The Enlightenment’s Most Beloved Lie
“The world does not need more confession;
— Against Agency
it needs better design.”
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The Enlightenment promised liberation through reason – that if we could think clearly enough, we could act freely enough. Agency, it claimed, was the defining trait of the rational individual: a sovereign chooser, self-contained and self-determining.
But this was always a fiction.
Not an innocent one, either.
Agency became the moral infrastructure of modernity – the premise behind law, punishment, merit, guilt, and even political participation. To say “I chose” was not simply to describe behaviour; it was to perform belonging within a metaphysical system that made individuals the unit of responsibility. The fiction worked, for a while, because it kept the machinery running.
Against Agency argues that this story has collapsed – not metaphorically but structurally. Cognitive science, postcolonial thought, and relational philosophies all point to the same conclusion: there is no autonomous agent, only differential responsiveness – a system’s fluctuating capacity to register and transmit influence.
Copper sings under current; rubber resists. Humans, likewise, respond within the constraints of biology, fatigue, trauma, and social design. What we call “freedom” is merely a condition in which responsiveness remains broad and protected.
This reframing dismantles the binary of “free” and “unfree.” There is no metaphysical threshold where agency appears. Instead, responsiveness scales – widened by safety, narrowed by coercion, eroded by exhaustion. Politics becomes engineering: the maintenance of conditions that sustain responsiveness, rather than the worship of choice.
Ethics, too, must shift.
Not “Who is to blame?” but “Where did the circuit break?”
The essay proposes a gradient model of conduct grounded in relation and feedback, rather than autonomy and will. Responsibility becomes less about moral worth and more about bandwidth – a physics of care.
It’s an uncomfortable vision for a culture addicted to outrage and repentance. The loss of agency removes our favourite alibi: the chooser who could have done otherwise. But it also opens the possibility of a more honest ethics – one that replaces judgment with maintenance, retribution with repair.
This is not nihilism. It’s realism.
Systems appear stable only from a distance. Up close, everything is process – bodies, institutions, meanings – held together by temporary alignments of responsiveness. Against Agency names this collapse not as tragedy, but as opportunity: a clearing from which to think and act without the fictions that sustained modernity.
The essay forms the foundation for what comes next in the Anti-Enlightenment Project – Dis-Integration, a philosophical sequel that explores what remains once coherence, control, and autonomy have been decommissioned.
Philosophics 
Decolonial thought specifies above all that Western comfort is only due to the exploitation of the peripheries of the world system. The performative autonomy of the atomized individuals of triumphant neoliberalism serves the enslavement of the people to the bio-power of the capitalist, global and integrated empire.
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Hey Bry, this piece really got me thinking! It totally shakes up the usual idea of autonomy as this neat, all-powerful inner self making choices. Instead, it sees agency more like a spectrum of how we respond to the world—shaped by our bodies, traumas, and the people around us. It’s like saying we’re always in process, not fixed agents.
What’s cool is how this flips politics and ethics, moving from blaming isolated individuals to caring about the conditions that keep us responsive and connected.
I’m curious though—how do you see this way of thinking working out when it comes to everyday responsibility? Can we still hold people accountable without that old idea of a fixed, autonomous self? And what are some examples from science that really back up this idea that autonomy is more myth than reality?
Really looking forward to hearing more on this—your essay opens up a fresh, honest way to think about freedom and care. Plus it feels as though you have been reading my recent posts on the right to die with dignity in light of personal autonomy and self-determination, thus making your thoughts all the relevant to my own explorations.
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I’m curious though—how do you see this way of thinking working out when it comes to everyday responsibility? Can we still hold people accountable without that old idea of a fixed, autonomous self? And what are some examples from science that really back up this idea that autonomy is more myth than reality?
I appreciate your thoughtful comment. If your own work connects with these ideas, feel free to link to it—or to this piece. A self-supporting network of references serves the investigative reader far better than isolated essays.
You can explore the wider project here: Anti-Enlightenment Series.
This particular essay’s references are collected at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17276732.
Much of my thinking on moral responsibility was shaped by Gregg Caruso, whose central claim is that retributive justice is indefensible in a deterministic world. (Rejecting Retributivism, Cambridge UP, 2021; précis here; YouTube interview).
Where Caruso tackles determinism head-on, I sidestep the compatibilism debate by focusing on agency itself. Once we accept that the autonomous self is a fiction, non-retributive ethics follow naturally.
Other useful touchpoints include Neil Levy’s Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility (PhilPapers), along with Sapolsky, Strawson, Dennett, and Zehr.
Cheers,
Bry
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