## 1. Introduction




When people living in some region of the world declare that their
group has the right to live autonomously, they are saying that they
ought to be allowed to govern themselves. In making this claim, they
are, in essence, rejecting the political and legal authority of those
not in their group. They are insisting that whatever power these
outsiders may have over them, this power is illegitimate; they, and
they alone, have the authority to determine and enforce the rules and
policies that govern their lives.




When an individual makes a similar declaration about some sphere of
her own life, she, too, is denying that anyone else has the authority
to control her activity within this sphere; she is saying that any
exercise of power over this activity is illegitimate unless she
authorizes it herself. Most of the reasons that can be offered in
support of this claim have correlates in the case of demands for group
autonomy. But there is one very important exception: a reason that
takes us beyond politics, to the metaphysics of agency.




An agent is one who acts. In order to act, one must initiate one's
action. And one cannot initiate one's action without exercising one's
power to do so. Since nothing and no one has the power to act except
the agent herself, she alone is entitled to exercise this power, if she
is entitled to act. This means that insofar as someone is an agent,
i.e., insofar as she is one who acts--she is correct to regard
her own commitments to acting, her own judgments and decisions about
how she should act, as authoritative. Indeed, if she were to challenge
the authority that is an essential feature of her judgments and
decisions, then they would cease to be her own practical conclusions.
Their power to move her would cease to be a manifestation of her power
to move herself; it would not be the power of her own agency.




In short, every agent has an authority over herself that is
grounded, not in her political or social role, nor in any law or
custom, but in the simple fact that she alone can initiate her actions.
To be sure, it might be unwise for someone to follow the commands she
gives to herself when she "makes up her mind." The point,
however, is that she has no conceivable option. In order to form an
intention to do one thing rather than another, an agent must regard her
own judgment about how to act as authoritative--even if it is
only the judgment that she should follow the command or advice of
someone else. This tight connection between being an agent and having
authority has no correlate in cases where the authority at issue is
political. Anyone can coherently (and often plausibly) challenge the
political authority of some individual or group. Even a political
leader herself can with good reason believe that her political power is
illegitimate, and that exercising this power is unjustified.




Despite the special inalienable nature of our authority over
ourselves, it is possible for us to fail to govern ourselves, just as
it is possible for a political leader to fail to govern those who fall
within her domain. Indeed, precisely because our authority over our own
actions is an intrinsic feature of our agency, our deference to this
authority is but the *form* of self-government. It is no guarantee that
whenever we act, the forces that move us owe *their* power to
*our* power to decide what to do. Just as a political leader's
official status is compatible with her having no real power to call the
shots, so too, a person can have an authoritative status with respect
to her motives without having any real power over them. Though it is an
agent's job to determine how she will act, she can do this job without
really being in control. Of course, no one can govern herself without
being subject to influences whose power does not derive from her own
authority: everything we do is a response to past and present
circumstances over which we have no control. But some of the forces
that move us to act do not merely affect which actions we choose to
perform, nor how we govern ourselves in making these choices. They
influence us in a way that makes a mockery of our authority to
determine our own actions. They undermine our autonomy.




What distinguishes autonomy-undermining influences on a person's
decision, intention, or will from those motivating forces that merely
play a role in the self-governing process? This is the question that
all accounts of autonomy try to answer. As the number and variety of
these accounts indicate, the distinction is extremely elusive. There is
certainly widespread agreement about the paradigm threats to personal
autonomy: brainwashing and addiction are the favorite examples in the
philosophical literature. But philosophers seem unable to reach a
consensus about the precise nature of these threats. They cannot agree
about how it is that certain influences on our behavior prevent us from
governing ourselves.




This disagreement about the defining characteristics of autonomous
agency reflects the fact that even as concrete examples appear to call
attention to a very real difference between those who govern themselves
and those who do not, there are significant conceptual obstacles to
making sense of this distinction. These obstacles are tied to the very
feature of agency mentioned above--the feature that appears to
support the demand that individuals be granted considerable political
and legal power. If an agent fails to govern herself when she acts,
this must be because what she does is independent of her power to
determine how she will act. But if she necessarily has the authority to
determine how she will act, and if this essential feature of agency is
inseparable from the fact that she necessarily defers to herself
whenever she initiates her action, then how can her behavior possibly
escape her control? Intuitively, an agent can fall under the sway of
desires, or urges, or compulsions whose power is at odds with her own
power as an agent; she can be moved by such impulses "in spite of
herself." But in what sense, exactly, are such motives
"external" to the agent herself? How can *their*
power to move her fail to be a manifestation of *her* power to
act? How can their power reduce her authorization of her action to a
mere formality? It is difficult to answer these questions when the
governing agent and the agent she governs are one and the same.




