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Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Wikipedia Definition of Human Agency

In preparation for the visit of Jo Moran-Ellis, I am posting a definition of human agency from wikipedia. This is an important concept from social philosophy which is vital to understanding what we will be discussing during this Tuesday's The Playground of Youth in At-Risk Communities seminar. (If you live near NYC and want to come - for FREE, click on the link for details!)

Here's the definition:

"Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world on a collective basis, usually through democratic means... Human agency entails the uncontroversial, lower claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. How humans come to make decisions, by free choice or other processes, is not at issue.

Human agency invests a moral component into a given situation. If a situation is the consequence of human decision making, persons may be under a duty to apply value judgements to the consequences of their decisions, and held to be responsible for those decisions."

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