Rethinking Agency and Responsibility: A call for compassion
*last updated on March 13, 2026
When people talk about agency, they often imagine it as something clear and solid. Either a person had the freedom to act differently or they did not. Either someone is responsible or they are not. This way of thinking treats agency as if it were a clearly identifiable force inside a person that can be located, measured, and judged from the outside. But human life rarely works that way.
Every person lives within layers of constraint: social expectations, economic pressures, cultural habits, emotional histories, institutional rules, physical limits, and the accumulated effects of past choices. These constraints shape what feels possible, what seems unthinkable, and what actions appear available in a given moment. Because of this, it is rarely possible to draw a clean line between what a person “could have done” in some abstract sense and what they realistically experienced as possible.
This is why it can be helpful to think of agency not as a fixed power but as wiggle room. Wiggle room suggests that some degree of freedom usually exists, but it may be narrow, shifting, and difficult to identify. Sometimes that room is wide. Sometimes it is almost invisible. Often an outsider cannot tell where it begins or ends. This way of thinking has important consequences for how we understand responsibility.
In everyday life, discussions of agency quickly become discussions of responsibility. Responsibility can look backward: who is responsible for what happened? But it can also look forward: who is responsible for changing what happens next? Thinking about agency as wiggle room complicates both questions in a useful way.
First, it encourages humility and compassion in judgment. If agency is narrow and context-dependent, then it becomes difficult to claim with confidence that another person simply could have done otherwise. Outsiders rarely know the full set of pressures, fears, habits, obligations, and limits shaping someone’s choices. Even the person acting may not fully understand how those forces operate. The wiggle-room view does not deny responsibility, but it reminds us that responsibility exists within conditions we usually cannot see clearly. That recognition makes harsh certainty harder to sustain.
At the same time, this way of thinking also encourages action. If human behavior were completely determined by forces outside our control, then the idea of responsibility might lose much of its force. There would be little reason to expect change from ourselves or from anyone else. The concept of wiggle room resists that conclusion. Human beings are not completely free, but they are also rarely completely determined. Within the constraints that shape our lives, there are often small openings where something different might happen.
Those openings matter. They are the places where habits can shift, patterns can be interrupted, and harmful dynamics can begin to change. The wiggle room may be difficult to define precisely, but the possibility that it exists is enough to justify effort. In that sense, agency as wiggle room holds together two truths that are often pulled apart: human action is constrained, and change is still possible.
That is why this idea can encourage both compassion and action at once. It encourages compassion because it reminds us how limited and conditioned human action often is, and how little we know about another person’s internal landscape. But it also encourages action because it insists that constraint does not erase agency entirely. Even under difficult conditions, some degree of movement is often possible.
Recognizing both truths at once may be uncomfortable. It prevents us from settling into simple narratives—either that people are fully to blame for everything they do or that no one could ever have acted differently. Yet that discomfort is part of what makes the wiggle-room perspective useful. It asks us to approach human behavior with humility while still taking seriously the possibility of change. And in a world shaped by complicated patterns of action, meaning, and power, that combination—compassion without resignation, responsibility without harsh certainty—may be one of the most constructive ways to think about agency.