Abstract

Two broad views on how agents are related to their actions are distinguished, agents as origins and agents as rulers. This paper focusses on the second. First it argues that a view of agents as rulers is attractive because a view of agents as origins seems incapable of accounting for the difference between actions and mere doings. Second, various attempts to spell out the idea of agents as rulers are examined, none of them proving successful. Thus the final suggestion is to renounce the search for a basic pattern of how agents are related to their actions and settle for the historically ascertainable significance of individual actions in the context of individual lives.