Buss - Valuing Autonomy

ARTICLES
Valuing Autonomy and Respecting

Persons: Manipulation, Seduction, and the
Basis of Moral Constraints*
Sarah Buss
Whether we are writing poetry or constructing arguments, playing

sports or baking cakes, we human beings are governed by laws we
impose on ourselves. But of all the forms that self-government takes,
one has been singled out for special philosophical attention, perhaps
because it appears to underlie all the rest. This is the self-governed
(and self-governing) activity we call “making up one’s own mind about
how to act.” It is generally agreed that our capacity to do this is quite
a marvelous evolutionary achievement. Indeed, many believe that being
able to determine one’s own will is intrinsically valuable—an “end in
itself” whose value does not depend on anything else. For this reason,
they say, self-governing (“autonomous”) agency has deep moral signif-
icance: autonomy is both the source of fundamental rights and the key
to understanding what these rights are and what we must do to ac-
knowledge them.1
The suggestion that there is a link between autonomy and morality
* So many people have offered me helpful comments on this article, and I have done
my best to respond to them all. As always, I am grateful for several consulting sessions
with Maggie Little. I would also like to thank Jennifer Hawkins, Elijah Millgram, Martha
Nussbaum, Angela Smith, Gopal Sreenivassan, David Velleman, Carol Voeller, Michelle
Kosch, and especially Marcia Baron. I have benefited greatly from the comments of eight
anonymous readers and from the opportunity to discuss the article with audiences at
Vanderbilt University, Stanford University, the University of Calgary, the University of Iowa,
and the University of Illinois, and with the members of the short-lived but lovely-while-it-
lasted PHILAMORE.
1. Thus, Thomas Nagel summarizes Rawls’s Kantian thesis as follows: “The funda-
mental attitude toward persons on which justice as fairness depends is a respect for their
autonomy” (“Rawls on Justice,” in Other Minds [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995],
pp. 121–36, p. 125).
Ethics 115 ( January 2005): 195–235

䉷 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2005/11502-
0001$10.00
195
196 Ethics January 2005
is highly plausible. If we really do have a moral status that distinguishes

us from all other animals, then on what can this status depend if not
on the fact that we alone are not mere pawns of nature, at the mercy
of our instincts? If we are especially worthy of respect, then mustn’t this
be because we alone can and do decide for ourselves whether and how
our inclinations are really worth satisfying? If there are limitations on
how we can justifiably treat one another, then isn’t this, in part, because,
independent of our more particular concerns, it is a good thing for
each of us to determine our own will?
These questions are meant to sound rhetorical. In this article, how-
ever, I will argue that the capacity for autonomous agency—autonomy—
is neither the key to justifying moral constraints nor the key to identi-
fying what the content of these constraints must be. I will make my case
by exploring two theses that appear to spell out the strong, if vague,
intuition that autonomy (and hence each autonomous agent) is a source
of moral norms. These theses have widespread support among non-
philosophers and philosophers alike, and this despite the fact that there
is widespread perplexity about just what autonomy is. According to the
first thesis, if someone truly appreciates that autonomy has uncondi-
tional value, then she cannot help but acknowledge that she has moral
obligations; for to value autonomy as an end in itself is to regard au-
tonomous persons as a source of moral claims. According to the second
thesis, the moral respect we owe to one another is, essentially, a respect
for one another’s autonomy; the value of autonomy is the key to the
content of our most basic moral obligations.
However plausible each thesis may be, I will argue that we must
reject them both. They give the wrong account of why we have moral
obligations to one another and of what these obligations amount to. In
developing my critique, I will call attention to an infamous philosophical
tale of manipulation. Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer shows, I will argue,
that though our capacity to govern ourselves is surely very valuable, it
cannot do the work that many moral and political philosophers have
asked it to do. Even if autonomy is an end in itself—even if it is an
intrinsically, unconditionally good end—it is not possible to pull the
morality rabbit out of the autonomy hat.
Against the first thesis I will argue that Kierkegaard’s seducer Jo-
hannes regards the autonomy of his victim Cordelia as an intrinsically
valuable end in itself, even though (without contradicting himself) he
most definitely does not believe that he (or anyone else) has moral
obligations. Against the second thesis I will argue that once we take a
closer look at what is indeed morally repugnant about Johannes’s treat-
ment of Cordelia, we discover that the value of autonomy has relatively
little to do with it.
Johannes and his fellow aesthetes teach us that the belief in au-
Buss Valuing Autonomy and Respecting Persons 197
tonomy’s moral significance presupposes a special understanding of

what is involved in governing oneself. This means that we cannot derive
moral conclusions from the mere concept of autonomy; we need to rely
on a particular, substantive conception according to which governing
oneself is at odds with being manipulated or deceived.2 Call this par-
ticular conception the “moral conception.” However plausible it may
be, we cannot take it for granted. We need to tell a convincing story
about why we ought to accept it.
Having reached this conclusion in the first (shorter) half of the
article, I devote the remaining pages to considering whether any con-
vincing story can be told. I conclude that this is not possible. One person
can manipulate and deceive another, I argue, without preventing the
manipulated person from governing herself. Moreover, when manipu-
lation and deceit are characterized in a morally neutral way, reasonable,
self-governing agents do not object to being manipulated or deceived
in a wide range of circumstances. We thus have reason to doubt not
only that the moral conception of autonomy can serve as a useful guide
to action but also that it is the conception of something valuable in
itself.
It is important to state at the outset what I will not be disputing
here. First, I will not deny that autonomy is intrinsically valuable. Some
have attacked the alleged connection between autonomy and moral
obligation on the grounds that autonomy is only instrumentally valuable.
The power to determine one’s own will is good, they argue, insofar and
only insofar as it helps one to achieve one’s own ends. In contrast, I
will be assuming that our capacity to govern ourselves is an uncondi-
tionally good end in itself and that we, who can make up our own minds,
are thus ends in ourselves. Even if this is true, I argue, it hardly follows
that we have moral obligations to one another.
Second, I say nothing about the highly controversial Kantian thesis
that governing oneself essentially involves being governed by the Cat-
egorical Imperative. Nor do I address the further claim that no one
governed by the Categorical Imperative can will to manipulate or deceive
other rational agents (except, perhaps, under very special circum-
stances). In the article’s first half, I focus instead on the assumption
that, whatever the necessary conditions of autonomy may be, we cannot
properly appreciate that other human beings have the capacity to govern
2. Of course, as Kant took pains to point out, whether we are dealing in concepts or
conceptions, the conclusions will be conditional, unless we can also establish that we are,
in fact, autonomous agents: they will be conclusions about what we ought to do, if we
have the capacity to govern ourselves when we act. As should be clear, for the purposes
of this article, I am taking it for granted that on any adequate account of autonomy, most
of us do, in fact, have this capacity, most of the time.
themselves without thereby acknowledging that we have certain basic

moral obligations to these human beings. According to this widespread
assumption, it is not our autonomy, but the autonomy of those who are
affected by our behavior, that imposes moral constraints on what we
can do.3 But this, I argue, is false: we cannot defend the authority of
morality by simply pointing to the fact that the human beings with whom
we interact have an unconditionally valuable capacity to govern
themselves.
Nor can we defend particular moral claims in this way. Again, in
pressing this point, my aim is not to challenge Kant’s highly contro-
versial suggestion that willing to manipulate or deceive is incompatible
with governing oneself.4 My targets are two far more popular—and
less controversial—theses: the claim that being manipulated or de-
ceived is incompatible with governing oneself and the claim that no
(well-informed) autonomous agent would endorse a policy that in-
volved his being manipulated and deceived—except under very special
circumstances.
In challenging these theses, I am, in effect, challenging the met-
aphysical assumptions that underlie them. But what, exactly, are these
3. The distinction I draw here is, I think, quite similar to the distinction that John
Christman has in mind when he notes that “accounts which explicate the relation between
autonomy and principles of justice and rights should be separated into two different
categories. On the one hand, writers like Rawls and Gewirth—both heavily influenced by
Kant—see autonomy as one principal property of persons that determines their ability to
derive the principles of morality and justice. . . . This can be contrasted with the view
that autonomy is a valuable character trait of individuals which, from the point of view
of the moral theorist, should be afforded respect and/or protection. . . . Autonomy, on
[this second] view . . . , provides the basis for the right to be treated as a free and equal
moral person, a fundamental human right. . . . The characteristics of persons that warrant
the root idea that they are owed basic respect (no one can be used as a resource for
another) is their capacity for rational agency and the ability to formulate a plan of life.
. . . For both Richards and Nozick, autonomy is seen as the characteristic of persons
whose value (from the point of view of the theorist) is only protected properly when a
certain set of human or natural rights is attributed to the agent and respected by others.”
According to Christman, the first approach “amounts to construing autonomy as a kind
of moral neutrality by which agents can be said to construct or derive moral principles
from their point of view” (John Christman, “Constructing the Inner Citadel: Recent Work
on Autonomy,” Ethics 99 [1988]: 109–24, p. 119). To my mind, however, this construal of
autonomy reflects something deeper: a conception of autonomy as government by reason
and of reason as “neutral” with respect to any but its own intrinsic ends.
4. One element of the controversy concerns the relationship between the Kantian
“ideal” of self-government and the sort of self-determination that is characteristic of im-
moral agents. Whatever the details, the rough idea is that insofar as our maxims are
incompatible with the Categorical Imperative, we are violating the law of our own will
and are, to this extent, governed by a law that is “external,” or “alien,” to our will. Of
course, even when we set this issue to one side, there is the additional difficulty of ex-
plaining just how the Categorical Imperative rules out manipulation and deceit.
metaphysical assumptions? One of the implicit morals of this article is

that those who would draw normative and/or metaethical conclusions
from metaphysics need to take the relevant metaphysical issues more
seriously. In particular, they must offer an account of self-governing
agency that explains why it has the moral implications so often attributed
to it. If, for various reasons, we do not accept Kant’s claim that a self-
governing agent is governed by the Categorical Imperative, and that the
Categorical Imperative imposes constraints on how one rational agent
can treat another, then we must find another story. It will not do, I hope
to show, to rely on the vague, if otherwise unobjectionable, idea that
self-governing agents act for their own reasons—that the norms gov-
erning their thought and actions are norms they themselves endorse
and in this sense impose on themselves. Nor will appeals to autonomy
have any explanatory or justificatory power if we simply stipulate that,
whatever else autonomous agency is, it is not the sort of agency that
involves forming one’s intentions in a way that reflects the influence of
manipulation and/or deceit. I have elsewhere offered my own account
of autonomy, and I allude to this account at one point in my discussion.
My aim here, however, is to provide reasons for thinking that no ade-
quate account will have the moral and metaethical implications so com-
monly attributed to autonomy. By the end of this article, the burden of
proof will be on those who still think we can establish the alleged links
between metaphysics and morals without building them into the con-
ception of autonomy itself.
THE AESTHETIC APPRECIATION OF AUTONOMY