(Again, the perplexity to which these questions give voice does not
have a correlate in the political case. We can easily grasp the idea of
a country's army (or legislative body, or cabinet ministers) dictating
to the president what legislation he must approve; for in this case
there are (at least) two independently identifiable 
decision-makers--each with its own point of view, each with its own power. The
difficulty in the case where the relevant powers are all within the
psyche of a single individual agent is that there is no such
independently identifiable pair of standpoints in terms of which we can
distinguish the powers that bully this agent from the powers that can
be attributed to the agent herself. An account of the conditions under
which an individual agent is bullied by her motives is, at the same
time, an account of what makes a motive external to the agent's own
standpoint.)


## 2. Four More or Less Overlapping Accounts of Personal Autonomy




Philosophers have proposed many different accounts of the autonomous
agent's special relation to her own motives. According to one
prominent conception, which one might call
"*coherentist*," an agent governs her own action if
and only if she is motivated to act as she does because this
motivation coheres with (is in harmony with) some mental state that
represents her point of view on the action. The relevant mental state
varies from account to account. According to one popular story, an
agent's point of view is constituted by her highest-order desires
regarding which of her first-order desires moves her to
act. (Frankfurt
 1988c)[1] 
According to another story, her point of
view is constituted by her (contemporaneous or long-term) evaluative
judgments regarding which actions are (most) worth performing. (Watson
 1975)[2] Still
another account adds that there must also be harmony between what the
agent does and her more or less long-term plans (Bratman 1979 and
2007). And others appeal to the relatively stable network of
emotional states constitutive of "caring" (Frankfurt 1988f
and 1999d, Jaworska, Shoemaker
 2003)[3]
 or to the agent's character traits
(Dworkin, R.), or to her most thoroughly "integrated"
psychological states (Arpaly and Schroeder).





All these accounts reflect the intuition that an action cannot be
attributed to the agent herself if, even as she performs this action,
she occupies a point of view from which she repudiates what she is
doing. More carefully, such an action cannot be the agent's doing in
the way that it must be if it is to qualify as an instance of
self-government. According to this intuition, if someone repudiates,
or in some other way dissociates herself from, the causal efficacy of
her own motives, then the power of these motives is independent of her
authority. If, on the other hand, she endorses these motives, whether
implicitly or explicitly, then her actions occur with her permission,
if not necessarily at her command. Under what conditions does someone
count as endorsing or repudiating her motives? Each account offers a
different answer to this question.




Not only does there appear to be a tight conceptual connection between
self-governing agency and *synchronic* psychic unity; there
also appears to be a connection between self-governing agency and
the *diachronic* unity of one's later self with one's earlier
self. This is the connection central to accounts that identify
self-governing agents with agents constrained by plans, or by
well-integrated emotions, or traits of character. Agents persist
through time; and so, these accounts stress, an agent's point of view
is not simply a function of whatever mental state(s) she happens to be
in at some point in time. Because an agent's plans play a crucial role
in ensuring that she is more than a mere collection or sequence of
mental states, it is reasonable to think that whether her motives have
her support depends on whether they are constrained by these plans.
So, too, it is reasonable to think that her stance toward her motives
is determined by her long-term values and/or her relatively stable
commitments and cares.





On a strict coherentist conception of autonomy, autonomous agents can
be moved by desires they are helpless to resist: though an addict fails
to govern herself if she would rather resist her irresistible urge to
take drugs, she is an autonomous agent if she has no objection to her
addiction and its motivational effects. According to the coherentist,
moreover, both the origin and the content of a person's higher-order
attitudes (evaluative judgments, plans) are irrelevant to whether she
is an autonomous agent. She need have done nothing to bring it about
that she has these attitudes; and the attitudes need not be especially
rational or well-informed. Coherentist accounts are thus doubly
*internalist*. They express the intuition that whether we govern
ourselves depends on neither how we came to be who we are (a fact that
is prior to (and in this sense external to) the action itself) nor how
our beliefs and attitudes relate to reality (a fact that is independent
of (and in this sense external to) the beliefs and attitudes
themselves). In other words, on these accounts, there need be no special
relation between our autonomy-constituting attitudes and either the
past circumstances that caused these attitudes or the present
circumstances in response to which they move us to act.




