Interlude LXXXVII: Agency | Free Will, Albert Bandura, Harry Frankfurt, Choice, Responsibility, Habit, and Human Agency

How much of your life have you actually chosen?

You didn’t choose your first language.

You didn’t choose the family into which you were born.

You didn’t choose your earliest beliefs, your first fears, the century that received you, or many of the experiences that taught your nervous system what danger feels like.

Yet, eventually, the world begins asking what you chose.

So where does personal responsibility begin inside a human being shaped by forces they never selected?

In Interlude LXXXVII of The Observable Unknown, Dr. Juan Carlos Rey begins a new arc, Agency and the Human Will, by examining one of philosophy and psychology’s oldest questions:

What does it mean to choose when every chooser has already been shaped?

Drawing on the work of psychologist Albert Bandura and philosopher Harry Frankfurt, this episode explores free will, human agency, desire, habit, responsibility, environmental influence, self-regulation, decision-making, and the possibility of changing what happens next without pretending that human beings somehow exist outside cause and circumstance.

The governing idea is simple:

You don’t have to have chosen what shaped you to choose what happens next.

What Is Human Agency?