What Is Recursive Agency?
Recursive Agency is the principle that present agency changes the conditions in which future agency will operate. An action becomes part of the next field. Other participants inherit some portion of what that action made easier, harder, safer, riskier, more visible, or less available.
This page explains CI terminology in ordinary language. Canonical formulations remain in the CI corpus.
Why agency recurs
A decision rarely ends at the moment of choice. It can alter habits, expectations, access, infrastructure, memory, relationships, policy, or material conditions. Those changes become part of the environment encountered by later participants, including the original actor.
The canonical refrain compresses this idea into two words: Agency recurs. Recurrence here concerns consequence moving forward through changing conditions.
The normative principle
CI gives Recursive Agency ethical force once agency is treated as having normative standing. This is a philosophical commitment, not a theorem supplied by physics. A participant who appeals to agency as a basis for consent, authorship, refusal, or responsibility enters a field where the agency of other participants also counts in justification.
The normative premise can be rejected, which places the disagreement where it belongs: at the level of ethical standing rather than thermodynamic description. Once the premise is accepted, Recursive Agency asks what conditions an intervention leaves behind. The relevant capacities include perception, choice, refusal, correction, recovery, revision, and later meaningful participation.
Bounded responsibility
Recursive responsibility remains finite. CI uses bounded recursion and reachable onus to connect responsibility with foreseeability, causal connection, evidence, actual capacity, proximity, and cost. A participant is answerable for reachable consequence, with foreseeability and capacity setting the boundary of responsibility.
Canonical sources
See Recursive Agency and Bounded recursion. The full normative argument appears in The Work Remembers Cruelty Too.