Other accounts of autonomy introduce conditions that are
*externalist* in one or both of these ways. According to those
who advocate a *reasons-responsive* conception of autonomous agency, an
agent does not really govern herself unless her motives, or the mental
processes that produce them, are responsive to a sufficiently wide
range of reasons for and against behaving as she
 does. (Fischer and Ravizza, Nelkin, 
 Wolf)[4]
 On accounts
of this type, an agent who is unresponsive to the reasons for
"standing behind," or "backing up," certain
motives and not others is not in the proper position to authorize her
own actions. Whether the relevant reasons are grounded in facts about
her own desires and interests, or whether they have some independent
source, the idea is that someone is not qualified to govern herself if
she cannot understand what she (really) has reason to do, or (if this
is a distinct handicap) is incapable of being moved by these reasons.
In effect, her exercise of authority is so ill-conceived that it is
powerless to confer legitimacy on her motives.




The feature of these accounts that most distinguishes them from
coherentist accounts is the importance they attribute to an agent's
ability to appreciate the reasons she has. (Once she appreciates these
reasons, her inability to act accordingly is, essentially, the
inability to conform her act to her own judgment, and to her
corresponding (higher-order) desire.) What, exactly, is the connection
supposed to be between being out of touch with (evaluative and/or
nonevaluative) reality and failing to govern oneself? Clearly, a person
who fails to appreciate a wide range of reasons for action is unlikely
to govern herself *well*: she is likely to do things that will,
in the long run, thwart her own purposes and interests. The
reasons-responsiveness conception of autonomy thus appears to
reflect the intuition that when we do something very poorly, we do not
really do it at all. There is, however, another possible underlying
rationale for regarding ignorance as a threat to self-government. If
doing *Y* is constitutive of doing *Z*, then if I
authorize myself to be moved by the desire to do *Y* because I
mistakenly believe that doing *Y* is a way of *not* doing
*Z*, then there is an obvious sense in which I have not
authorized myself to do what I am now doing when I am moved by the
desire to do *Y*. So, if I have a general desire to do what is
right and prudent, or, even more generally, a desire to do what I can
justify to myself (and others), or, more generally still, a desire to
be responsive to reasons, then insofar as I am moved to act in ways
that are, in fact, incompatible with satisfying these desires, there
is a sense in which I--who am committed to doing only what I
have good (enough) reason to do--have not really authorized my
action. Alternatively, we could say that, under these circumstances,
something external to my power to guide myself by reasons has
prevented me from exercising this power, and so has prevented me from
governing
 myself.[5]




An additional source of support for the reasons-responsive
conception of autonomy comes from the thought that someone who cannot
respond to the reasons there are must have a limited ability to reason.
This brings us to a third popular approach to autonomous 
agency--an approach that stresses the importance of the reasoning process
 itself (Christman 1991, 1993 and Mele 1993,
 1995).[6]
 According to
*responsiveness-to-reasoning* accounts, the essence of
self-government is the capacity to evaluate one's motives on the basis
of whatever else one believes and desires, and to adjust these motives
in response to one's evaluations. It is the capacity to discern what
"follows from" one's beliefs and desires, and to act
accordingly. One can exercise this capacity despite holding false
beliefs of all kinds about what one has reason to do. Accordingly, on
these accounts, being autonomous is not the same thing as being guided
by correct evaluative and normative judgments.




The emphasis on an autonomous agent's responsiveness to her own
reasoning reflects the intuition that someone whose education consisted
of a method of indoctrination that deprived her of the ability to call
her own attitudes into question would, in effect, be governed by her
"programmers," not by herself. So, too, someone whose
practical reasoning was directly manipulated by others would not govern
herself by means of this reasoning. And so, it seems, she would have no
power over the motives that this reasoning produced.




Like the coherentists, advocates of responsiveness-to-reasoning
accounts believe that the key to autonomous agency is the ability to
distance oneself from one's attitudes and beliefs--to occupy a
standpoint that is not constituted by whatever mental states are moving
one to act. They agree that motives authorized from this reflective
standpoint are internal to the agent herself in a way that her other
motives are not. Unlike the coherentists, however, the
reasoning-responsive theorists believe that there is more to the
capacity for self-reflection than the capacity to hold higher-order
attitudes. The authority of our higher-order attitudes is grounded,
they claim, in the authority of the practical reasoning that supports
these attitudes. So a self-governing agent does not merely endorse her
motives: her endorsements are implicit claims about which motives have
the support of her reason.




