Agency Without Metaphysics: Resolution, Suffering, and Normativity

Debates about free will, moral responsibility, and normativity are often treated as distinct problems, yet they repeatedly fail in structurally similar ways. This paper argues that these failures arise from a shared mistake: the conflation of causal explanation with moral attribution. I propose Resolution Theory, a framework in which agency consists not in causal indeterminism, rational control, or reasons-responsiveness, but in resolution—the settling of an evaluative field into action by an agent. Resolution marks the point at which events become attributable actions rather than merely explained outcomes. On this account, evaluation and resolution are binary: either an agent settles action, or the agent is bypassed. Degrees apply not to agency itself but to the conditions under which resolution occurs. This distinction allows responsibility to be preserved without appeal to metaphysical freedom, while explaining mitigation in cases of addiction, coercion, trauma, and severe constraint. Such cases involve distorted experiential conditions rather than the disappearance of agency. The paper further argues that suffering functions as first-person evidence of authored commitment meeting resistance, revealing the inseparability of agency and exposure. From this structure, normativity emerges without appeal to mind-independent moral facts or social practices: standards of better and worse arise wherever agents resolve under conditions that can succeed or fail. By separating authorship from explanation and responsibility from mitigation, Resolution Theory dissolves the traditional free will–determinism problem and provides a unified account of agency, responsibility, suffering, and normativity. The framework clarifies long-standing confusions in moral philosophy while offering a stable foundation for legal, clinical, and institutional applications.