What is the basic self-relation to which any conception of autonomy
must do justice? To be autonomous is, in essence, to do things for one’s
own reasons—to act according to principles, or laws, which are “self-
imposed” in the sense that one endorses and applies them oneself.5 As
5. This is, of course, a very broad, rather indeterminate, conception of autonomy,

and this is just the point. It is just such a vague conception that one encounters almost
whenever autonomy is evoked in discussions of moral or political philosophy. For the
record, I offer a few representative samples: (1) Autonomous agents can “call their life
their own, self-critically reflecting on and revising, in terms of arguments and evidence
to which rational assent is given, which desires will be pursued and which disowned, which
capacities cultivated and which left unexplored, with what or with whom in one’s history
one will identify, or in what theory of ends or aspirations one will center one’s self-esteem,
one’s integrity, in a life well lived.” The necessary capacities of autonomous agents are
the capacities “to take ultimate responsibility, as free and rational beings, for adopting
and revising a point of view on how to live their lives” (David Richards, “Rights and
Autonomy,” Ethics 92 [1981]: 3–20, pp. 7 and 17); (2) “Deontological theories often employ
the notion of moral autonomy to stress the dignity and inviolability of the person. What
is valuable about persons, according to this tradition, is their ability to follow laws that
are self-imposed, formulated by exercises of their capacity to deliberate and rea-
Thomas Hill explains, this means that the capacity for self-government
“is attributed only to those presumed to have certain basic normative
capacities and dispositions. These include the ability to reflect on one’s
desires and circumstances, to set ends for oneself, to form coherent
plans.”6
To this list Hill adds the disposition “to be willing to reciprocate
with others in endorsing principles that respect each person as a po-
tential source of legitimate ends.”7 He appears to take this disposition
to be an intrinsically moral capacity. But this is precisely what I want to
deny. With Hill and other Kantians, I begin with the assumption that
“when we acknowledge, as we must, the . . . value of rational agency
in others, what we grant as important per se is not their happiness or
particular projects but their existence, development, and opportunity
to live as rational agents.”8 Having conceded this much, however, I want
to challenge the further assumption that in order to “grant as important
per se” other persons’ “existence, development, and opportunity to live
as rational agents,” one must adopt a moral point of view. I am prepared
to grant that we cannot acknowledge the value of other human beings
without acknowledging the value of their developing and exercising
their capacity for self-determination. But as far as I can tell, there are
nonmoral, and even immoral, ways of interpreting this evaluative
commitment.
Consider Kierkegaard’s aesthetes. They govern themselves in ac-
cordance with their own conceptions of what is, not morally good, but
aesthetically good, that is, interesting. Like the paradigmatic moral
agents, however, they regard the capacity to govern oneself as an end
in itself; and so they regard everyone who has this capacity as a “legit-
imate source of ends.” Everything a true aesthete does is conditional
upon his acknowledging the value of the capacity for self-government.
He is dedicated to the proposition that this capacity—the capacity to
evaluate the merely given in terms of one’s own criteria, to make some-
thing of it in one’s own way, to respond to it according to one’s own
son”(Douglas N. Husak, “Paternalism and Autonomy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 10 [1980]:
27–46, p. 28); (3) “To the extent that individuals survey their options guided by their self-
scrutinized feelings, values, goals, and the like, and then marshall the determination to
follow their own counsel, they live autonomously” (Diana Meyers, “Personal Autonomy
and the Paradox of Feminine Socialization,” Journal of Philosophy 84 [1987]: 619–28, p.
627). For further examples, see n. 25.
6. Thomas Hill, “Respect for Humanity,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol.
18, ed. Grethe B. Petersen (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997), pp. 1–76, p.
37.
7. Ibid.
8. Thomas Hill, “Kant’s Theory of Practical Reason,” in Dignity and Practical Reason
in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 123–46, p. 145.
laws—is unconditionally good. It is a valuable capacity, independent of

whether it enables one to achieve one’s personal ends.
According to the aesthete, the capacity for self-government ought
to be developed and exercised as fully as possible. Our chief aim should
be “to set aside conventional constraints, to proclaim the space empty,
enter that void, take charge of the elements, and create [our] own
world.”9 So devoted is the aesthete to living autonomously that he runs
the risk of caring too little about the external constraints imposed by
reality. Nonetheless, he does recognize that even the most creative think-
ing is not possible without limits of some kind. As an aesthete, he rec-
ognizes at least one categorical imperative: so order your life that you
cultivate the creative and evaluative capacity that every human thinker
needs in order to be the master of himself.10
This imperative does not counsel egoism; and unless an aesthete
is also an egoist, his interactions with others will reflect his appreciation
of the fact that they, too, are a source of values, and so they, too, are
intrinsically valuable. Because he recognizes this, he refrains from treat-
ing other human beings as if they were mere things, whose value is
solely determined by his own evaluative scheme. He goes to great lengths
to ensure that their responses to him reflect their own evaluations. He
aspires to engage their “normative capacities and dispositions” to the
extent that they are able to exercise these capacities, and in a way that
enables him to exercise these capacities himself. For the aesthete, noth-
ing could be better than thinking his way to more complete self-deter-
mination by developing similar habits of thought in another.
This situation is nicely illustrated for us by Kierkegaard’s infamous
Seducer, Johannes. Writing in his diary, Johannes explains his goal for
Cordelia: “She must be developed inwardly, she must feel an elasticity
of soul, she must learn to evaluate the world. . . . She must owe me
nothing; for she must be free; love exists only in freedom, only in free-
dom is there enjoyment and everlasting delight. . . . Between the two
of us only the proper play of freedom must prevail.”11
Johannes has boundless admiration for the capacity to impose one’s
own laws on oneself. He honors this capacity by praising it in his diary
9. Bradley P. Dewey, “Seven Seductions: A Typology of Interpretations of the Aesthetic

Stage in Kierkegaard’s ‘The Seducer’s Diary,’” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol.
3, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995), pp. 159–99, p. 168.
10. Notice that the aesthete’s categorical imperative leaves it ambiguous whether he
can/should sacrifice one person’s autonomy in order to enhance that of others. As far
as I can tell, something very like the familiar debate between deontologists and conse-
quentialists can proceed without either side appealing to moral values.
11. Søren Kierkegaard, Diary of a Seducer, in Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson
and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944), pp.
297–440, p. 356.
entries and by interacting with other agents in ways that “bring it out.”
By means of virtuosic feats of self-reflection and self-control, he seduces
Cordelia into valuing this capacity in herself as well as in him.
And then he leaves her. Without regret, without any concern for
her feelings, he abruptly cuts off all communication with her because,
he believes, he has done all that he can to honor the unconditional
value of her autonomy. He has exhausted the opportunities for enjoying
and developing her ability to think for herself, to eschew the restrictions
of external authority, to contemplate alternate possibilities, and in other
ways to exercise her capacity for self-government. He always knew that
this day would come. Cordelia has already broken their engagement on
the grounds that it is an unacceptable restriction of her freedom; and
he takes the same attitude toward all long-term commitments, including
the long-term commitment of marriage. More generally, he is opposed
to relationships of mutual dependence, which, in his view, narrow the
scope of a rational agent’s powers of self-legislation by establishing en-
trenched habits of thought and evaluation whose influence is not under
the agent’s control. And so, he believes, he must terminate the rela-
tionship if he is to remain true to his values.12
Since Cordelia is a less thorough aesthete than he is, his decision
to abandon her—and especially his abrupt manner of severing all ties
with her just when she has broken all other ties in order to become his
lover—makes her miserable. But it does not compromise her newly
developed autonomy.13 And it is her autonomy—not her happiness or
her “particular projects”—that he values as an end in itself. He values
her as an end in herself insofar as, and only insofar as, she is an au-
tonomous agent.
One might plausibly object to my characterization of the Seducer’s
motives. After all, he seems to contradict himself from one diary entry
to the next. And Kierkegaard wants us to conclude that he is, ultimately,
self-deceiving—that he is not as free as he thinks he is, precisely because
he refuses to acknowledge the constraints imposed by external reality
and so is constantly broadsided by these constraints. If, however, the
motivation I have attributed to him is different from the one that really
12. Jennifer Hawkins has called my attention to similarities between the case of Jo-
hannes and Cordelia and the case of the two main characters in the movie Dangerous
Liaisons (and the book on which the movie is based). These two people, she suggests,
“are aesthetes of sorts.” “They enjoy manipulating others. But they admire each other so
much precisely because they are the two most autonomous people they know. . . . But
precisely because this is what they admire about one another, they can’t really come
together as lovers. . . . If one of the pair started to trust the other, then the one in control
would suddenly see the other as having sacrificed autonomy, and so would suddenly despise
that one as weak” (personal correspondence).
13. But see n. 36.
moves him, it is, nonetheless, the motivation of a possible aesthete. And

if I have described a conceptual possibility, then we are forced to con-
cede that valuing autonomy (valuing an autonomous agent) as an un-
conditionally good end is not the same thing as valuing it (her) morally.
There are two obvious ways one might try to challenge this con-
clusion. One might argue that it is not really autonomy the aesthete
values; or one might argue that he does not really value autonomy as
an end in itself. According to the first charge, Johannes values, not the
basic capacity for self-government, but certain more refined aesthetic
talents—especially the talent for imaginatively transforming the given.
He values the ability to write poetry, not the ability to act in accordance
with laws one gives to oneself. To Johannes, so this charge goes, it is
better to encourage someone to sing the blues while she darns her
husband’s socks than to encourage her to think for herself about
whether she really wants to darn them; and as long as Cordelia is able
to free her imagination from the anchoring pieties of those among
whom she lives, it is all one to him whether she is able to make up her
own mind to live differently.
But this charge is mistaken. First, Johannes does value Cordelia’s
capacity for rational choice. This is why he encourages her to think for
herself, to challenge the ends set for her by those among whom she
lives, and, more particularly, to initiate every new development in their
relationship. What’s more, the alternative presented is a false one: writ-
ing poetry is one way of acting in accordance with laws one gives to
oneself (this is why Johannes values it); and one cannot free one’s
imagination from unexamined assumptions without simultaneously re-
ducing the power exerted over one’s choices by “alien” determining
causes. More generally, if the capacity to determine one’s own choices
is intrinsically valuable, then this is, necessarily, because it is a manifes-
tation of the same intrinsically valuable capacity that we manifest in
writing poetry.
This last point can be made in terms of Kant’s own defense of the
special moral status of autonomous agents. This defense has recently
been resurrected by Christine Korsgaard. It takes the form of a rather
simple regress argument that makes no assumptions whatsoever about
which principles must govern our thinking insofar as we are truly self-
governing. “When we make a choice,” Korsgaard explains, “we must
regard its object as good.” But why do we believe that something is
good? Because, Kant suggests, it is important to us. “He [concludes]
that we must therefore take ourselves to be important.”14 Indeed, we must
regard our humanity—our capacity for rational choice—as the source
14. Christine Korsgaard, “Kant’s Formula of Humanity,” in Creating the Kingdom of

Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 106–32, p. 122.
of all value, an unconditional good, an end in itself. “The unconditional

condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature, or the power
of rational choice. To play this role, however, rational nature must itself
be something of unconditional value—an end in itself. This means,
however, that you must treat rational nature wherever you find it (in
your own person or in that of another) as an end. This in turn means
that no choice is rational which violates the status of rational nature as
an end: rational nature becomes a limiting condition of the rationality
of choice and action.”15
As I have already indicated, it is not my aim in this article to critique
the arguments for the unconditional value of autonomy. Rather, I have
been taking this value for granted and arguing that it does not have
the moral implications attributed to it by even those who do not buy
the arguments. I call attention to the regress argument, however, in
order to point out that the capacity of value to the aesthete has the
same normative status as the decision-making capacity of importance to
those who try to ground morality in autonomy. The ground for thinking
that “the capacity for rational choice” is a source of values is that it is
a manifestation of the capacity to think for oneself, to evaluate in ac-
cordance with one’s own criteria (or laws), to impose one’s own order
on the given. Since the capacity to engage in imaginative, creative en-
deavors is a manifestation of this same more general capacity, the aes-
thete has as strong a claim to appreciate the supreme intrinsic value of
autonomy as do those who place a premium on the ability to make up
one’s mind about how to act.
But does the aesthete really value autonomy as an end in itself? It
might seem, to the contrary, that, for him, autonomy is merely a means
to the end of his aesthetic experience—a means, that is, to the “enjoy-
ment and everlasting delight” that he feels whenever he exercises his
own capacity for self-government, or witnesses or interacts with others
who are exercising this capacity themselves. I believe, however, that this
characterization of the aesthete reflects a double standard; it distin-
guishes between the aesthete and the moralist where no distinction is
warranted. We would clearly be mistaken to criticize the moral agent
for valuing autonomy as a means to experiencing it morally: a person’s
moral experience of autonomy just is his way of valuing it. So, too, it is
only because the aesthete values autonomy in the way that he does that
he is capable of experiencing it aesthetically: a person’s aesthetic ex-
perience of autonomy just is his way of valuing it. To say that autonomy
has noninstrumental moral value is to say that it is worthy of moral
concern and respect, regardless of what anyone’s goals happen to be.
So, too, to say that autonomy has noninstrumental aesthetic value is to
15. Ibid., p. 123.