This fact is closely tied to another. Like many accounts that stress
an autonomous agent's responsiveness to reasons, responsiveness-
to-reasoning accounts often suggest that self-government requires the
capacity for self-transformation. On this assumption, an autonomous
agent is someone who can change her mind when she discovers good reason
to do
 so.[7]
 In contrast, strict coherentists insist that
it is possible to act autonomously while being moved by desires that
are not only irresistible when they produce their effects, but so
integral to one's identity that one could not possibly will to resist
them.[8]





The conception of autonomous agency as responsiveness to reasoning
clearly has a more internalist character than the conception of
autonomous agency as responsiveness to reasons: according to those who
stress the autonomous agent's ability to evaluate her own motives, what
counts is not the relation between the agent's attitudes and external
reality, but her ability to draw inferences from what she wants and
believes, and by so doing, to reconsider--to rationally reflect
upon--her other desires and beliefs. Insofar, however, as a
responsiveness-to-reasoning account presupposes a particular conception
of practical reasoning, it appeals to standards, or principles, that
the agent herself might misapply, or fail to recognize altogether.
Moreover, even if advocates of autonomy as responsiveness-to-reasoning
have nothing in particular in mind when they speak of the process of
"reflection," "rational evaluation," etc.,
reasoning is a norm-governed process that an agent might reject for
reasons of her own. Responsiveness to reasoning accounts thus contain
an externalist element that is absent from strict coherentist accounts.
They imply that an agent can be mistaken about whether she is really
reasoning--and so can be mistaken about whether the power of her
motives reflects the fact that she has the authority to determine her
own actions.




This weak externalism naturally expands into more robust varieties.
In particular, it supports the idea that whether an agent's reasoning
is really her way of governing her actions depends on which
forces exert a nonrational influence on this reasoning. Even when
indoctrination and other more or less imaginary forms of "mind
control" do not prevent a person from reaching evaluative
conclusions about her own motives, they can prevent her from thinking
for herself. So, too, it seems, someone in the grip of compulsion or
addiction can be so dominated by this condition that whatever facts she
considers, and whatever conclusions she draws, cannot legitimately be
attributed to her. One way to interpret these cases is to say that the
person's reasoning falls so far short of the norms of "rational
reflection" that she is not really reasoning at all.
Alternatively, one can say that her reasoning does not guarantee her
autonomy because it is under the control of external forces.




Insofar as accounts of autonomy simply stipulate that certain
influences on an agent's intention-forming process "interfere
with," or "pervert," this process, these accounts
are incomplete. For they leave it mysterious why certain influences,
and not others, are a threat to self-government. One response to this
challenge is offered by reasons-responsive accounts: according to this
response, the autonomy-undermining influences are the ones that
prevent the reasoning process from being sufficiently sensitive to the
reasons there
 are.[9]
Another - compatible - response appeals to the
"relational" aspects of autonomy: other agents can prevent
someone's reasoning from qualifying as a mode of self-government by
preventing the reasoner from developing the self-respect and/or
self-trust necessary for forming a point of view that is truly her
own (Benson 1994, 2000, Mackenzie and Stoljar, Anderson and 
 Honneth)[10].
 If an agent's point of view does not reflect her respect for
herself and for her ability to set her own ends and assess the reasons
relevant to pursuing some ends and not others, then the direction her
reasoning takes cannot be attributed to her. (Though relational
accounts of autonomy highlight the extent to which an agent's capacity
to govern herself depends on her interactions with other agents, it is
important to note that self-respect and self-trust can also be
undermined by experiences or psychological conditions that do not
involve the actions of anyone else.)



A fourth conception of personal autonomy offers a very different
response to the challenge of distinguishing (i) the determining causes
that prevent an agent from governing herself when she employs her
reason from (ii) the causes that determine how an agent governs
herself when she reasons. According to this *incompatibilist*
conception, each of these influences undermines the agent's autonomy;
cases of mind control simply call our attention to the fact that
whenever our motives are causally determined by events over which we
have no control, their power does not reflect our
authority. (Pereboom) According to incompatibilists, if our actions
can be fully explained as the effects of causal powers that are
independent of us, then even if our beliefs and attitudes are among
these effects, we do not govern them, and so we do not govern
ourselves. (Kane 1996 and van Inwagen
1983)[11]




