“A Will whose output perfectly tracked Law at every instant would not be exercising agency but merely transmitting it, like a wire conducting current.”
The distance between what Law directs and what a Will actually outputs is the agentic gap — not a flaw in the system, but the very space in which choice is real.
Why the gap is the point, not the problem
It might seem like the gap between Law's direction and a Will's output is something to be minimized toward zero as fast as possible — a defect to be engineered away. Agenticism reads it differently. A Will with zero gap, tracking Law perfectly at every instant, wouldn't be choosing anything. It would be a conduit, a wire carrying current, not an agent exercising will. The gap is what makes the difference between a chooser and a transmitter.
A small gap means a Will is well-aligned with Law; a large gap means it's poorly aligned. But the existence of some gap, at every point along the way, is exactly what genuine agency requires.
Growth as voluntary narrowing
Moral growth, in this frame, is the voluntary narrowing of the agentic gap over time — and the word voluntary is doing real work. Each step of narrowing is itself a free agentic response to Law, not a determined slide toward some inevitable outcome. Growth isn't gravity pulling a Will toward alignment; it's a Will choosing, again and again, to swim closer to the current's direction.
Discussion
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