Suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is appropriate to ascribe representational mental states to non-human beings of various kinds. It may still be the case that there are other kinds of non-human beings that are capable of agency and that do not possess representational mental states. Would this show that the standard theory is too demanding? Only if the standard theory is construed as providing an account of agency as such. According to a less demanding view, the standard theory provides an account of one particularly interesting and central kind of agency: intentional agency (and the kind of unintentional agency that derives from it; see section 2).[9] On this construal, the standard theory is perfectly compatible with the claim that there are more basic kinds of agency, including kinds of agency that do not require the possession of representational mental states. It is, for instance, compatible with what Barandiaran et al. (2009) call “minimal agency”. On their view, an agent is a unified entity that is distinguishable from its environment and that is doing something by itself in accord with a certain goal (or norm). This view departs from the standard conception and theory in its characterization of action (“doing something”) in terms of the “adaptive regulation” of the agent’s “coupling with the environment” and in terms of metabolic self-maintenance (inspired by Varela et al. 1974). They suggest that organisms as simple as bacteria exhibit this minimal kind of agency. The crucial point is that this provides an account of goal-directed behavior that does not appeal to the mental representation of goals. Barandiaran et al. suggest, rather, that even very simple organisms can be said to have the intrinsic goal to be: to bring about the continuation of their existence.