Why Care About Freedom and Agency?

In ethical systems that focus on apportioning praise and blame, a key consideration is often whether or not the individual is a free agent since individuals are only held to be responsible for what they freely choose. As various critiques indicate, if it were to be the case that freedom is in some way illusory or radically restricted, these systems would have a significant problem since reactive attitudes would involve holding individuals responsible for actions that they did not freely choose. I will argue that the problem may run even deeper: even if there is such a thing as free agency, it is a mistake to think that autonomous individuals uniquely instantiate this agency. I will draw on arguments from Pratyabhijñā Śaivism, which state that although there is ultimately no such thing as a praise or blameworthy individual agent, free agency is the precondition for manifestation itself. Worlds, not individuals, are the proper unit of analysis for ethical theories. This position picks up on many of the critiques of the kind of substantial self that stands apart from the world that were offered by various Buddhist traditions in the Classical Sanskritic context. At the same time, it does not fall prey to these objections precisely because the self that Pratyabhijñā theorists argue for is neither an unchanging substance nor a minimally thin kind of self-awareness that could be accommodated by no-self theorists. Pratyabhijñā theorists’ particular way of understanding agency, then, presents a productive exchange between some of the most ethically salient ramifications of Buddhist no-self theories and insights into why, nevertheless, freedom and agency are inextricably bound up in our worlds.