say that it is beautiful, or charming, or otherwise interesting, regardless

of what anyone’s goals happen to be. The fundamental disagreement
between the moralist and the aesthete is not over whether autonomy is
good in itself; their fundamental disagreement is over what kind of good
it is and how best to acknowledge it.
Johannes’s genuine enthusiasm for the unconditional value of Cor-
delia’s capacity to govern herself is precisely what makes him so seductive
to her. Indeed, seducing her is his way of honoring the fact that auton-
omy—her autonomy—is an end in itself. Of course, this does not mean
that he treats her merely as an end. To the contrary, he treats her as a
means to the end of realizing her capacity as an autonomous agent—
just as he treats himself as the means to realizing this capacity in himself.
But, the discerning reader will surely protest, treating a person as
a means to realizing her capacity for self-government is not really treat-
ing her as an end in herself. So even if a committed aesthete like Jo-
hannes values autonomy as an end in itself, it hardly follows that he values
autonomous agents. Surely, there is all the difference in the world be-
tween regarding an agent’s capacity for self-government as an end in
itself and regarding the agent herself as an end in virtue of the fact that
she has this capacity. The problem with this retort, however, is that it
merely asserts what needs to be proved: how, we need to know, does
the value of autonomy explain the moral significance of the “in virtue
of” relation? If we are interested in establishing that we do, indeed,
have moral obligations to one another, then we cannot at the outset
make any assumptions about the moral significance of autonomy. And
free of any such assumptions, the premise that autonomy is intrinsically
valuable seems to imply nothing about the value of those who have and
exercise this capacity except that they are themselves valuable insofar
as they have and exercise it. In particular, it does not seem to imply
that we fail to do justice to their value when we value them solely in
their capacity as autonomous agents.
Of course, even if I am right, there may nonetheless be something
inadequate—something wrong or mistaken—about the aesthete’s way
of valuing autonomy. The moral appreciation of autonomy may be su-
perior to the aesthetic appreciation. I will later consider the attempt to
cash out this thought in terms of the appeal to what autonomous agents
would themselves endorse. For now it suffices to stress how difficult it
is to defend the moral evaluation of autonomy without implicitly ap-
pealing to the moral superiority of this evaluation.
Kierkegaard himself appears to offer the relevant sort of defense.
The aesthetic point of view is inferior to the moral (or ethical) point
of view, he argues, because it is not possible to live aesthetically without
eventually falling apart as a person. The aesthete’s hostility to the con-
straints of the actual leads him further and further into the world of
possibilities—his delight in distancing himself from those aspects of

himself which he did not himself produce leads him to ever higher
levels of reflection—until, finally, he loses touch with himself and his
world. Having “lost the inmost and holiest thing of all in a man, the
unifying power of personality,” his self is “resolved into a multiplicity”;16
and he descends into madness. As one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous
authors explains, there is “nothing more excruciating than an intriguing
mind which has lost the thread of its continuity and now turns its whole
acumen against itself. . . . It is in vain that he has many exits from his
foxhole; at the moment his anxious soul believes that it already sees
daylight breaking through, it turns out to be a new entrance, and like
a startled deer pursued by despair, he constantly seeks a way out, and
finds only a way in, through which he goes back into himself.”17 A similar
point has been made more recently by Harry Frankfurt. If, Frankfurt
claims, “there are no volitional laws that [a person] has bound himself
to respect and to which he unconditionally submits . . . , he has no
fixed identity or shape. . . . There is nothing that he can be said es-
sentially to be.”18 (Presumably, Frankfurt would deny that the aesthete’s
Categorical Imperative is sufficient to give him an identity, a shape, or
an essence.)
Even if, however, a careless aesthete can lose his way in thought,
this is not an inevitable consequence of valuing autonomy aesthetically.
As I have already noted, to relate to the world aesthetically is not nec-
essarily, or even usually, to eschew law-governed activity. What’s more,
a smart aesthete will restrict the exercise of his imagination to the extent
necessary to maintain his sanity; he will keep in touch with reality just
enough to be able to make use of it. More importantly, I see no reason
to think that the legitimacy of one’s evaluations depends on how easy
it is to live by them. Madness aside, the aesthetic mode of existence
almost surely involves costs that we would regard as unacceptably great:
no true friendships, to name just one. To an aesthete, however, what is
lost is not nearly as valuable as what is gained. Indeed, most of the costs
and benefits we identify look very different from his point of view. Were
he to acquire a fixed identity, shape, or essence, for example, he would
consider himself a failure.
MANIPULATION, SEDUCTION, AND RESPECT
On the basis of the preceding considerations, I conclude that we should
not look to “the value of autonomy” to gain insight into what is wrong
16. Søren Kierkegaard, “Equilibrium,” in Either/Or, vol. 2, trans. Walter Lowrie (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 159–338, p. 164.
17. Kierkegaard, Diary of the Seducer, p. 304.
18. Harry Frankfurt, “On the Necessity of Ideals,” in Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 108–17, pp. 114–15.
with Johannes’s treatment of Cordelia. At this point, however, some are

likely to insist that they did not mean to claim that autonomy is morally
significant on every possible account of what is involved in governing
oneself. Their point was, rather, that there is a very plausible conception
of autonomy according to which one cannot appreciate its value without
recognizing that it is wrong to treat another human being the way that
Johannes treats Cordelia. When autonomy is conceived in this way, they
urge, it does have moral implications; and certainly this “moral con-
ception” of autonomy is a very natural, perfectly respectable one.
This clarification, it is important to note, presents us with a far
more modest claim than the one with which we began. According to
the present claim, we cannot appeal to the concept of self-government
to justify the belief that we have moral obligations and that these ob-
ligations include prohibitions against manipulating and deceiving one
another. The justification depends on a particular conception of self-
government.
But this naturally prompts the question of whether we should accept
this particular conception. Is it really a respectable conception of au-
tonomy? And does autonomy so conceived really provide a credible,
independent criterion to which we can appeal to justify our assessment
of cases in which one human being manipulates or deceives another?
We need a story about why being manipulated and/or deceived is in-
compatible with something it makes sense to call autonomous agency—
or why, if this is a different story, it is incompatible with something it
makes sense to call “treating autonomous agency with respect.” What’s
more, we need a story about why these incompatibilities are morally
significant. Lacking such accounts, we can still insist, if we like, that it
is wrong for Johannes to manipulate and deceive Cordelia because such
behavior is incompatible with respecting the unconditional value of
autonomy. But in so doing, we will essentially be saying that such be-
havior is wrong because it involves manipulation and deceit.
If a given conception of autonomy is to explain and justify various
moral convictions, then it must be an independently plausible concep-
tion, and it must be a conception of something whose value sheds light
on the norms of morality. I will try to show that neither of these con-
ditions is satisfied by the, admittedly rather vague, view that governing
oneself is incompatible with being manipulated or deceived. I will argue,
first, that when manipulation and deceit are morally criticizable, this is
not because they undermine the autonomy of the one who is manip-
ulated and deceived or even because this is what the manipulator/
deceiver wills to do. I will then argue that, at least without first defending
Kant’s conception of rational agency (or something equally controver-
sial), we cannot rely on the concept of autonomy to determine whether
autonomous agents would countenance being manipulated or deceived
under certain specified circumstances. Finally, I will point out that there
is good reason to think that autonomous agents would countenance
being manipulated or deceived in a wide range of cases. These argu-
ments together suggest that when we are obligated to refrain from ma-
nipulating or deceiving one another, this has relatively little to do with
the value of autonomy. I will bring my case to a close by calling attention
to some valuable conditions that do seem to be relevant to our moral
assessments—conditions whose independent moral significance is too
often obscured by appeals to the moral value of autonomy.
The Effects of Manipulation and Deceit upon the Autonomy of the One
Manipulated and Deceived
What makes Johannes’s treatment of Cordelia so despicable? The ob-
vious answer seems to be that he manipulates and deceives her. Without
ever telling her lies, he induces her to fall in love with him (and with
the life of the imagination) by giving her various “side-glances,” by talk-
ing with her aunt in a way designed to pique her curiosity, by pretending
not to notice her, by leaving a book of poetry open to an especially
moving passage, by speaking in a disparaging way of conventions, by
speaking passionately about freedom, and so forth. He “works on” her
emotions without her knowing what is going on; and he presents her
with a carefully controlled, and seductively partial, image of what he is
really like.
What, exactly, is wrong with this? Why is manipulating someone
incompatible with treating her with moral respect?19 One popular an-
19. It is perhaps worth stressing that, like all those who purport to make more than
tautologous claims in condemning manipulation, I am using the term ‘manipulation’ in
a purely descriptive, nonevaluative sense. My claims thus do not apply to methods of
influence specifically defined as methods that no rational agent could reasonably endorse.
(See, e.g., Thomas Hill’s characterization: “Manipulation, broadly conceived, can perhaps
be understood as intentionally causing or encouraging people to make the decisions one
wants them to make by actively promoting their making the decisions in ways that rational
persons would not want to make their decisions” [Thomas Hill, “Autonomy and Benevolent
Lies,” Journal of Value Inquiry 18 (1984): 251–67, p. 251].) Clearly, if ‘manipulation’ is
defined as a method of influence that rational people would reject, it is not a defensible
form of influence. The interesting question, however, is: what sort of influence would
rational people reject, and why? And, in particular, would they necessarily reject the sort
of influence that bypasses their rationality in order to get them to see their reasons for
action in a way they might otherwise not? Christman contrasts “manipulative” processes
of preference formation with “‘normal’ processes of self-development” (John Christman,
“Autonomy and Personal History,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 [1991]: 1–24, p. 10).
If, however, the distinguishing mark of manipulative “processes” is that they influence
preferences (and beliefs) nonrationally, then, as I suggest, there is hardly anything more
normal to be found in human interactions. (Note that similar remarks apply to my use
of the term ‘deceit’. When Herman claims that “what counts as deceit varies with the
persons involved, the social conditions of expectations, particular practices, and so on”
swer—perhaps the most popular—is that treating someone in this way

