ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an account of human agency from the standpoint of hermeneutic moral realism. Based on basic hermeneutic notions such as situated (non-dualistic) participation, existential concern, temporality, and moral ecologies, this form of agency casts human existence fundamentally as a concernful pressing into moral possibilities inherent in practices. From this perspective, practices are given shape and meaning by ontologically real values that provide a frame of reference for how to make sense of practice and how to participate in order to achieve its intrinsic goods. An important aspect of this view of agency, then, is the stance one takes on these values and goods by virtue of how one participates in everyday practice. Finally, this chapter offers a description of agency as disclosing a totality of moral involvements and possibilities. As entities are disclosed in the midst of agentic participation, they show up in terms of their moral fit within this value-suffused space of practice.
