Agency and Value

We all live in society and are tied to a web of social relations. These relations or the social fabrics are grounded on values. These values are defining features of human existence. With values, human civilization has been sustaining and flourishing. No doubt there are ups and downs, still, humanity has aspired always to encounter challenges. What we are, depends on how we live and act morally in everyday life. The moral or ethical attitudes of an individual are defined by choice and action. Human actions are generally evaluated from a moral point of view. Either the action is praised or condemned, but in all cases, it involves the agent who performs it. The agent is held morally responsible for bringing out an action. The nature of human agency is such that it is actively engaged in performing actions. Actions are inevitable in human life. Our active engagement is driven by desire, inclination, anxiety, love, hatred and fear. Through all these, we connect to the world and live. This living is indeed becoming living in isolation. As Pojman summarizes, “The immediate, existential condition of humanity is alienation. We find ourselves driven by desire; cravings which are never really satisfied, for any desires never meet, leaving us frustrated, if they are satisfied, the satisfaction is ephemeral.”1 The isolated form of existence that empowers our individualism is an attitude which is a product of modernity. It has taught me how to exercise one’s interest and be reasonably rational in creating safeguards so that my interest prevails. In this connection, Taylor writes, “We live in a world where people have the right to choose for themselves their own pattern of life, to decide in conscience what convictions to espouse, to determine the shape of their lives in a whole host of ways that their ancestors could not control. And these rights are generally defended by our legal systems. In principle, people are no longer sacrificed to the demands of supposedly sacred orders that transcend them.”2 Individualism is nurtured and protected by the host of institutions developed by modern societal thinking. The individual who grew up in this environment of modernity has been engaged in resolving the inner conflicts of its institutions. It has forgotten about the sacred state of life which could be realized by transcending every rational-logical engagement.

Life is not only materially conditioned by the desire to possess and become, [ ‘being and its becoming’] but also is associated with anxiety and fear of loss. Still, the passion does not end and one continues to strive and live through to gain the maximum. This has been a common motif of living a luxurious and comfortable life. At the same time, it has not completely taken away the intense aspiration to know the higher or the spiritual. The power of achievement in the world fails to arrest this aspiration and puts the person continuously in a state of unfulfillment and quest for knowing the infinite and the absolute truth of life. As Sinari illustrates “Had man not been constantly a seeking at the core, he would not have created the most complex civilizations ever with its science and technology and their countless gifts and remained restless, despaired, and insecure.”3 Most of us experience restlessness, despair and insecurity because our wants and desires are yet to be defined normatively, in the sense that there is a mismatch between the common good of the good of the individual.