Agency and the Myth of Free Will

Few ideas are defended as fiercely — or examined as shallowly — as free will.

We are told that agency requires it: that without free will there can be no responsibility, no ethics, no meaning. Neuroscience periodically threatens the concept, philosophy rushes to rescue it, and popular discourse oscillates between panic and reassurance. But throughout these debates, one assumption remains almost entirely untouched.

Agency is presumed to be something an inner self has.

Once that assumption is loosened, the problem of free will begins to dissolve — not by being solved, but by being re-cut.

The Classical Picture: An Inner Decider

Free will presupposes a familiar architecture:

• a self located inside the individual

• intentions formed internally

• decisions selected from alternatives

• actions issued to the body

• responsibility assigned to the chooser

Whether dressed up in libertarian metaphysics or compatibilist pragmatism, the structure is the same. Something inside deliberates, then chooses.

Neuroscience disrupts this picture by showing that neural activity precedes reported decisions. Philosophy responds by redefining “choice” or “freedom” so that it survives the data. But notice what never changes: agency is still treated as an inner causal power.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is the original error.

Agency Is Not a Mental Lever

Just as belief is not a stored object and emotion is not an inner feeling-state, agency is not a force applied by a self.

Agency is a pattern of coordination across relations — linguistic, social, material, historical — that gets retrospectively narrated as choice.

We say “I decided” not because we observed an inner act of will, but because the event coheres with:

• reasons we can articulate

• norms we recognise

• expectations we endorse

• consequences we accept

Agency is not located at the moment of action. It is stabilised after the fact through construal.

The Free Will Debate as a Category Error

The traditional free will question asks:

Could I have done otherwise?

This sounds profound, but it quietly assumes that an inner agent stood outside the conditions and selected one branch among many.

From a relational view, this is incoherent. There is no agent prior to the relations. The agent is the cut that renders the action intelligible as intentional.

To ask whether the agent could have done otherwise is to ask whether the same relational configuration could have produced a different configuration — while holding the configuration fixed.

The paradox is manufactured by the model.

Responsibility Without Inner Freedom

The deepest anxiety around free will is moral: if actions are not freely chosen, how can anyone be responsible?

This worry only arises if responsibility is treated as a property of an inner chooser.

But in practice, responsibility is relational through and through. It depends on:

• shared norms

• mutual expectations

• intelligible reasons

• responsiveness to sanction or repair

We hold people responsible not because they possessed metaphysical freedom, but because they participate in the practices that make responsibility meaningful.

No inner freedom is required. Only relational accountability.

Why the Brain Keeps Getting Blamed

As with emotion and belief, the brain is asked to carry explanatory weight it was never meant to bear.

Neural processes are necessary for coordinated action, but they are not the site of agency. Finding precursors to action in the brain does not undermine agency — it merely undermines a myth about where agency lives.

Agency is not in the neurons any more than a promise is in the vocal cords.

When Agency Breaks Down

Conditions such as compulsion, addiction, mania, or coercion are often described as losses of free will.

From a relational ontology perspective, they are disruptions in coordination, not failures of inner freedom. The person’s actions no longer stabilise within the normative and interpretive frameworks that ordinarily support agency attribution.

Nothing mystical has been removed. The relational conditions have shifted.

Free Will as Myth, Agency as Achievement

Free will functions as a myth that reassures us there is someone “in charge.”

Agency, by contrast, is an achievement — fragile, contextual, and continuously negotiated. It emerges when actions can be:

• explained

• justified

• challenged

• revised

This is why agency increases with education, social inclusion, and communicative capacity — and why it erodes under isolation, trauma, and deprivation.

Freedom is not a metaphysical property. It is a relational accomplishment.

The Cut Ahead

If agency does not require free will, then intention, choice, and even consciousness itself cannot be treated as inner causal primitives.

They are patterns that emerge when relational systems stabilise in particular ways.

The next myths waiting in line is consciousness — and it is far more dependent on this reframing than is usually admitted.