flyingjesuit t1_j43x48z wrote on January 13, 2023 at 12:10 AM

Reply to comment by thelandsman55 in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Leguin affected me like few books have done by feanor_imc

Agency is your ability to enact your free will. I’d love to drop everything and go visit Europe, but I have to hold down a job to pay bills and feed myself. A billionaire could go visit Europe on a whim because they don’t have the concerns I do. In theory me and the billionaire have the same free will, but when you account for how realistically we can act on it, they have more agency than I do. Same with my example regarding women riding the subway in an earlier comment. So in a lot of mythology, maybe Pandora wasn’t a good example I thought she was told not to open it like Eve being told not to eat the apple, there’s a MacGuffin of sorts where they are free to enjoy paradise or a superhuman ability or whatever so long as they don’t do X. In Omelas they are told they can’t intercede on behalf off the child otherwise it all falls apart. So they have the free will to do it but not the agency. So agency could also be thought of as revealing the extent to which our free will is an illusion. If the people in Omelas were truly free they’d be able to save the child, but the world is structured in a way that ensures that they don’t. Almost akin to structural injustices in our own world which limit the agency of certain people despite them technically having free will.

thelandsman55 t1_j441e6o wrote on January 13, 2023 at 12:39 AM

I think you are right that in the classic modern version of the story Pandora is told not to open the box although she is not told why, IIRC she's made to think its a present she has to wait to open.

I'm not sure quite how to square your concept of agency (coming from what sounds like a literary background) with my concept of freedom (coming from someone in political science grad school). Having to pay bills and feed yourself is arguably an infringement on your freedom from need. You are subordinated to others because you have to eat and have shelter and those needs create opportunities for exploitation that you aren't protected from. Not being able to go to Europe is arguably an infringement on your freedom from obstacles, but its sort of a gray area, since your ability to get to Europe is presumably contingent on exploitative relationships with others (pilots, airline employees, taxi drivers, etc).

I would also say that beyond freedom from need stuff, most of the greater agency a billionaire has is not per se personal freedom but the ability to compel the subordination of others to his or her will. That is, the additional freedom/agency/whatever you want to call it of a billionaire compared to you is mostly built on other people being less free then they otherwise would be.

And this is where I have a hard time with how your concept of agency relates to Omelas, for one person to have the agency to remove the child without causing social collapse would imply a level of agency that is only possible by subordinating others. You can't generalize that kind of agency since any increase in it for one person is inherently a reduction for someone else, so a society where someone can free the child cannot possibly be more free than Omelas.