ABSTRACT
If agency is understood as the capacity to respond to our reasons, then agency is exercised not merely in our intentional actions, but also in our desires, resentments, beliefs, and credal states. But if agency is understood as the capacity to act in light of our reasons, can it still include all these states among its exercises? Kieran Setiya has recently argued that it cannot. Our doxastic responsiveness to our reasons, he argues, involves nothing more than the conjunction of our doxastic responses, on the one hand, and our beliefs about those reasons, on the other. Thus, he concludes, doxastic responsiveness does not involve an exercise of agency, because it does not involve causing anything. The present chapter rebuts Setiya’s argument for this conclusion, and argues that the very same kind of agency that we find in intentional action can also be found in beliefs and other attitudes.