Incompatibilist accounts of autonomy take many subtly different
forms. So do the three other (compatibilist) accounts mentioned here.
Some of the differences reflect disagreements over the extent to which
the relevant conditions--coherence among higher- and
lower-order attitudes, responsiveness to reasons, responsiveness to
reasoning, freedom from determination by external causes--must
actually obtain when an agent determines her will, or whether it is
enough that under certain specified circumstances the
agent *would* relate to her motives in the stipulated manner.
There is also a difference of opinion about the scope of the relevant
capacities: Must an autonomous agent be capable of responding to a
wide range of reasons for and against her action? or is it enough that
her motives are responsive to the "strongest," "most
compelling" reasons? and can these reasons include the sort of
credible threats that figure in cases of coercion? What range of
attitudes must an autonomous agent be capable of calling into
question? How well must she be capable of reasoning? Does it matter
whether she is guided by certain principles of rationality? Must it be
possible for her to draw different conclusions on the basis of the
reasons she considers? Is it essential that she could have considered
a different set of reasons instead?




There are even disagreements over whether the reasons to which
self-governing agents respond are, as most assume, practical
considerations concerning what to do, or what is worth doing. It has
been suggested that agents govern their actions by engaging in
theoretical reasoning to the end of forming beliefs about which modes
of behavior they could explain, given their desires. (Velleman) This suggestion
stresses the extent to which governing oneself involves deferring to
psychic demands whose power is independent of one's authority. On this
picture, an agent exercises authority over what she does only once she
is faced with a set of possible actions, whose possibility reflects
their compatibility with the causal power of her desires: in predicting
that she will perform one of these actions, she authorizes this action,
and thereby strengthens her motives for performing
 it.[12]




This way of interpreting the link between autonomous agency and
responsiveness to reasons raises larger questions about the
relationship between our practical impulses and our reason. The
answers to these questions, and to those mentioned above can be
combined in many different ways. Not only, moreover, can each
approach thus take a wide variety of forms, but the approaches
themselves can (and often do) figure together as necessary or
sufficient conditions in a single complex account.


## 3. Challenges to Identifying the Minimal Conditions of Personal Autonomy




All the proposals just considered contribute to our understanding
of the various roles that agents can play in their
own actions. They articulate various ideals that agents can realize to
various degrees when they act. In so doing, they shed light on how,
with the proper training, a very young child, whose deference to the
authority of her own judgments is little more than the *form* of
self-government, can develop into an exemplary self-governing agent.




This is a very important contribution. Nonetheless, it falls short
of giving us everything we have reason to expect from an account of
personal autonomy. In particular, challenges to the different
approaches sketched above suggest that they do not spell out the
minimal conditions under which a person's exercise of authority over
*how she behaves* reflects her own power to determine *how
she exercises this authority*. Minimal self-government seems to
require nothing more nor less than being the power behind whatever
reasoning directly gives rise to one's behavior. Yet none of the
accounts we have canvassed here seems to capture this important, most
basic, form of self-government. Nor, it seems, does any combination of
these accounts.




The worry that the coherence of one's contemporaneous attitudes does
not suffice for even minimal self-government is grounded in the
apparent possibility that a person could be brainwashed, or otherwise
compelled, to endorse a given motive. Indeed, her brain could be
manipulated in such a way that each of her endorsements is highly
responsive to reasons. This has led some philosophers to supplement
coherentist accounts of autonomy with additional conditions that place
constraints on the causal history of an agent's endorsements,
constraints of the very sort singled out in the
responsiveness-to-reasoning accounts. These supplements face a
significant challenge, however: it is very difficult to spell out the
distinction between autonomy-*conferring* reasoning and
autonomy-*undermining* reasoning without implicitly appealing to
the very phenomenon one is trying to explain.




Even if historical approaches to autonomy can successfully overcome
this difficulty, they do nothing to address the fact that coherence is
not even necessary for autonomous agency. An agent need not sacrifice
her autonomy in order to decide to act contrary to her long-term
commitments and concerns; acting "out of character" is not
a sufficient condition for failing to govern oneself. Though a
"weak-willed" agent is hardly a paradigm example of
someone who governs herself when she acts, she too plays a decisive
role in the relative power of her own motives; she authorizes her
behavior, even though she believes that she has good reason to act
otherwise. It is notoriously difficult to make sense of such an
exercise of
 authority.[13] 
For our purposes here, however, it
suffices to note that if weakness of will is a genuine phenomenon,
then human agents have the capacity to govern themselves in a way that
they themselves take to be unjustified. They can assert an authority
over themselves that challenges the authority of their very own
reason.