is incompatible with respecting her autonomy. According to one version
of this answer—what we might call “the metaphysical version”—when
you manipulate someone, you interfere with her ability to exercise au-
tonomous choice.20 According to a second version, though manipulating
someone does not actually undermine her autonomy, it nonetheless
involves treating her in a way that she could not autonomously endorse.
I will consider each suggestion in turn.
First, then, it seems obvious to many that Johannes prevents Cor-
delia from thinking for herself and making up her own mind. Those
who favor this diagnosis evoke the intuitive contrast between appealing
to someone’s rational capacity and, as we sometimes put it, “pushing
her buttons.” Thus, according to Onora O’Neill, “it is morally objec-
tionable to treat . . . another as a thing or tool, which cannot, so does
not, consent to the ways in which it is used; such action fails to treat
others as persons, who can choose, and may withhold consent from
actions that affect them. . . . On this understanding of treating others
as persons, rape and seduction are decisively unacceptable.”21 Similarly,
Barbara Herman notes that when someone is deceived, her “will be-
comes an instrument of the deceiver’s purposes.”22 In short, it is morally
wrong for us to deceive and/or manipulate a competent adult human
being because it is morally wrong for someone to “try to determine
which levers to pull to get the desired results” from someone else.23 This
is what is morally repugnant about Johannes’s behavior toward Cordelia.
The metaphors that bear the weight of this diagnosis are quite
compelling. Nonetheless, the diagnosis cannot be correct. For it rests
on the very assumption I have just challenged in the essay’s first half,
namely, the assumption that an aesthete seducer like Johannes prevents
[“Agency, Attachment, and Difference,” in The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 184–207, p. 204], she is conceiving of deceit as having
an essentially negative moral valence. In contrast, when I use the term, I mean to refer
to the intentional misleading of one person by another; and my two [distinct] points
about this way of relating to someone are [1] that it is a far more common feature of
benign human interactions than many moral philosophers seem to think, and [2] when
it is morally wrong to treat someone this way, this has less to do with autonomy than many
moral philosophers seem to think.)
20. As Paul Hoffman puts it, “Seduction is another way in which our will is overpow-
ered. When we are seduced, what we propose to do is not really up to us, it is up to our
seducer” (Paul Hoffman, “Freedom and Strength of Will: Descartes and Albritton,” Phil-
osophical Studies 77 [1995]: 241–60, p. 54).
21. Onora O’Neill, “Between Consenting Adults,” in Constructions of Reason: Kant’s
Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 105–25, p. 106.
22. Barbara Herman, “Leaving Deontology Behind,” in The Practice of Moral Judgment,
pp. 208–40, p. 228.
23. Christine Korsgaard, “The Right to Lie: On Dealing with Evil,” Philosophy & Public
Affairs 15 (1986): 325–49, p. 334.
his beloved from “choosing for herself which transaction she will engage
in and which ends she will promote.” Of course, Johannes “pulls the
levers” that determine (or at least heavily influence) Cordelia’s thinking
about how to act—and how, in particular, to respond to him; he treats
her “reason as a mediate cause.”24 But this does not mean that he un-
dermines her capacity for reasoning—or even that he prevents her from
exercising this capacity. To the contrary, he takes pains not to do this—
as he must, if he is to avoid forcing her to do things “against her will.”
Those who appeal to the moral impermissibility of “pulling some-
one’s levers,” “pushing her buttons,” treating her as an “instrument” or
“tool,” recognize, of course, that manipulating someone’s will is not the
same thing as compelling her to do something she wills not to do. (They
recognize that there is a difference between rape and seduction.) None-
theless, they claim that manipulation is morally wrong because the ma-
nipulated agent resembles the compelled agent in being deliberately
prevented from exercising the control over her action that is essential
to its being truly her own. Manipulating someone may not prevent her
from reasoning about what to do; but, they insist, it does prevent her
from acting for her own reasons, and this is ultimately why it is wrong.25
24. Ibid.
25. This is what lies behind the view many philosophers share with Bernard Berofsky,
namely, that someone’s “autonomy is respected insofar as his desiring nature as given is
accommodated and the method of influence is restricted to the techniques of rational
persuasion” (Bernard Berofsky, “Autonomy,” in How Many Questions? Essays in Honor of
Sidney Morgenbesser, ed. Leigh S. Cauman, Isaac Levi, Charles Parsons, and Robert Schwartz
[Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983], pp. 301–20, p. 311). Though Berofsky does not say
“only insofar as,” he seems to be committed to this further qualification. Christman spells
out this commitment more fully: “For a person to be autonomous, it must be true that
during the processes where she might have resisted these developing desires, she wasn’t
also under the influence of manipulating factors that inhibit the person’s ability to reflect
on her desires and those processes that helped form them. These will be factors whose
presence undermines an agent’s rationality and self-awareness, by virtue of which she
could critically appraise the development of desires and values she finds herself with. [New
paragraph.] The essential aspect of such influences, then, will be whether or not they
crucially affect a person’s reflective capabilities—those cognitive capacities we discussed
above: minimal rationality and self-awareness (non-self-deception). These capacities enable
the agent to appraise and revise certain aspects of herself and the factors which affect her
desires and beliefs. Such things as hypnosis, some drugs, certain educational techniques,
and the like, have the effect of rendering the agent less able to evaluate, from her own
point of view, the processes by which she has come to develop a certain desire or value.
Her vision is clouded, as it were” (Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History,” p. 19).
One of my points in arguing that many cases of nonrational influence are morally benign
is that the critics of manipulation owe us a much more careful account of what it is to
“crucially affect” a person’s “reflective capabilities,” so that she is less able to evaluate
“from her own point of view.” Unless an adult human being is very severely retarded or
demented, she has some ability to “appraise and revise certain aspects of herself and the
factors which affect her desires and beliefs.” What more, exactly, is necessary to qualify
Again, I have already noted that, in an obvious sense, Cordelia does

act for her own reasons. But perhaps there is some other sense in which
she does not—a sense relevant to the moral significance of autonomy.
To evaluate this hypothesis, let us consider for a moment Herman’s
attempt to spell out the conceptual connections it presupposes. Deceit,
Herman explains, involves willing that the desires and beliefs of a ra-
tional agent be “available to all as means for their purposes”; and this
is wrong because someone in this situation has “in effect given over
[her] agency to the agency of others.”26
But why should we think that willing to deceive and manipulate
involves willing a “take over” of “agency”? Here is what Herman says:
Rational agents can fully determine their actions according to rea-
sons. Indeed, the capacity to act for reasons all the way down is
defining of rational agency. Kant calls it autonomy. It is what we
respect in respecting a person as an end-in-herself. . . .
The maxim of deception places the grounds of choice-wor-
thiness of the victim’s reasons in the deceiver’s will. The victim
cannot take the deceiver’s action as good for the reasons that make
it good (in the eyes of the deceiver) all the way down. In effect,
the deceiver has a maxim of treating a rational agent as someone
whose will may be brought under causal control—as one whose
reasons do not go all the way down. Someone who is an end-in-
herself—a rational agent with autonomy—cannot accept that as a
principle of action. It violates the requirement that we regard
reasons as coming to an end in the will of each agent separately.
. . .
A law of rational agency that entails the causal control of one
will over another implies that no will is a possible source of reasons
all the way down. Such a law could not be a law of rational agency:
a law describing the agency of ends-in-themselves.27
According to Herman, the deceiver/manipulator regards his victim
as “someone whose will may be brought under causal control.” And this,
she suggests, is incompatible with regarding her as a “possible source
of reasons all the way down.” In short: treating someone as though she
can be brought under causal control is treating her as though she is
not a possible source of reasons all the way down; so, treating her as
though she can be brought under causal control is incompatible with
her as a competent rational agent? (For a more extensive critique of the attempt to account
for autonomous agency in terms of the ideals of rational agency, see Sarah Buss, “Auton-
omy: Self-Expression in the Passive Mode,” unpublished manuscript. There I also offer
my own account of the sense in which the evaluations of an autonomous agent are “from
her own point of view.”)
26. Barbara Herman, “Murder and Mayhem,” in The Practice of Moral Judgment, pp.
113–31, p. 126.
27. Herman, “Leaving Deontology Behind,” pp. 228, 229, 230.
treating her as a “rational agent with autonomy.” Moreover: willing to

manipulate and deceive someone involves willing to bring her under
causal control; so, in willing to manipulate or deceive someone, one is
willing to treat her as though she were not really an autonomous agent.
Why does willing to manipulate and deceive someone essentially
involve willing to exert causal control over him? Herman does not say
so herself, but the most obvious reason is that manipulating and de-
ceiving someone does, in fact, involve “the causal control of one will
over another.” Let us grant that this is so—that to influence a person’s
choice by manipulating or deceiving her is intentionally to influence
her in nonrational, purely “causal,” ways. We can then ask: is treating
someone in this way really incompatible with treating her as a source
of reasons all the way down? An affirmative answer to this question is,
I hope to show, as difficult to defend as the incompatibilist assumption
that deterministic causal laws are a threat to self-determination; and it
is difficult to defend for essentially the same reason. Manipulators and
deceivers have no more power to undermine an agent’s autonomy than
do the past states of affairs or events that cause her to decide as she
does.28 There is, I will argue, only one important sense in which a ma-
nipulator/deceiver necessarily fails to regard her victim’s capacity for
autonomous choice as a significant fact: she fails to regard it as a suf-
ficient reason not to manipulate or deceive.
First, then, do manipulation and deceit actually prevent someone’s
reasons from going “all the way down”? To answer this question, we
need to know what it means to claim that “the capacity to act for reasons
all the way down is defining of rational agency.” If this means that
someone is not a truly autonomous, truly rational agent when her actions
are partly determined by nonrational influences, then true rational
agency is not a conceptual possibility—at least not for human beings.
Human beings cannot do anything without being caused to do it. So
human beings cannot recognize that certain considerations give them
reasons to act without being caused to recognize both the considerations
themselves and their normative significance. If, however, rational agents
can be said to “fully determine their actions according to reasons” when-
28. Many arguments against incompatibilism make the point that a person can be in
control of her behavior, even if how she exercises this control is causally determined by
some state of affairs, or sequence of events, over which she never had any control. Harry
Frankfurt is among those philosophers who argue that the point does not depend on the
assumption that no rational agent played (intentionally or unintentionally) a causally
determining role in the determining causal chain. Just because one person is morally, as
well as causally, responsible for the fact that a second person makes a certain choice, it
does not follow, Frankfurt says, that the second person is not also responsible. (See Harry
Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in The Importance of What
We Care About [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], pp. 11–25, p. 25, n. 10.)
ever they take their actions to be adequately justified, then deceit and
manipulation cannot prevent someone from being a truly autonomous,
truly rational agent.
Deception does not (and cannot) “place the grounds of choice-
worthiness of the victim’s reasons in the deceiver’s will” precisely be-
cause, as Herman herself notes, the victim cannot share the deceiver’s
own point of view on his action. She must act for her own reasons if
she is to act at all; and so she must act for her own reasons if she is to
do what he wants her to do. His success depends not on his making
her take his will as justifying a given choice, but on his acting in such
a way that what he does (and what he wills to do) becomes one of the
factors that causes her to believe—for reasons she herself can defend
“all the way down”—that the choice is, in fact, justified. The fact that
she would have acted differently if she had known more (about his
intentions, in particular) is perfectly compatible with the fact that she
governed herself in light of what she did know.29 If this were not so—
if “transforming reasons into causes” violated the “separateness” of ra-
tional agents—then one would have to be a hermit to preserve one’s
integrity. The salesclerk who wants her commission could, with one false
flattering remark, prevent a shopper from making up her own mind to
buy the unflattering dress. The student who turns in a plagiarized paper
could, just by fooling me into thinking she had written it herself, prevent
me from having my own reasons for giving her an A. The man in Donald
Davidson’s well-known example who plants flowers in order to entice
his neighbor to stop and look could thereby prevent her from making
up her own mind about whether to stop.30
The point, again, is a metaphysical one. I am not here defending
plagiarism, or flattery, or any other favorite example of immorality. I
am not even arguing that deceit and manipulation are sometimes mor-
ally permissible—though I will get to that later. My point is simply that
if such behavior is wrong, this is not because it prevents people from
making up their own minds, determining their own intentions, thinking
for themselves about what is worth doing, and, on this basis, deciding
to do it. If ignorance does not generally have this effect, then there is
29. According to Hill, a mode of nonrational influence is morally criticizable if it

“[keeps the one being influenced] from realizing that she [has] other choices” (Hill,
“Autonomy and Benevolent Lies,” p. 260). But if one is “kept from” realizing that one
has alternative choices whenever one is caused to regard a given choice in such a favorable
light that one is indifferent to the alternatives, then Hill’s claim seems false. And if one
is not “kept from” realizing that one has alternatives unless one is placed in a position
where one could not possibly discover them, then no form of nonrational influence short
of hypnosis (or brainwashing) is morally criticizable for this reason.
30. Donald Davidson, “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” in Philosophical Essays on Freud, ed.
Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
no reason to think that it has this effect when it is the product of

someone else’s intentions.
Deceit and manipulation are supposed to be “the most fundamental
forms of wrongdoing” because they trick someone into thinking that
she is determining her own ends, when she is really serving the ends
of someone else (the deceiver/manipulator) instead.31 But why “in-
stead”? After all, the choice is her own. No one compelled her to make
it. To be sure, she made it under the influence of factors (mood music,
etc.) of which she was hardly aware and of whose source she knew
nothing. But every choice is like this. No rational chooser can do any-
thing without the aid of nonrational influences that determine how she
sees her choice situation and how she weighs the options she sees.32
What’s more, many of these hidden influences can be directly traced
to hidden intentions. To be sure, what is thus intentionally “obscured”
can sometimes undermine a person’s autonomy.33 But when this hap-
pens, it is not because she is subject to hidden influences (she always
is, no matter what) nor is it because such influences prevent her from
exercising her capacity for rational choice or “preempt [her] willing”
(they don’t).34 To put it somewhat crudely, whether an instance of prac-
tical reasoning is self-determined is a matter of whether it is really the
agent herself who is doing the reasoning. And this would seem to de-
pend on whether she determines her response to the considerations that
figure in her reasoning—not on how the considerations to which she
responds relate to reality, nor on how she came to be aware of these
considerations.35
31. Korsgaard, “The Right to Lie,” p. 337.

