Agency Is Interruptibility

This book begins with a question often concealed by the language used to describe agency: what must remain possible for an action to remain causally one’s own? Agency is usually associated with intention, consciousness, choice, or responsibility. Yet each of these can persist after the capacity to alter an unfolding course of action has already disappeared. A subject may understand, consent, explain, or even accept an outcome without having possessed a meaningful point at which that outcome could still have been stopped or redirected. The argument proceeds by controlled exclusion. It examines what agency cannot be reduced to, and what is lost when causal power is displaced, dispersed, or rendered temporally late. The claim is not that interruptibility is another moral value, nor that it replaces responsibility, consciousness, or judgment. It is more minimal: interruptibility is the structural condition that allows these concepts to retain causal force at all. The book is organized in three movements. The first develops a sequence of analyses of agency. The second concentrates their implications into an account of interruptibility, responsibility, custody, and the causal lateness of consciousness. The third maps the philosophical consequences of a condition in which responsibility remains in circulation while its bearer has become difficult to~locate. This open edition is offered as an object for examination. It does not ask to be accepted on the basis of terminology or ambition. Its claim stands or falls by the structure of the argument: whether the exclusions are sound, whether the transition to interruptibility is intelligible, and whether the resulting concept clarifies what contemporary systems make increasingly difficult to see.