Of course, someone whose action is caused in this way does not
govern herself as *thoroughly* as someone whose will is
"strong"; she acts for a reason that she herself deems
inadequate; and so she is not (adequately) governed by the norms of her
own thought. Nonetheless, even under these conditions, the desires that
move her to act do so on her own authority. To use what is perhaps the
most important metaphor in the literature on personal autonomy, the
weak-willed agent "identifies with" her motives in whatever
way she must in order to be accountable for their effects. It is not
simply that what she does is the result of an earlier autonomous
action. Rather, her accountability is grounded in her contemporaneous
relation to what she is doing.



The possibility of weakness of will points to the more general fact
that an agent's authorization of her own motives need not take the
form of the judgment that it would not be better to act otherwise.
Various forms of perversity are perfectly compatible with autonomous
agency. Some philosophers believe that it is also possible for agents
to defy their own contemporaneous normative verdicts without defying
anything very deep about themselves. A woman, for example, may
conclude that even though she has an overriding reason to give up her
child for adoption, she cannot recognize herself in this action, and
so cannot identify with the desire to perform
 it.[14]
Reasonable people will surely disagree about how best to interpret any
particular example. But human experience does seem to support the
general point: the human capacity for self-reflection enables human
agents to distance themselves in thought from every aspect of their
own psyches--even their rational reflections. Given this
possibility, a person's identification with her motives cannot be
cashed out in terms of higher-order attitudes of approval and
disapproval, or in terms of the rational reflections that typically
ground these attitudes.




Similar concerns are raised by the appeal to plans. Though plans
often enable a person to exercise some measure of control over her life
as a whole, a person can govern herself at a particular time even while
defying her earlier attempts to place constraints on how she will
govern herself at this time. She can take it upon herself to abandon
her plans, or to modify them in ways she did not anticipate when she
first made them. She can even reject the counsel of the long-term
values that provide the underlying rationale for these plans.




Reflections along these lines have led some to conclude that we are
bound to come up empty-handed as long as we think of an agent's
identification with her motives as a self-relation she is responsible
for securing. For, as long as we take this approach, we appear to be
stuck with the question: under what conditions does the agent govern
her identification with some motive? what conditions must she satisfy
in order to identify with the motives that move her to identify with
some of her motives and not others? under what conditions does she
authorize the attitudes and/or mental activities that issue in a given
lower-order authorization? If we are to escape the regress such
questions evoke, it seems that there must be an attitude that can be
identified with the agent's point of view simply by virtue of being the
attitude it is; there must be an attitude from which no agent can
possibly be alienated. To be sure, if--like most animals--rational 
agents could not distance themselves from their own motives,
then they would be incapable of governing themselves. Self-government
requires two points of view: that of the governing authority, and that
of the governed. Nonetheless, if there is to be an end to the potential
regress of identifications, it seems that there must also be a limit to
the capacity for self-alienation.




As we have seen, no such limitation seems to apply where the mental
state at stake is an agent's highest-order desire, evaluative
judgment, or plan, or even an integrated combination of such
attitudes. The only attitude from which it seems that no agent can be
alienated is the desire to have sufficient power to determine one's
own motives--the desire to be a self-governing
 agent.[15]
 Even if, however, we leave to one side the
question of whether this desire can really be attributed to every
potentially self-governing agent, it does not seem to be an adequate
basis for distinguishing motives whose power can be attributed to the
agent herself from motives that are not in this sense internal. For if
a desire underlies *every* action performed by a potentially
self-governing agent, then it plays a causal role even when an agent
fails to govern her motives in the minimal way necessary to be
accountable for them. It thus cannot be the key to any account of what
is special about self-governing 
 agency[16].





Perhaps there is no attitude to which we can point in order to
distinguish between cases in which the power of an agent's motives can
be directly attributed to *her* and cases in which her authority
over her motives is a mere formality. If so, then this might seem to be
a reason to favor accounts that tie autonomous agency to the agent's
responsiveness to reasons. Unfortunately, however, these accounts have
problems of their own. Most importantly, it seems as though a person
can govern herself even if she does not understand the significance of
what she is doing. To be sure, if someone's ignorance is perfectly
reasonable, then she may not be to blame if she does something wrong.
But under such circumstances, what frees her from blame is the fact
that she has good reason to be ignorant. There appears to be no basis
for assuming that, in addition to lacking certain relevant information,
she is not really the (ill-informed) power behind her authorization of
her action.