32. As T. M. Scanlon explains, “What is bad about [subliminal advertising] is not just
that it is ‘subliminal,’ i.e., that we are influenced by it without being aware of that influence.
This . . . happens all the time and is, in many cases, unobjectionable” (T. M. Scanlon,
“Freedom of Expression,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review [1979]: 519–50, p. 525).
33. O’Neill, “Between Consenting Adults,” p. 113.
34. Ibid., p. 138.
35. As I indicate in the text and in the accompanying note (n. 28), I am here pressing
a line of argument that others have pressed against incompatibilist conceptions of auton-
omy, freedom, and moral responsibility. This sort of argument has also been used against
those who insist that all threats are “coercive” in the sense that they undermine autonomy
and moral responsibility. (See Harry Frankfurt, “What We Are Morally Responsible For,”
and “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” in The Importance of What We Care
About, pp. 26–44, pp. 38–44 and pp. 1–10, pp. 2–5.) Some might think that coercion is
importantly different from manipulation and deceit—precisely because it is more “straight-
forward.” (The coerced agent knows where she stands.) As far as I can tell, however, just
as it muddies the water to assimilate (1) the judgment that the bank teller was not to
blame for turning over the money (after calmly considering the costs and benefits of
doing so) with (2) the judgment that the bank teller did not govern her own actions and
so was not morally responsible for her actions, so too, it muddies the water to assimilate
(1) the judgment that the victim of deceit and manipulation was not to blame for her
On my own view (which I have defended at length elsewhere) the

key to the distinction between self and nonself at the heart of any
account of self-governing agency is the distinction between a healthy
human being and a human being who suffers from some psychological
or physiological “affliction” (e.g., intense pain, fear, anxiety, fatigue,
depression, and obsession).36 The important point for my purposes here,
however, is that if manipulation and deceit are generally morally wrong,
this is not because they prevent the person manipulated and deceived
from making up her own mind. As Othello well knows, even if there is
a sense in which liars and other deceivers “determine what form [some-
one’s] contribution to destiny will take,”37 they cannot thereby prevent
this person from governing herself. To manipulate someone’s capacity
to think for herself about what is worth doing is not to prevent her from
exercising this capacity; to the contrary, it necessarily involves relating
to her as someone who has it. When this important metaphysical dis-
tinction is obscured, we obscure the difficulty of explaining why ma-
nipulating and deceiving someone is often incompatible with treating
her with moral respect.38
ignorance and (2) the judgment that she did not govern her own actions. (As I indicate
later [when I discuss the value of being in touch with reality], confusion is also the result
of failing to distinguish self-government from other desirable conditions.)
36. See Sarah Buss, “Autonomy Reconsidered,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1994):
95–121, and esp. “Autonomy: Self-Expression in the Passive Mode.” The basic idea is that
someone fails to exercise her capacity for rational choice autonomously when she exercises
it in a way that does not express who she truly is, and this happens when the way she
exercises it—the things she takes into consideration in deciding what to do and the relative
“weight” she attributes to these considerations—is decisively influenced by various con-
ditions that are “external”/“alien” to who she truly is, by virtue of being paradigm con-
ditions of human malfunctioning. On this account, autonomy is not merely a component
of a good human life; other components—like the absence of pain, fear, fatigue, depres-
sion—are partly definitive of what autonomy is. This means, of course, that even though
deception and manipulation are not intrinsically autonomy-undermining, they are none-
theless capable of undermining a person’s autonomy by causing her to be afflicted in the
ways mentioned here. It may well be that Cordelia satisfies this condition when Johannes
leaves her. The pain and confusion she feels at being abandoned may be great enough
to prevent her from governing herself. So if, as it is plausible to think, her distress is due,
in part, to the fact that she has been manipulated and deceived, then this manipulation
and deception are partly responsible for her inability to govern herself.
38. In “Agency, Attachment, and Difference,” Herman herself notes that “if one has
Kantian autonomy as a rational being (able to act on self-given principles), Kantian au-
tonomy may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for ‘real’ moral autonomy.”
“Ordinarily,” she continues, “we have reason to think that the autonomous person is not
merely one who can act on principles but is, rather, the person whose situation or up-
bringing yields not only a character capable of practically effective critical reflection but
also a character moved by desires and interests that are in some important sense her own”
(pp. 202–3). This leaves us with the task of elucidating the relevant “important sense.”
Herman claims that in this sense “desires and interests that are [either] the result of
If the diagnosis we have been examining is purged of metaphysics,

it amounts to the claim that deceit and manipulation are (usually) mor-
ally wrong because the deceiver/manipulator treats his victim’s reason,
her capacity to govern herself, as a mere means. In fact, however, there
are limits to what most manipulators are willing to do to their victims,
just as there are limits to what we will do to obtain the services of the
lawyers, librarians, dentists with whom we would never bother interact-
ing if it were not for the fact that they are a means to our ends. In
particular: someone who intends to manipulate another human being
would not necessarily be willing to destroy, or even disable, this person’s
capacity for autonomous choice; nor would he necessarily be willing to
prevent her from exercising this capacity.
This last observation addresses the suggestion that even if deceit
and manipulation cannot “take over” the rational agency of the one
deceived and/or manipulated, they nonetheless involve willing such a
takeover. According to this suggestion, even if a manipulator/deceiver
believes that he cannot in fact bring his victim’s will “under causal
control,” he values her as nothing more than an instrument for the
attainment of his own ends; this is how he conceives of her in his maxim.
But what does this way of valuing her come to if manipulating her is
incompatible with actually treating her as a mere instrument?39 It must
be that he would be willing to reduce her to an instrument if this were
possible.40 Yet I have just claimed that those who intentionally mislead or
manipulate another person would not, as a general rule, be willing to
treat this person as a mere instrument, even if they could do so for only
a limited time and with respect to a very limited range of choices.41
They might well be delighted if there were easier ways of getting their
coercion [or] the products of institutionalized oppression” are not the agent’s own, that
such determining causes—and deceit also—prevent “effective agency” through which “au-
tonomy is expressed (made real)” (p. 205). I do not believe, however, that she tells us
enough about this more robust conception of autonomy to enable us to determine what
it amounts to and in what way it is morally significant.
39. Again, it may be worth reminding the reader of how slippery the terms are—and
how tempting it is to equivocate. There is clearly a sense in which by presenting a person
with reasons for seeing things a certain way, one is treating her as a certain kind of
“instrument”: the kind that responds to reasons.
40. I want to thank Carol Voeller for patiently talking me through the Kantian position
I address in this paragraph. Both she and David Velleman have helped me to see that the
issues touched on here are crucial to evaluating Kant’s understanding of the moral sig-
nificance of autonomy.
41. There are, of course, exceptions. In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi describes a
prisoner named Henri who manipulates the guards by expressing pity for them. It is not
unreasonable to assume that Henri would have reduced these brutal human beings to
mere things if this had been possible, just as he (and many others) would surely have
killed them. (See Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Guilio Einaudi [New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1996], pp. 98–100.)
victims to do their bidding; but this does not mean that they would be
willing to take the steps necessary to disable their victims’ rational agency
in the relevant ways. A willingness to reduce another person to a non-
rational agent—even if only to the point where this would serve one’s
particular purpose—is not an essential component of a willingness to
manipulate and deceive.
I conclude that if manipulating and deceiving someone are gen-
erally wrong, this cannot be because these modes of interacting with
other rational agents either deprive these people of their autonomy
or presuppose a willingness to do so. No independently credible con-
ception of autonomous agency can carry the weight of our belief that
it is wrong to manipulate and deceive people in a wide range of
circumstances.
What Autonomous Agents Can Reasonably Endorse

Having rejected one possible connection between failing to treat some-
one with respect and failing to respect her autonomy, we are now in a
position to consider a very different possible connection. Though ma-
nipulating and deceiving someone cannot prevent her from governing
herself, being manipulated and deceived may nonetheless be a condi-
tion one cannot autonomously endorse, and this may be why it is wrong.
Though Johannes does not deprive Cordelia of her autonomy—or even
of the opportunity to exercise it—though he does not even will to disable
her in this way, it could nonetheless be the case that his behavior is
immoral because in keeping the “underlying maxim” of his acts “ob-
scure,”42 he treats her in ways to which she does not—and could not—
rationally consent.
This alternative (less metaphysical) diagnosis of the moral relevance
of autonomy is itself subject to two very different interpretations. Ac-
cording to the first of these, Johannes fails to treat Cordelia with respect
not because he prevents her from forming her own opinions but because
he prevents her from forming her own opinions about (from exercising
her capacity for autonomous choice with respect to) what he is up to.
As Korsgaard explains, “If our way of acting is to be consistent with the
unconditional value of free rational choice, others must be able to assent
to the transactions in which we engage them, and be in a position to
voluntarily choose to further the ends at which those transactions are
aimed. . . . The person who . . . is fooled into [engaging in a trans-
action] cannot be said to assent to the transaction or choose the end.
. . . [She] is being treated as a mere means to the ends of others. As
free rational beings, persons must be allowed to choose for themselves

what transactions they will engage in and what ends they will promote.
This is what it means to treat persons as ends in themselves.”43
On this interpretation of the moral requirement to respect other
people’s capacity for rational choice, Cordelia’s morally relevant in-
ability to consent to Johannes’s intentions is simply the conceptual im-
possibility of her doing so. Deceit and manipulation are always morally
wrong, on this view, because manipulating and/or deceiving someone
is incompatible with her being aware that she is being treated this way.44
This view is appealing in its simplicity. Nonetheless, I believe that
it rests on an exaggerated sense of the desirability of being in control
of one’s own choices. Once we remind ourselves of the wide range of
circumstances under which we are not the least bit threatened by forces
that limit our control over ourselves, we can appreciate, not that ma-
nipulation and deceit are generally acceptable forms of human inter-
action, but that when they are impermissible this has very little to do
with the intrinsic value of the power to think for oneself, to make up
one’s own mind, to act for one’s own reasons.
There are at least two reasons for rejecting the claim that we fail
to respect someone whenever our intentions concerning her are con-
ceptually impossible for her to endorse at the time. First, no one can
consent to any influence on her deliberations without, at the time she
consents, considering (and in at least a minimal sense, assessing) this
43. Christine Korsgaard, “Two Arguments against Lying,” in Creating the Kingdom of
Ends, pp. 335–62, p. 347.
44. Ibid.: “Even the most rational and independent cannot genuinely consent to
proposals about which they are deceived or with which they are compelled to comply.
Even if a proposal would have been welcomed, and coercion or deception is otiose, its
enforcement or surreptitious imposition precludes consent.” See also O’Neill, “Between
Consenting Adults,” p. 111: “The other person cannot assent to my action because he is
not in a position to. This is because he is deceived. By the nature of the case, he doesn’t
know how I am acting, and you can’t assent to a transaction you do not know is occurring.
In the same way, he cannot ‘contain in himself’ the end of the same action because he
is not in a position to. He doesn’t know what the real end of the action is, and is therefore
not in a position to make it his own—to choose, freely, to contribute to its realization.”
Christman suggests that a person’s development of some desire D is autonomous only if
the person “would not have resisted that development had [he] attended to the process
[by which it was developed]” (Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History,” p. 11). But
Korsgaard’s point is that the victim of deception or manipulation cannot “attend to the
process” by which her desires are influenced without profoundly altering the process itself.
Later, Christman suggests that the agent’s “ability to reflect on her own mental states and
the forces that affect them” could be exercised before the influences occur, the question
thus being: “Would she resist submitting to these techniques and their effects” if she knew
“before the fact” what they amounted to? (p. 21). This sounds more like Scanlon’s test,
which I discuss later in the article. As I explain, insofar as the question is what sort of
treatment someone could reasonably accept, the issue is no longer essentially: what sort
of treatment undermines the agent’s autonomy?
influence. And, as we have already seen, no one can possibly make up

her mind about what to do unless her deliberations are subject to count-
less nonrational influences of which she is unaware, and which, insofar
as they are external to her deliberations, she does not even consider.
In principle, of course, a deliberator can single out any given nonra-
tional influence for attention. But not only does this attention transform
the nature of the influence—and often significantly alter its strength;
it also does not (and cannot) render the person free from all influences
of which she is unaware. Necessarily, no one can, at the time she delib-
erates, consent to many of the conditions that play a role in how she
deliberates. And to this conceptually necessary ignorance is added the
ignorance that is inevitable given the limitations of our minds, and of
our predictive power, in particular: when we are trying to decide what
to do, we cannot possibly survey all the facts that are potentially relevant
to our decisions.
With respect, then, to the basic conditions within which we make
up our minds, we are necessarily in the very position that someone
places us in with respect to her intentions when she keeps them a secret.
It is thus hard to see what justifies the conclusion that someone wrongs
us when she places us in this position—especially since our necessary
ignorance is no cause for regret. My point is not that a manipulator/
deceiver does not wrong us but that if she does, this cannot simply be
because she influences our reasoning in ways of which we are unaware.
Given the conceptual necessity of our ignorance of so much that is
relevant to our decisions, and given that we generally do not mourn
this necessity (and that such regret would be unreasonable), the mere
fact that we cannot consent to a manipulator’s tactics at the time she
deploys them cannot be a strike against her.45 Of course, if we are
45. Again, it is, in principle, possible for us to become aware of any given influence
on our reasoning, even though we cannot become aware of all of them. But this possibility
does not distinguish nonintentional influences from the intentional variety. No matter
what the origin of a nonrational influence, its effectiveness as an influence depends on
the extent to which it is not a constituent of the agent’s practical reasoning. Even an
unintended influence will tend to lose its power when it is called to the agent’s attention.
Conversely, even the intended influences of a manipulator can retain their power when
the agent becomes aware of them. Indeed, their power can sometimes increase as a result.
(This may be what happens in the sort of case Sartre describes in order to illustrate one
sort of bad faith: the woman who leaves her hand in the grasp of the man who has taken
it is in the not terribly unusual situation of allowing her emotions to be “worked on”
nonrationally by another without admitting to herself that this is what she is doing [Jean-
Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956),
pp. 97–98]. Mark Miller describes a very different way in which the victims of manipulation
can be witting victims: the success of a particular Pepsi commercial, he notes, depended
on the fact that it appealed to the viewers’ sense of superiority at being wise to the fact
that Pepsi was trying to manipulate them into buying Pepsi [Mark C. Miller, “Deride and
ignorant of her intentions, then we are especially vulnerable to her

