The Burden of Possibility: Boredom, Confabulation, and the Limits of Reasons-Responsive Agency

Standard theories of free action draw their evidence almost exclusively from deliberation, where agents weigh competing reasons and a choice visibly follows. Choice-blindness research shows that agents routinely misidentify the causes of their own choices, confidently defending decisions and moral positions they never actually made. I argue that boredom supplies a neglected test case with the same structure: agents act, often restlessly, while nothing they can recognise, endorse, or cite favours the specific action performed over its live alternatives. Sartre's account of bad faith names the mechanism agents use to paper over this gap, constructing fluent post-hoc narratives that make undetermined action look reasoned all along. Read together, these two literatures expose an unmet explanatory burden for reasons-responsive compatibilism: standard theories cannot yet say what makes a mechanism an agent's own when she cannot recognise it as her reason for acting.