In killing Desdemona, Othello fails to accomplish his aim of doing
what he has good reason to do. But this does not prevent him from
being the author of his own actions. Nor would he necessarily have
been prevented from governing himself if, given his character and
circumstances, he had been *unable* to "track" the
evaluative and nonevaluative facts: he would still have been
accountable for what he did if his reason for doing it had been that
he was too jealous, or too stubborn, or too vain, or too hot-tempered
to be capable of responding to the wide range of reasons against
believing that his wife was unfaithful to him--and the wide
range of reasons against killing her even if she was
 unfaithful.[17]
 More carefully, to
insist that he would *not* have been accountable under these
circumstances, we must abandon the assumption that autonomous agency is
possible even if all actions can, in principle, be explained in terms
of deterministic laws of nature. In other words, we must accept the
incompatibilist thesis that if a person's character is the product of
forces over which he never had any control, and if his character traits
determine his choices, then *even if his motives are responsive to
reasons*, he is not responsible for their motivating force.




The preceding reflections call attention to how difficult it is to
distinguish the conditions of *ideal* self-government from the
conditions under which one is sufficiently self-governing to be
responsible for the motivating power of one's desires. The difficulty
is manifested in the fact that as soon as we try to pin down the
minimal, threshold conditions of *autonomous* agency, we seem to
come up against the conditions necessary for *agency*
itself.




Consider, for example, an alleged paradigm case of an agent who fails
to govern herself: a person who takes drugs even though she would
rather resist the motivating force of her addiction. It is widely
agreed that, even if many people who fit this description are merely
weak-willed, not all of them are: some unwilling addicts are not
self-governing in even the minimal sense. According to coherentist and
responsiveness-to-reasoning accounts, this is because such addicts
are, in effect, "passive bystanders" to their own
motives. But even if we could find a satisfactory account of the
relevant passivity, this diagnosis would be problematic. For it
assimilates the addict to someone whose behavior does not even qualify
as an *action*--someone, e.g., with Tourette's Syndrome,
whose verbal outbursts and bodily movements are not
even *voluntary*. It thus fails to shed light on the conditions
under which someone acts--intentionally, even 
deliberately--without being accountable for what she does. (The same problem
arises for the proposal that autonomous agents differ from other
agents in virtue of their special way of understanding what they are
up to. Regardless of whether someone governs her intentional actions,
she knows what she is doing without having to observe her behavior.
If someone had to observe her own behavior in order to discover what
she was up to, then this behavior would not qualify as her action.)





If someone's motives directly defy her attempt to exercise authority
over her actions, then their power is not only independent of her
authority; they bypass her agency altogether. Even if under these
conditions a person can acknowledge that there is something to be said
for behaving as she does, she is as alienated from the power of her own
motives as she is from the power of the physiological states that
produce her reflex movements. She is not an autonomous agent because
she is not an agent at 
 all[18].





Of course, there is a sense in which the addict, but not the victim
of Tourette's, is responsive to reasons. But even if we could spell out
this distinction in a satisfactory way, we still face the problem of
explaining why an agent's capacity to respond to external reality is
relevant to her capacity to govern herself. And there are other
problems too. If, for example, nonaction differs from action in virtue
of being unresponsive to reasons, then it follows that nonrational
animals never really act, or that acting from instinct is acting for
reasons. It is not clear what considerations could overcome the
implausibility of these implications.


## 4. Agents as Causes and the Practical Point of View




Even *nonautonomous* rational agents authorize the motivating
power of the desires that move them to act. Yet there is an important
sense in which the power behind their authorizations is not their own.
What does the relevant impotence amount to? The incompatibilist, we
saw, has a ready answer: an agent is prevented from exercising any
power over her behavior when her authorization of this behavior can be
traced to the determining influence of external powers. According to
the incompatibilist, if the unwilling addict fails to govern herself,
this is because her motives are determined by past states of affair
over which she does not have (and never did have) any control. And if a
*willing* addict's motives have a similar genesis, then she,
too, is not accountable for their motivating power.




