Abstract
What does it mean to shape one's own everyday life and to be the author of one's ordinary acting with all its repetitions, anchored habits and well‐known practices? In this paper, I argue that moral philosophy should pay more attention to human agency in quotidian contexts. Furthermore, I sketch a tentative conceptual proposal for analysing everyday life for normative purposes: According to this, everyday life is an ordered network of recurrent tasks that an agent copes with by developing a personal set of robust embodied stances. In the text, I explain the notions of recurrent tasks and robust embodied stances and differentiate between two paradigmatic types of such stances: basic habits and intelligent practices. Based on this, I present first thoughts on the notion of everyday agency: A person possesses everyday agency to the extent that they are free to develop certain robust embodied stances, to reflect on and change their practices and to rework their habits if need arises. The notion of everyday agency allows us to identify different types of impoverished everyday lives in need of normative evaluation and criticism. Thus, the paper seeks to demonstrate that normative ethics has good reasons to focus on the realm of quotidian action: A broad focus on everyday life will open up new research perspectives for practical philosophy.