manipulations. But of course, this fact sheds no light on why her ma-
nipulations are wrong.
Not only does a healthy appreciation of the limitations of rational
agency require that we accept the necessity of being determined by all
sorts of things, in all sorts of ways, over which we have no control and
of which we are not even aware, but for most human agents, influences
of this indirect, nonrational sort are among the essential ingredients of
a good life. Though there is something seductive about the thought
that we wrong someone whenever we try to get her to (choose to) do
something without obtaining her consent to our aim and methods, and
without even informing her of what we are up to, most of us are not
really prepared to endorse this thought. We do not really believe that
the moral ideal of mutual respect always requires conformity to what
Korsgaard calls “the ideal of straightforwardness in human relations.”46
It is not just that most of us think there is nothing morally wrong
with misleading a friend about the surprise birthday party one is plan-
ning for her. The point is that we value relationships that include a
measure of indirection, attention to the purely causal influences on
choice, and an effort (albeit largely unconscious) to use these influences
to shape and direct these relationships. Indeed, few of us really regard
purely straightforward human interactions as an ideal.
Take the case of seduction. Kierkegaard presents us with an espe-
cially creepy, morally repugnant seducer. But what is so horrible about
Johannes’s treatment of Cordelia is not that he seduces her. To the
contrary, the process by which a lover attempts to seduce his beloved
into returning his affection appears to be an important and valuable
episode in many good lives. In many good human lives, the beloved
falls in love with the lover because and only because he initially gives
her a misleading impression of who he is and of his intentions—because
and only because he misleads her about “the end he is promoting” in
their interactions. Many loving human relations begin with a self-con-
scious side-glance and are helped along with feigned indifference, walks
in the moonlight, carefully chosen music, carefully chosen poetry, and
so forth. Of course, many lovers “work on” themselves in these ways,
even as they “work on” their beloved. But in this respect, too, they are
Conquer,” in Watching Television, ed. Todd Gitlin (New York: Random House, 1987), cited
in David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in A Supposedly
Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 21–82, pp. 59–60].) Deceit
cannot survive exposure in the same way. But, again, this is just to say that it is not possible
for someone to be in the dark about what she has just been told. This is hardly a reason
to think that we are obligated to tell someone everything we know that might be relevant
to how she decides to act.
no different from the aesthete seducer. More importantly, like the aesth-
ete seducer, most ordinary seducers aim to influence their beloved’s
choices in extrarational ways, without calling attention to what they are
up to. At some point, their intentions will become clear. But not, they
hope, before the beloved is already well primed to encourage them.
It is, of course, impossible to prove that seductions play an essential
role in many good lives. But it does seem highly plausible that a certain
amount of deception—about what one is up to, and about what sort of
person one is, really—and a certain degree of manipulation—to the
end of turning the beloved into one’s lover—is a necessary condition
for the possibility of (at least most cases of) mutual romantic love. The
necessity enters in two different places. First, for many of us, transform-
ing the beloved’s attitude by nonrational means, some of which involve
a certain amount of falsification, is integral to our way of expressing
our love to someone who does not love us back—yet. As Sartre says, we
want to fascinate the beloved, to captivate him, to inspire him—not so
as to convince him to deliberately choose to love us (for all the right
reasons, of course!)—but so as to induce him to “fall in love” with us.
At a minimum, we try to “be on our best behavior,” to “hide our warts.”
Usually, we go further: we become atypically animated, or grave; we act
so much more interested in his tales about his eccentric uncle with the
talking parrot than we ever would have been before—or ever will be
again. We do not deliberately and self-consciously “act a part.” But the
part is a bit of an “act” nonetheless. Not in every case, of course. But,
again, in most of them.
The second reason why manipulation and deception are a necessary
part of most early romances—and so a necessary condition for the pos-
sibility of the mutual love into which these romances evolve when things
go well—is that most early romantic love is too fragile to withstand
complete straightforwardness. A lover is not likely to get very far with
her beloved if she marches up to him and announces: “I really love you.
Would you please (please, please, please) love me back?” In order to
secure her beloved’s “contribution to [her] end,” she cannot simply
“put the fact before him and ask for his contribution.”47 On the other
hand, she has to do something or he won’t even know she’s alive. So,
she has to interact with him in a way that does not reveal the true nature
of her ends. She has to keep her “underlying maxim” “obscure.” (What
she must do, moreover, if mutual love is to have a chance is precisely
what her instinct for self-preservation naturally inclines her to do: since
she is not sure how she would survive his rejection of her intentions—
since his rejection of her intentions would, she knows, feel like a rejec-
47. Ibid., p. 335.

tion of her—she is in no hurry to place him in a position in which he

can choose not to “contribute to her end.”)
If there is an intimate connection between early romantic love, on
the one hand, and deception and manipulation, on the other, why not
conclude: so much the worse for romantic love? After all, the mere fact
that the Seducer’s aesthete-love requires deception and manipulation
does not make his treatment of Cordelia any more acceptable from the
moral point of view. My answer to this question is already implicit in
the preceding discussion: taking moral considerations seriously, and, in
particular, acknowledging a moral duty to respect other autonomous
agents, appears to be compatible with endorsing the sort of indirection
common in the history of romance. Appearances could be misleading,
of course; most people could be mistaken about the implications of
their moral commitments. But this cannot be established by pointing
out that it is not conceptually possible to consent to being manipulated
or deceived at the very time one is being so treated: the point is that
most reasonable people do not seem to take this to be morally decisive.
With this appeal to the judgments of “reasonable people,” we have
arrived at the second possible interpretation of the claim that manip-
ulating and deceiving someone is incompatible with treating her in a
way that she could autonomously endorse. On this interpretation, to
ask whether manipulation and deceit are ever morally acceptable forms
of human interaction is to ask whether a reasonable, autonomous agent
could endorse being manipulated or deceived, not necessarily at the
very time she is being treated this way, but during a moment of calm
reflection.48 This is, essentially, T. M. Scanlon’s interpretation of the
moral obligation to respect “the capacity of human beings, as rational
creatures, to assess reasons and to govern their lives according to this
assessment.”49 According to Scanlon, “Our concern with right and wrong
is based on a concern that our actions be justifiable to others on grounds
48. In effect, there is a second possible interpretation of the requirement to “rate”

rational beings as “always at the same time as ends”; for there is a second possible inter-
pretation of what is involved in treating a rational being as someone who must himself
“be able to share in the end” of one’s action (Immanuel Kant, The Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper & Row, 1964] [430], p. 97),
and more particularly, a second possible interpretation of what is required to treat a
rational being as “one who must always be able to consent freely to one’s treatment of
him as compatible with the ends he himself adopts as a rational agent” (Paul Guyer,
“Kant’s Morality of Law and Morality of Freedom,” in Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness
[New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000], pp. 129–71, p. 148).
49. T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1998), p. 106. According to Scanlon, “Human beings are capable of assessing reasons
and justifications, and proper respect for their distinctive value involves treating them only
in ways that they could, by proper exercise of this capacity, recognize as justifiable” (p.
169).
that they could not reasonably reject insofar as they share this con-
cern”;50 “the most general moral demand is that we exercise our capacity
for self-governance in ways that others could reasonably be expected to
authorize.”51
It is hard to argue with this. But this is because it offers us so little
to argue about. In particular, it takes no stand on two issues that are
central to any attempt to ground morality in autonomy. First, it is silent
about whether “authorizations” that are (partly) determined by manip-
ulation and/or deceit can themselves count as “self-governed.” Second,
it is silent about what a self-governing agent might authorize. In short,
on this interpretation of the moral value of autonomy, the moral value
of autonomy is not the basis of any substantive moral conclusions. In
particular, it provides no ground for thinking that people would be
unreasonable to endorse manipulation and deceit in a wide range of
cases. If this would, in fact, be unreasonable, the explanation lies
elsewhere.52
According to Scanlon, reasonable human beings would regard it
as unacceptable for one person to “bombard” another with “one-sided
information” or to “create an environment in which [the other person]
is distracted from certain questions by . . . competing stimuli.”53 But if
I am right, then Scanlon is wrong—or, anyway, misleading: reasonable
human beings would permit such behavior, not only in “emergency
cases,” or “threat cases,” or “paternalistic cases,”54 but also in cases where
there are no countervailing moral pressures. They would permit (and
even welcome) such behavior under the circumstances of ordinary
courtship and under many other circumstances as well. They would
judge it permissible—they do judge it permissible—for someone to use
her tone of voice, the volume at which she speaks, her facial expression,
her body language, to captivate or distract another rational agent so as
to elicit from him the sort of response she wants—whether this response
is an emotion, like love, or an act of forgiveness, a determination not
50. Ibid., p. 202.

51. T. M. Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice,” in The Tanner Lectures in Human
Values, vol. 8, ed. Sterling McMarrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988), p.
182. Hill defends a similar view: “We can appropriately think of moral principles as prin-
ciples that all reasonable human beings would accept, as justifiable to themselves and others,
under certain ideal conditions” (“Respect for Humanity,” p. 48).
52. Scanlon himself concedes the point. “According to my version of contractualism,”
he explains, “deciding whether an action is right or wrong requires a substantive judgment
on our part about whether certain objections to possible moral principles would be rea-
sonable” (What We Owe to Each Other, p. 194).
53. Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice,” p. 157.
54. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, p. 229.
to give up hope, a donation to Oxfam, a job offer, an agreement to

consult with a doctor.
We might disagree about whether reasonable people would really
support someone’s intending to exert such indirect, unstraightforward
influence—rather than merely doing so inadvertently. Perhaps this is
an issue about which reasonable people themselves would disagree. I
myself have just argued that self-consciously “playing upon” someone’s
emotions or vulnerabilities is sometimes justifiable. But even if I am
wrong about this, it hardly follows that it is never morally permissible
to exert such nonrational influence intentionally: we do all sorts of
things intentionally, without giving the least thought to what we are up
to.
Some reasonable people will grant that deliberately exerting a non-
rational influence on someone and/or withholding relevant informa-
tion from her is permissible, but only in contexts where this sort of
human interaction is widely accepted. To my mind, however, there are
two objections to this conception of what it takes for conditions to be
“favorable to choice.”55 First, though I have focused on the especially
intriguing case of seduction, the number and variety of such contexts
is immense, and they cannot be neatly carved off from the rest of life
as distinct “practices” which people can refrain from participating in if
they choose. (Review the list of examples above. And then think of the
countless additional contexts in which it is widely taken for granted that
people will intentionally shape each other’s responses, whether by with-
holding some relevant information or by controlling the way informa-
tion is presented so as to determine the way it is likely to be received.)
My point, I hope it is clear, is not that people generally have low ex-
pectations of one another—that they expect to relate to one another
as mere means. To the contrary, my point is that our daily lives are filled
with situations in which we do not really believe that manipulating and/
or deceiving someone is incompatible with treating her as an end in
herself. When ‘manipulation’ and ‘deceit’ are used in a morally neutral
sense (as they must be if the claim “It is morally wrong to manipulate
and/or deceive someone” is to be informative), they describe pervasive
forms of human interaction which are often quite benign and even
valuable.
The second, and more important, reason why I do not think that
the moral acceptability of nonstraightforward interactions is grounded
in the actual consent of those engaged in these interactions is because
such acceptance is a source of legitimacy only insofar as it is reasonable.
As we all know, the mere fact that I agree to your beating me does not
justify your beating me. And if it would be wrong for me to work on

