The term agency comes from the Latin word arbitrīum. The concept refers to the will or autonomy of a person to act. For example: “Do not wait for my instructions: act according to your will”, “The officer made the decisions on his own and according to his will”, “In this organization there is free will, but each one must take responsibility for the consequences of their actions ”.
According to DigoPaul, the idea of free will is usually included in the notion of free will, frequently used in the field of religion and philosophy. Free will implies that the human being has the power to decide and act on his own, without being tied to a divinity or destiny.
This supposes that people do not act from a conditioning, but they do it according to their will. In this way, a subject who decides an action is responsible for its effects.
The question of free will has been analyzed throughout history. If people are free to act autonomously and therefore responsible for their actions, it is possible to argue that individuals should be punished or rewarded for the moral quality of the actions. For this, people must not only have freedom: they must also have the ability to choose between different options. In the event that there was only one path, there would be no free will possible.
Modern social organization is based, in a broad sense, on the belief in free will. For this reason, those who commit crimes are punished: the subject is held responsible for the consequences of his actions.
In the fields of psychiatry and neurology, the concept of free will is of great importance, since there are certain disorders in which the patient seems to go against his own will, as if a problem in his brain prevented him from using of that freedom that supposedly characterizes us.
A clear case of conflict between free will and a disorder of the mind occurs in obsessive-compulsive disorder, whose main feature is that the patient is overwhelmed by the need to carry out certain actions that, although they are against of his own free will, he interprets them in the opposite way. For example, a person who feels compelled to wash their hands many times a day, may come to believe that they are following their own wishes, even if the opposite is true.
On the other hand is Tourette syndrome, which begins in the early years of childhood and is characterized by the presence of various tics of the vocal (phonic) and physical (motor) type, which usually vary in intensity and even disappear by seasons. Some tics can be chronic and others, transitory; In addition, it is possible to delete some of them for a time.
In most cases, the severity of tics decreases when patients reach adolescence, which is why this syndrome is not usually properly diagnosed. Another factor that influences the fact that it goes unnoticed by science is that it does not usually manifest itself violently, that is to say that many cases are relatively mild and are not decisive in the social insertion of the person.
The alien, alien or strange hand syndrome causes the patient to make movements with his upper limbs that are impossible to control and contrary to his own will. As can be seen, free will is not something that we can all take for granted, since some diseases prevent us from making use of it.
