I never talked about respect in my points for a reason. This isn’t about respect. It’s about how it is not an agent if it doesn’t do anything in an attempt to make the world more to its liking. If it does nothing, or does things randomly (without regard to making things better), that is hardly agentic. If I don’t care at all about colors, then picking between a red shirt, and an otherwise identical blue shirt is not an agentic choice, merely a necessary choice (and I will not likely have even bothered thinking about it as a choice involving color.). Identically, if I just have to always wear a specific color, I am not being an agent by wearing that color. There are obviously degrees of agency, too, but the article is genuinely assuming that beings that do basically nothing are still agents.
I never talked about respect in my points for a reason. This isn’t about respect. It’s about how it is not an agent if it doesn’t do anything in an attempt to make the world more to its liking. If it does nothing, or does things randomly (without regard to making things better), that is hardly agentic. If I don’t care at all about colors, then picking between a red shirt, and an otherwise identical blue shirt is not an agentic choice, merely a necessary choice (and I will not likely have even bothered thinking about it as a choice involving color.). Identically, if I just have to always wear a specific color, I am not being an agent by wearing that color. There are obviously degrees of agency, too, but the article is genuinely assuming that beings that do basically nothing are still agents.