Episodic Agency and the Epistemic Conditions of Responsibility

This article argues that contemporary accounts of agency mislocate its normative significance by treating it as a standing capacity—typically reason-responsiveness or reflective control—available across normal conditions of action. While such accounts aim to preserve responsibility under determinism, they risk over-ascribing agency and thereby trivialising both freedom and responsibility. I propose an alternative conception of agency as episodic and epistemically conditioned. Most action proceeds under conditions of epistemic alignment, in which inherited norms, roles, and evaluative frameworks render conduct intelligible without requiring authorship in a strong sense. Agency becomes explanatorily salient only when this alignment fails—when epistemic rupture disrupts practical intelligibility and forces agents to take ownership of the normative terms under which action proceeds. By analysing epistemic dissonance as an agentially significant event, the paper shows how agency can ground responsibility without being a continuous feature of action or belief. It further explains how agency may be structurally foreclosed within institutional roles through constitutive failure, even where intention and competence remain intact. Re-locating agency in this way preserves the normative core of responsibility while avoiding both metaphysical inflation and sceptical denial.