your emotions without your acknowledging that this was the sort of
situation in which such manipulation was permissible, then this is not
because you have not actually given your consent but because in this
context it would be reasonable for you to object to such nonstraight-
forward behavior.56
Again, disagreements about these matters should not distract us
from the main point which they help to illustrate, namely, that the
substantive constraint on what counts as treating persons as ends is
provided, not by the moral value of rational agency, reasonable choice,
or autonomy (the disputants can all concede that it would be wrong to
permit behavior that most rational agents could not reasonably en-
dorse), but by a particular conception of what counts as “reasonably
favorable conditions” for choice. Unlike Kierkegaard’s aesthetes, I do
not think that aesthetic standards have priority in determining what is
“reasonable.” But nor do I believe that most reasonable people would,
as Scanlon suggests, “feel alienated” and upset if they were to discover
that the reason they had fallen in love with someone,57 or done any
number of other things as a result of interacting with her, was because
she had failed to disclose her motives and intentions and thereby failed
to conform to the “ideal of straightforwardness in human relations.”
Of course, we don’t want to be lied to. My point is that if, in the
circumstances, lying is wrong, this is not for the reasons suggested by
talk of “environments” “created” by “one-sided bombardments” and
“distractions.”
Taken together, the reflections of this section call attention to how
many human interactions involve intentional and unintentional influ-
ences that do not depend on the exchange of considerations for or
against some response. We are reminded, too, of how many such in-
teractions are mutually respectful and even seem to have a value beyond
price. To be sure, most of the time most of us prefer to know what other
people intend with respect to us. But there are limits—reasonable
limits—to our strong interest in encountering reality “straightforwardly.”
56. Douglas Husak has made a similar point in challenging the relevance of autonomy
to the moral status of paternalism: “‘When is it reasonable to believe that a person would
consent to an interference?’ The only sensible answer to this question, though one that
may not be particularly illuminating, is that it is reasonable to believe that a person would
consent to whatever interferences are reasonable. The proper focus, then, is on whether
an interference is reasonable—not on whether a person would consent to it. The notion
of consent is retained in the criteria to create the impression that a concern for moral
autonomy is preserved. In reality, however, consent plays only a token role in the criteria.
Once the notion of consent is omitted from the criteria and it becomes evident that the
central focus is on the reasonableness of the interference, it is easier to appreciate that
the attempt to employ the notion of moral autonomy as a barrier to justify paternalism
is unsuccessful” (Husak, “Paternalism and Autonomy,” pp. 34–35).
A human life consisting solely of straightforward encounters is likely to

miss much that is beautiful and interesting. For this reason, most of us
want—sometimes—to encounter reality indirectly, obliquely, trans-
formed. We want to exercise our capacity for self-government by exer-
cising our imagination. And—sometimes—we want to be “moved”—
even “carried away”—by the imagination of others. We want to
experience their power to induce in us an emotional response to the
transformed reality they make accessible to us. We want to experience
a response we do not “rationally choose.”
Again, this does not mean that we are generally indifferent to
whether we are tricked, or surreptitiously prodded, into doing the will
of another. And it certainly does not mean that we think it is sometimes
morally permissible for one autonomous agent to treat another with
contempt. It means, rather, that whether we know the truth about some-
one’s intentions with respect to us is often irrelevant to whether she
treats us with respect and, more generally, that, though we certainly do
want to be treated with respect, we often do not really care all that much
about what others have in mind when they interact with us. Sometimes,
we even prefer not to know—to wonder, to doubt, to be kept in sus-
pense—to be overwhelmed, captivated, moved, seduced, played with,
played upon—and yes, manipulated—by poetry, drama, music, oratory,
a steady gaze, a darting side-glance. We can only pity those human beings
(if any there be) whose souls vibrate to nothing but their own acts of
well-informed, undistracted self-determination.
The Moral Significance of Manipulation and Deceit

Most people object to being manipulated and deceived in a wide range
of circumstances. They do not generally like to be kept in the dark
about how they figure in other people’s intentions. They do not gen-
erally like to be the unwitting characters—at least not the main char-
acters—in someone else’s plot. What, exactly, is their objection? Why is
it reasonable for them to object? This article is not the place to offer
a full account of manipulation and deceit. Nor is it the place to offer
a theory of when and why manipulation and deceit are morally wrong.
In order, however, to supplement my arguments against the assumption
that the value of autonomy is the key to any satisfactory explanation, I
want to remind the reader of the reasons we do have for thinking that
in a wide range of circumstances, we ought not to manipulate and/or
deceive one another.
There are, in particular, three reasons worth noting: manipulating/
deceiving someone often prevents her from governing herself with an
accurate understanding of her situation; manipulating/deceiving someone
often prevents her from relating to the manipulator/deceiver as an
equal; and manipulating/deceiving someone is often incompatible with
promoting, or even preserving, her welfare. Again, without any attempt

to offer a theory, I would like to say a few words about these undesirable
conditions.
Though lack of knowledge and inequality can each be the unde-
sirable effects of either manipulation or deception, I will limit myself
to explaining how the undesirability of the first of these conditions helps
to explain the immorality of deceit and how the undesirability of the
second condition helps to explain the immorality of manipulation. First,
then, deceit is generally wrong because rational agents generally do not
want to be out of touch with reality. More particularly, insofar as we are
rational, we want to know what we really have most reason to do,58 we
want to know who we are really dealing with, and (within limits) we
want to know what other people really think of us. The value of being
in this condition and the related value of straightforwardness are not
only distinct from the value of autonomy but impose constraints on
what we can do to honor this value. From the moral point of view, the
value of being in touch with reality is a good reason for not valuing
autonomy aesthetically, and this is why it is, in most circumstances, a
good reason for not deceiving other autonomous agents.59
This is, in essence, the point that Hill makes when he says that
“fully rational persons not only want to make their important decisions
free from [the] subversions of the deliberative process; they also want
to have the opportunity to know their options and to reflect on any
relevant considerations for and against each option. In short, a rational
decision maker wants not only to have a clear head and ability to respond
wisely to the choice problem presented to him; he wants also to see the
problems and the important facts that bear on them realistically and in
58. This includes wanting to know the reasons we have for not giving pride of place
to aesthetic reasons. It is important to stress this point, since as Elijah Millgram has noted
in correspondence, someone (e.g., the Seducer) can put someone else (e.g., Cordelia)
“in touch with lots of reality (showing her the seamy underside of everything, and so on),
with the aim of making a cynic of her (for aesthetic reasons).” Of course, the Seducer
does not think that there are any overriding nonaesthetic reasons. But his biggest mistake
from the moral point of view is that he dismisses as irrelevant what other people—most
importantly, Cordelia—take to be normatively significant.
59. Having rejected the hypothesis that subliminal advertising is bad because it is
subliminal (see n. 32), Scanlon then speculates that it is objectionable (at least if it works)
because “it causes us to act . . . by making us think we have a good reason for so acting,
even though we probably have no such reason” (Scanlon, “Freedom of Expression,” p.
525). Surely, there is more to it than this. After all, there are circumstances under which
we can reasonably object to having been manipulated into doing the very thing we have
most reason to do, and this is because under these circumstances we can reasonably object
to having been kept in the dark about some relevant facts. What’s more, the case of the
Seducer suggests that it is usually relevant not only whether the one “causing” us to do
something actually thinks that we have good reason to act this way but also whether it is
reasonable for him to think this.
perspective.”60 As should by now be clear, my disagreement with Hill

and others is not over whether preventing someone from having access
to “pertinent evidence” is usually a bad thing to do. Rather, I object to
the suggestion that what makes such behavior bad is the effect it has
on a person’s autonomy.
Some may want to insist that no agent is truly autonomous if she
is ignorant of the considerations (or enough of the considerations) that
are relevant to her decision. But anyone who wants to defend this con-
ception of self-government will need to explain how it can be reconciled
with the fact (already noted above)61 that people can be accountable
for decisions they make on the basis of false beliefs. Moreover, even if
it is possible to meet this explanatory burden, we need some reason for
treating what appear to be two distinct desirable conditions as one. We
value (1) having the capacity to govern our own actions, the capacity
to act in accordance with our own ideas of what is right and good; and
we value (2) knowing the (likely) effects of our actions, as well as the
value of both these effects and the actions themselves. What is the ex-
planatory advantage of insisting that a person must satisfy the second
condition in order to count as exercising the capacity singled out in
the first condition? Even if we would not value the capacity to govern
ourselves if we thought that we rarely satisfied the second condition—
a hypothesis I reject (and which, as I see it, reflects a heteronomous
attachment to one’s own autonomy)—it hardly follows that governing
oneself is the same thing as governing oneself in a well-informed way.
To think otherwise would be like thinking that because scratching is
valuable only when one is itchy, scratching just is something one does
in an itchy state.62
Of course, a person who lacks information relevant to her choices
is more likely to be surprised and disappointed by the consequences of
her actions. But though being constantly taken off guard in this way
can certainly make one feel as though one lacks control over one’s life,
the control at issue here does not concern one’s relation to oneself but
one’s relation to one’s circumstances. Perhaps more importantly, the
60. Hill, “Autonomy and Benevolent Lies,” p. 251.

61. See my challenge to the suggestion that manipulation/deceit involves treating
someone as though her will can be brought under causal control.
62. When medical ethicists speak of how a doctor must treat her patients if she is to
“respect their autonomy,” the point seems to be that treating patients in this way is necessary
in order to respect patients’ rights both to make an informed choice about their treatment
and to be given the treatment they choose. I do not object to this sort of talk. My point,
however, is that in such contexts the appeal to autonomy has no justificatory or explanatory
force. In particular, it does not explain why patients have the alleged rights, what grounds
these rights, or in what sense they are, essentially, rights to self-government (as opposed
to rights to self-government and other things, too).
experience of having too little control over the circumstances of one’s

life is in large part a function of the fact that when one’s expectations
are upset, one becomes painfully aware of how little control anyone
ever has over anything beyond her actions themselves and their direct
effects. This fact is much easier to forget—much easier not to feel the
force of—when one’s external circumstances are benign and predictable
enough to form both a supportive background to one’s own purposeful
activity and a complex of causal links that one can (often enough) count
on to yield the results one intends to bring about.
Not only can it be unnerving to discover how little control one
really has over anything besides one’s own actions, but no reasonable
person wants the conditions under which she makes up her own mind
to be so tightly controlled by others that, given sufficient knowledge of
what makes her tick, these others can (often/usually/always) arrange
things so that she autonomously decides to do whatever they want her
to decide to do. This brings me to the second undesirable condition
mentioned above. When one person exerts tight control over another’s
choices, his treatment of her is disrespectful not because it “fails to
honor [her] right to make [her] own decisions,”63 or even because it
undermines her control over her life or her world, but because it involves
treating her as an (autonomous) object in his world, a character in his
plot, rather than as someone with whom he shares the world, someone
whose plot interacts with his own in ways he has not himself plotted.
Again, to unpack these metaphors would require another article.
For my purposes here it suffices to note that the reason why it is dis-
respectful to exert near total control over another autonomous human
being’s circumstances and narrative is because to treat her this way is
incompatible with treating her as an equal, where the inequality at issue
takes the form of an asymmetry, or lack of reciprocity, in one’s inter-
actions with her. Of course, not all asymmetrical human relationships
are morally suspect—not even all those between autonomous agents.
But willing to assert vastly disproportionate power over another auton-
omous human being is a violation of one’s obligation to treat her as an
equal. The Seducer deepens our metaphorical understanding of why
this is so by suggesting that the relevant moral fault belongs with the
fault of treating another autonomous human being as a spectacle for
one’s own entertainment.64 This morally repugnant attitude is especially
disrespectful when it reflects the assumption that one’s own ideas about
what is good and reasonable are privileged—that one has no reason to
63. Hill, “Autonomy and Benevolent Lies,” p. 251.

