Abstract
The text is inspired by the article of Steve Fuller named Making Agency Count (Fuller 1994) where Fuller introduced the concept of agency in medias res in order to treat agency as a kind of social „scarce good“. My aim is to show that while Fuller claim seems plausible in the light of the agency negotiation in the legal determination of patents, the fetal medicine or the fetal tissue research, there are nevertheless several problems in its implications. First, if we consider moral action as an example of agency, an altruistic actor, in order to not consume much from the stock of available agency, would resign from a moral action, or, in extreme case, would act immorally to provide more space for moral action. Second, agency is always connected to multiple meanings therefore what is considered as agency by one actor, could be considered as non-agency by another one. Agency can be multiplied by diversifi cation of attributed meanings, what is not the case of economic goods. In concluding the article I make a hypothesis that there is an interesting kind of agency (quasi-agency), which is produced by a social protection. Children, animals, fetuses are claimed to be actors but, in fact, this action magnify temporarily mainly the agency of claimants than those objects of protection.
Since 2019, TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE journal provides open access to its content under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Authors who publish in this journal agree that:
- Authors retain copyright and publication rights without restrictions and guarantee the journal the right of first publishing. All published articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows others to share this work under condition that its author and first publishing in this journal was acknowledged.
- Authors may enter into other agreements for non-exclusive dissemination of work in the version in which it was published in the journal (for example, publishing it in a book), but they have to acknowledge its first publication in this journal.
- Authors are allowed and encouraged to make their work available online (for example, on their personal websites, social media accounts, and institutional repositories) as such a practice may lead to productive exchanges of views as well as earlier and higher citations of published work.
There are no author fees, no article processing charges, or submission charges.
The journal allows readers to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and allows readers to use them for any other lawful purpose.
A summary of the open access policy is also available in the Sherpa Romeo database.