Dobrý den, nevím si rady jak překládat slovo agency v kontextu příkladů uvedených níže. Význam tak, jak ho chápu, bych popsala asi jako schopnost prosazovat vlastní agendu/hodnoty nebo uvědomovat si svojí roli. Mám ale pocit, že to pořád zcela nevystihuje význam slova v aj. Budu ráda za každou radu.

“I argue that we need to revisit our traditional conceptions of agency and responsibility and need to focus on design, design histories, and design agents in ethics in order to make applied ethics adequate for addressing moral problems in the coming decades.”

“When the legal system acquitted these women on the grounds of insanity it denied their agency.”

Díky! Lucie

Your understanding is basically correct. The meaning of “agency” in the two examples you give goes back to the Latin root ago, agere, egi, actum in the sense of “do”, “act”, “carry out”, etc. (The Latin verb also has other meanings in other contexts.)

Your first example could be paraphrased as: “we need to revisit our traditional conceptions of how we act / the way we do things / the way we operate / what we do and the extent of our responsibility …”, so I think našeho jednání is a suitable translation (but Czech isn't my native language).

In the second example, the meaning of “agency” is basically the same, but with a slight extension of the meaning in the sense that when the women were acquitted on the grounds of insanity, the system denied that they were responsible for their actions. As they were not of sound mind, they couldn't be held responsible for what they did. They were unable to exercise freedom of choice in their actions because their judgement was impaired. I would suggest svoboda jednání or maybe something like schopnost volit a jednat sami za sebe. (But you're the Czech speaker.  )