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gwillen comments on Ethicality of Denying Agency - Less Wrong
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I think I'm actually more comfortable with the scenario where you are the primary/sole beneficiary.
Denying someone's agency to benefit them is really treating them like a child, and is only appropriate in a case where they really don't have the capacity to exercise it (besides children, e.g. adults with significant dementia or cognitive impairment.)
By contrast, if someone's irrational behavior is going to negatively affect you, I see more room for mitigating it by denying them information (i.e. lying to them, whether by commission or omission.) In this case I don't see it as being quite the same thing as denying agency, somehow -- you're treating them as an agent, but an adversarial one. Whereas in the other case you're trying to protect them from themselves.
In the first example, you also need to catch the flight.
But if you thought of them as having agency, you'd want to respect their desires and therefore disclose the information, possibly hoping you'd come to some sort of compromise.
I think "agent" or "agency" is being used in two different senses here — a descriptive/game-theoretical sense and a normative/political sense.
In the game-theory sense of "agent", noticing the presence of an "agent" does not imply "you'd want to respect their desires". For instance, Clippy is an agent, but an adversarial one. We don't want Clippy to get what it wants with our light-cone, thank you very much.
The normative/political sense of "agency" implies a whole slew of values and norms having to do with how humans ought to relate to each other: people ought to get to make their own decisions; others ought not conspire to keep them ignorant; and so on.
Why is treating an adult "like a child" inherently worse than treating a child that way?
Let me rephrase that as "treating them like they have a diminished capacity for agency, which is only appropriate if they actually do."
There's a cultural presumption, which I am neither intending to support nor to argue with here, that children fall into this category.
Indeed. But more importantly, do adults fall into that category? That's what's being discussed here.