Loss of "Free Agency"

“You have agency, and you are free to choose. But there is actually no free agency. Agency has its price. You have to pay the consequences of your choices.”

…and I thought we parsed words here…but I guess Pres Uchtdorf and church leaders do too…

What is agency? How is it not Free?

I don’t think it was ever intended to mean it is free of the consequences.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary has this definition of “agency” that applies:

the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.

Seems to me like that is Free. We are free to choose, free to act, free to exert ourselves. Of course that doesn’t mean we are free from the consequences of acting.

Moral Agency seems to be introducing a whole different concept. I don’t get why they feel they need to phase away “Free Agency”.

Free Agency is a continuum — it’s not something you either have, or do not have.

At the “no free agency” end of the continumum, almost all of your choices are made for you. And if you violate the choices others have made for you, there is severe and immediate punishment. I think people subject to slavery who were killed for running away, maimed, or given strict punishment, or people in concentration camps during WWII fall into this category. And if these people stayed, and were obedient, found they had no choice in a vocation, were often subject to abuse, and barely had any leisure time or ability to pursue happiness.

At the other end of the spectrum “full free qgency” — you make almost all of your choices, yet there are still negative consequences for some of them. However, the range of choices is broader, the consequences less severe, and more distant in the future. I think living in America puts us in that category. We can choose our vocation, choose what to do with our leisure time, and most of the consequences are natural consequences, not items imposed on us by someone with immediate threat of punishment. Sure, there are laws to obey, taxes to pay, and things we must do, even though we don’t want to do them, but there is far more freedom than we receive at the other end of the scale.

So, there is no “pure free agency”, but there is relative free agency.

You could argue that the church limits our free agency in many ways. When we join the church, and integrate with the local church community, we face consequences if we decide we don’t want to be a TR-holder anymore. Some of these consequences are immediate, such as loss of temple priviledges.

This reminds me of the old pride stuff and how some people stopped using the word pride (as in “I am proud of you”) after finding out how dangerous it is.

Semantics by any other name is still…semantics.

Why do we not spend more time dicussing how badly we mangle the meaning of the words “modesty” and/or “virtue”?

At the other end of the spectrum “full free qgency” — you make almost all of your choices, yet there are still negative consequences for some of them. However, the range of choices is broader, the consequences less severe, and more distant in the future. I think living in America puts us in that category. We can choose our vocation, choose what to do with our leisure time, and most of the consequences are natural consequences, not items imposed on us by someone with immediate threat of punishment. Sure, there are laws to obey, taxes to pay, and things we must do, even though we don’t want to do them, but there is far more freedom than we receive at the other end of the scale.So, there is no “pure free agency”, but there is relative free agency.

As the resident proponent of limited agency I feel compelled to point out that even in the United States there are limitations on our choices. As a crude example – a boy born in significant poverty that is not supported in applying himself in school and gaining a higher education will not have all the same opportunities as someone whose parents supply private tutors. When DW and I would drive by the FLDS community in Colorado City DW would talk about helping women escape in our car. I reasoned with her that I din’t think we would have many takers. Are the women choosing to stay? In a way, they are choosing to stay. But the choice is clearly limited by factors outside of themselves.

My personal beef with “agency” is when it gets conflated with the “whenever a blessing is recieved it is by obedience to the law that the blessing is predicated upon” concept. It then comes across as “If you want to be happy, choose through your actions to be successful.” or “If you want to be successful, choose through your actions to be successful.” Or even worse – if you are not happy/successful it is your own fault.

When someone in class takes the time to point this out I usually translate it in my head as “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t ‘cha go gettin’ too happy with yourself.”

I guess this would be the wrong time to introduce my LDS free agency = free love commune. Dagnabbit! Those wily fellows saw my dastardly plan coming a mile away! 😈

We should refer to it as Free Will – that’s what the rest of the world refers to it as, from theologians to atheist philosophers, to psychologists and other students of the mind.