The familiar problem with this answer is that there seems to be no way
for an agent to gain an extra measure of control over her motives
simply by acquiring attitudes or judgments or other mental states that
are not determined by anything else. If someone's attitude toward her
motives is not determined by any earlier state of affairs, then how
can it be determined by *her*? This question pushes some with
incompatibilist intuitions to attribute a special causal power to
agents--a power of agency, which is not reducible to the effect
one event has on another. On this view, a person can
"agent-cause" a certain response to earlier events in a
way that is not itself the effect of these earlier events. (Chisholm,
Clarke, O'Connor, Taylor, R.) She can bring it about that she is
motivated in a certain way, without anything determining her to do so.
Thus, her power over her actions cannot be reduced to the power of
external motivating
 forces.[19]




Such accounts of autonomous agency take seriously the need to
distinguish an agent's power from the power of the psychic forces that
push and pull her. Yet the obscurities of the special sort of causation
they evoke are enough to prevent most philosophers from embracing this
conception of autonomous agency. To mention just a few familiar
challenges: If agent-causing an event does not involve doing something
to bring it about that the event occurs, then how does the agent exert
her causal power? and why does this power produce its effects at one
time rather than another? If, on the other hand, an agent must do
something in order to agent-cause an action, then doesn't this require
that she undergo some change? and isn't this change of state itself an
event?




On the basis of these and other difficulties, many conclude that the
appeal to agent-causation provides no more insight into autonomy than
the simple assertion that we can sometimes govern the causal efficacy
of our own motives. Incompatibilists who are sympathetic with this
complaint nonetheless insist that even if an agent's causal power must
be understood in terms of the causal relations among events, autonomous
agency is possible only if the conditions that immediately give rise to
an agent's intention need not suffice to produce it. If, they argue, an
agent cannot authorize a given action without being determined to do so
by powers beyond her control, then autonomous agency is an illusion. If
our every action is an event in a deterministic causal chain, then we
authorize our actions only in the sense that a figurehead authorizes
the decisions she is forced to sign. Indeed, unlike a political puppet,
we do not even have the option of 
 defiance[20].




Others see things differently, however. They argue that the
incompatibilist's conclusion reflects a misunderstanding of the very
nature of rational agency. In making their case, they take their lead
from the philosopher who has contributed more than any other to our
understanding of autonomy. Kant, they note, stresses the deep
differences between the two points of view from which we can think
about ourselves and our
 world.[21]
 We take up the
*theoretical* point of view in order to gain knowledge about the
nature of reality, and on this basis make predictions about which
effects will follow from which causes. When we want to make up our
minds about what to do, however, we take up the *practical*
point of view. From this point of view, too, we survey the facts that
are relevant to our decisions. But since none of these facts, taken
singly or together, is intrinsically action-guiding, they cannot free
us from the task of drawing our own conclusions about what we have
reason to do. (Korsgaard, Bok)



This is true, the neo-Kantians point out, even if our decisions are
the effect of causal powers over which we have no control. Since no
facts of which we could possibly become aware can force us to attribute
any particular significance to them, and since in order to decide what
to do, we must attribute some significance to the facts of which we are
aware (even if this involves taking them to have no significance at
all), our decisions are "up to us." According to those who press this
line of argument, our authority over our own actions would not be
illusory even if our mode of exercising it were causally determined by
events or states of affairs over which we have no control. Even under
these circumstances, no events or states of affairs would have the
power to determine what we have *reason* to do. So even under
these circumstances, we have to reach *our own* conclusions on this point
and acting accordingly. (Note that since this argument relies on the
connection between determining what we have reason to do and
determining what we *will* do, it can also be endorsed by those
who take acting for reasons to involve responding to theoretical
reasons. Indeed, there is a loose sense in which an agent's point of
view is "practical" as long as the truth of her predictions
depends on the fact that she makes them.)


## 5. Conclusion




These last observations take us back to where we started. The
political demand to be permitted to govern ourselves is grounded in the
metaphysics of agency: any agent who faces the task of "making up
her mind" has the authority to determine how she will act. On
most occasions, what an agent does is the direct effect of her exercise
of this authority. Yet there is also ample evidence that the capacity
for self-government is vulnerable to any number of assaults; an agent's
authority over her actions is no guarantee that she has the power to
determine how she exercises this authority. Agents can be deprived of
their autonomy by brainwashing, depression, anxiety, fatigue; they can
succumb to compulsions and addictions. To what, exactly, are we calling
attention when we say that, under these conditions, an agent does not
govern herself, even if she acts as she does because she thinks she has
sufficient reason to do so, even if she has (thoroughly) considered the
pros and cons of her options, and has endorsed her behavior on this
basis, and even if she would have acted differently if there had been
stronger reason to do so? Most agents who are capable of asking this
question are confident that they are the authors of most of their
actions, and are thus accountable for most of what they do. Nonetheless, as
this brief survey indicates, the self-relation they thereby attribute
to themselves is extremely difficult to pin 
 down.[22]