dung’s five-dimensional model (Dung, 2025) as a test case, the paper proposes a revised geometry of agency space. First, intentionality (“acting for reasons”) is treated not as an independent axis, but as the highest stage of a single dimension of directivity. Second, autonomy is re­interpreted in terms of author­ship and anti-bypassing conditions, empha­sizing the difference between be­ha­viour gen­erated through an agent’s own control architecture and behaviour pro­duced through manipulation or sub­personal disruptions. Third, efficacy, insofar as it privileges di­rect physical impact, is replaced by a two-level account that distin­guishes coup­ling dyna­mics (susceptibility to influence, latency, response mag­nitude) from the level of control (responsiveness to information, reasons, and norms). The resul­ting frame­work clarifies how agency profiles can inform prac­tical attri­butions such as respon­sibility, rights, and institutional roles.