64. Think, e.g., about the situation in which the protagonist finds himself in the movie
The Truman Show.
consult with, learn from, or defer to, the verdicts reached, or the ends
set, by other rational agents.65
If manipulation and deceit are sometimes morally acceptable, then
this is because the valuable conditions I have just identified are not the
only valuable conditions, and because the degree to which these con-
ditions are compromised makes all the moral difference in the world.
A conscientious moral agent has her hands full maintaining the right
balance, and this is never truer than when she wants someone to love
her. Because falling in love is intrinsically valuable, the deception and
manipulation integral to (most) early courtships is not only a necessary
condition for the possibility of something else of great value (mutual
love); it is not only a necessary means to a valuable end. It is also a part
of something good in itself—or at least it can be. At the same time,
however, there is a price to pay for this good: the vulnerability that
comes with allowing another person to determine, and even control,
not one’s decisions but one’s emotional life.
To be captivated by the beautiful and the interesting is to become
vulnerable to their charms. It is to be possessed, and so, to be less “self-
possessed,” and so, to have less control—not, again, over one’s decisions
but over one’s happiness. When we read poetry, or go to the theater
or the concert hall, we consent to enter this vulnerable condition; and
the seductions to which we expose ourselves are pretty strictly delimited.
Even so, we can become the victims of demagoguery: the sights and
sounds of Nuremberg can sweep us far away from a good human life.
The risks are even greater when we have not consented to be played
upon, and when the time and place of the seductive influence are not
strictly delimited. This is why it is important that those who move us to
love them not do so in the role of the self-conscious artist who has no
concern for our happiness.
This brings us back to Johannes and Cordelia. Johannes’s moral
fault is not, we have seen, that he fails to recognize and appreciate the
unconditional value of the human capacity for self-government. And it
is not that he manipulates and deceives another human being, where
these forms of human interaction are conceived in purely nonmoral
terms. I have suggested that his behavior is morally criticizable because
he manipulates and deceives another human being with the intention
of submerging her narrative in his—because he has no intention what-
soever of relating to her as an equal, no intention of interacting with
her in a world which belongs to her to the same extent that it belongs
65. As many have noted, the Categorical Imperative appears to tell us not to make
an exception of ourselves. If this is right, and if the Categorical Imperative is the law of
autonomous agents, then to be autonomous is to regard other autonomous agents as
equals.
to him. But this is an incomplete diagnosis of Johannes’s moral inad-

equacy. There is also the third factor mentioned above: his utter lack
of concern about the effect he is likely to have on Cordelia’s happiness
and on anything else she needs in order for her life to go well.
Johannes has no interest in promoting Cordelia’s happiness.66 And
since his impact on her feelings is not the relatively limited impact of
a composer, or poet, or dramatist, since, furthermore, he has every
reason to predict the magnitude of this impact, his indifference makes
him a scoundrel. He treats another human being immorally precisely
because, from the moral point of view, the capacity to govern oneself
is not the only human capacity that is valuable for its own sake or even
the most valuable such capacity.67
In explaining why it is morally wrong to seduce someone whom
one does not love, Onora O’Neill notes that “endearments standardly
express not just momentary enthusiasm but affection”; “embrace con-
veys a commitment that goes beyond momentary clinging.”68 Her point
is that the seducer who does not really care about the well-being of the
one he seduces is morally criticizable because he deceives her about his
real intentions. If I am right, however, there are contexts in which one
can treat someone with respect even though one obscures one’s motives;
and in such contexts, one earns moral reproach, not for concealing
one’s lack of affection and commitment to the person’s well-being, but
for what is concealed.
66. Scanlon himself calls attention to the irreducible importance of concern for
another’s welfare. “One can,” he claims, “reasonably refuse to grant others license to
ignore the costs of the expectations they lead one to form.” This is why a reasonable
person would endorse the following Principle L: “If one has intentionally or negligently
led someone to expect that one is going to follow a certain course of action, X, and one
has good reason to believe that that person will suffer significant loss as a result of this
expectation if one does not follow X, then one must take reasonable steps to prevent that
loss” (Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, pp. 300–301). More generally, Scanlon notes
that “a person can reasonably reject a principle if 1) general acceptance of that principle
in a world like the one we are familiar with would cause that person serious hardship,
and 2) there are alternative principles, the general acceptance of which would not entail
comparable burdens for anyone.” Thus, “in order . . . to decide whether a given principle
can reasonably be rejected we will need some interpretation of the terms ‘serious hardship’
and ‘comparable burden’” (T. M. Scanlon, “Value, Desire, and the Quality of Life,” in The
Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen [Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993], pp. 185–207, p. 196).
67. It is worth stressing here that, from the moral point of view, the aesthete’s problem
is not simply that he overvalues autonomy—that he gives it too much weight, relative to
other valuable things. Even if he values other things, too (e.g., human emotions, the
capacity to feel pain), he necessarily values them aesthetically and so does not attribute
to them the proper (moral) significance. I have Elijah Millgram to thank for helping me
to see this point.
Recent articles on Kant’s moral theory have noted that he had

difficulty accommodating his views to the fact of human sexuality. How,
he wondered, could one person relate to another as a sex object while,
at the same time, treating her as an end-in-herself? His suggestion that
sex is morally permissible as long as each participant becomes the “prop-
erty” of the other is, to my mind, unconvincing:69 if it is wrong to treat
someone as a tool, or thing, then this is wrong, even if she treats you
the same way. But Kant was closer to the mark, I think, when he defended
the moral importance of the very institution the aesthete seducer holds
in contempt: the institution of marriage. As Herman explains, Kant
recognized that sexual relations between human beings (“sexual inter-
est”) are (is) “possible [i.e., morally permissible] only where [each has]
secure moral regard for [the other’s] life”; and this means that “the
acceptance of obligations with respect to [a] person’s welfare [is] a
condition of [morally acceptable] sexual activity.”70 Even if we do not
share Kant’s opinion that marriage is the only way of ensuring that each
party in a sexual relationship respects the other’s well-being, and even
if we do not endorse his attempt to ground the moral value of well-
being in the value of autonomy, we can nonetheless agree that respecting
a person’s well-being is an important component of treating her as an
end.
Whereas Kant seemed to think that sexual relations pose a unique
problem to his conception of moral respect, I have tried to show that
there are other areas of human life in which the moral obligation to
treat someone as an end in herself cannot be reduced to the obligation
to appeal to her reason. Guided by the challenge posed by Kierkegaard’s
Seducer, I have limited myself to exploring one special sort of human
relation—romantic, erotic relations—but I believe (as I have also sug-
gested) that the harder we look, the more situations we will discover in
69. “If I yield myself completely to another and obtain the person of the other in
return, I win myself back; I have given myself up as the property of another, but in turn
I take that other as my property, and so win myself back again in winning the person
whose property I have become” (Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield
[New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963], p. 167, cited in Barbara Herman, “Could It Be
Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage?” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays
on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt [Boulder, Colo.: West-
view, 1993], pp. 53–72, p. 60).
70. Herman, “Could It Be Worth Thinking about Kant on Sex and Marriage?” p. 63.
Of course, in ideal cases, marriage is something to which both parties consent; and in so
doing, they acknowledge certain obligations to one another. In contrast, in the early stages
of a romance, the two parties do not (and are not in a position to) consent to promoting/
protecting one another’s welfare. The lover’s commitment to his beloved’s happiness is
(and initially must be) something he keeps to himself; and the beloved will generally have
no special commitment of any kind to the lover.
which there is no tension between valuing someone morally and relating

to her in nonstraightforward ways.71
***
If in most situations we are morally required to inform others of
the ends we are trying to get them to endorse, and of our reasons for
wanting them to endorse these ends, this must be because they could
not reasonably expect us to treat them otherwise in these situations.
But if they could not reasonably expect us to treat them otherwise, this
cannot be because there are independent (metaphysical) reasons for
thinking that such treatment prevents them from exercising their ca-
pacity for autonomous choice. And whatever the nonmetaphysical rea-
sons may be for rejecting such treatment, they are not always decisive:
most reasonable people do not expect to be informed at all times about
how others are trying to get them to think; to the contrary, they expect
not to be informed in many cases; indeed, they do not always want to
be treated “straightforwardly.”
Because it is very difficult to deprive someone of her ability to
govern herself (difficult, i.e., without also depriving her of the ability
to think), and because the requirements for treating someone with
respect cannot be read off of the fact that she can govern herself, the
moral status of manipulation and deceit is far more complex than has
commonly been supposed. There are many manipulative acts which
rational agents cannot reasonably endorse. But this is not because such
manipulation “violates the autonomy” of the one manipulated. Deceit
and manipulation can be motivated by a genuine (nonmoral) appre-
ciation of the unconditional value of the capacity to govern oneself.
And there is no credible conception of autonomy according to which
71. The case of pedagogy is an interesting one. Is what Johannes does to Cordelia
worse than what a teacher does to a student when she manipulates him into gaining
philosophical insight, with the knowledge that this will shatter his secure world and
may well leave him terribly unhappy? Christman suggests that the moral acceptability
of a “pedagogical technique” depends on whether the students are able to “reflect and
critically appraise the educational methods and principles to which they are being
subjected” (Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History,” p. 20). This is surely true with
respect to some such techniques. But in many, if not most, cases students will not be in
a good position to assess their teachers’ methods until these methods have had their effect.
What’s more, the sort of nonrational influences that come to my mind when I think about
teaching are not even really “techniques”; and they are not the sort of “methods” into
whose acceptability one can gain much insight by “critically appraising” them. They consist
in such things as body posture, facial expression, tone of voice, gesture—elements of the
presentation of self of which a good teacher is not even conscious but by means of which
she manages to present the material in a way that makes (yes, “makes” is the right word
here) at least some of the students think that they are being told, or shown, something
that may actually be worth caring about.
most deceivers and manipulators prevent their victims from governing

themselves. When deceit and manipulation are morally impermissible,
this is because they prevent someone from being (sufficiently) in touch
with reality, or from relating to the manipulator as an equal, or because
they reflect a lack of concern for the well-being and happiness of another
human being. According to those of us who are not aesthetes, to treat
someone in this way is to do something that a reasonable agent cannot
autonomously endorse. In this sense, it is to treat the person’s capacity
for rational, autonomous choice with contempt. This is a bad thing. But
there is nothing about the nature of autonomous agency itself that
explains why it is bad—nothing, at any rate, if agents are capable of
governing themselves without being governed by the moral law.
For us, the good human life is not the good aesthetic life. We do
not share the aesthete’s views about what is reasonable. Our way of
valuing autonomous human beings is very different from his. So our
way of honoring the special human capacity to govern oneself is very
different from his. Whereas the aesthete expresses his appreciation by
doing whatever he can to encourage himself and others to engage in
the most virtuosic self-reflection, self-creation, self-determination, self-
transcendence of which they are capable, we are rarely concerned about
how our behavior affects the extent to which anyone’s self-reflection,
etc., is refined, sophisticated, beautiful, and interesting rather than
crude and dull.
From the aesthete’s point of view, our constant appeals to the un-
conditional value of autonomy ring hollow. Can we really appreciate
the ability to think and choose for ourselves, to evaluate and transform
the given by submitting it to our own laws and criteria? If we really do
value this ability, then why do we place so many restrictions on what we
can do to honor it? And why do so few of us show any interest in
developing it into something more than the most rudimentary skill? We
seem to regard it as little more than a means to satisfying whatever
desires we happen to have—as if it were, almost, a slave of our passions.
From our point of view, however, things look quite different. For
us, it seems that in order to respect one another as self-governing agents,
we must refrain from manipulating and deceiving one another in a wide
range of circumstances, just as we must refrain from bullying and stab-
bing one another. If Kant is right, this assumption is reasonable because
it follows from the formal principles of rationality and because these
principles are the laws of our will. Those who do not buy his account,
however, cannot look to autonomy for a less costly explanation.
Lacking such an explanation, we can nonetheless ask: when, if ever,
is it reasonable to endorse human interactions involving manipulation
and/or deceit? To ask this is, of course, just to ask: when, if ever, is it
justifiable to manipulate and/or deceive someone? The aesthete cannot
understand why, in answering this question, we assume that it is generally

a good thing to relate to other people straightforwardly and to try not
to make them unhappy. But one need not be morally blind in order to
appreciate aesthetic virtues. Just as it is reasonable to value straightfor-
wardness and happiness, so too, it is reasonable to value beauty and
novelty. These and other aesthetic goods have an important place in a
good human life. And because of the role they play in some good lives,
in particular, it is sometimes possible for us to treat other autonomous
agents with respect, even as we employ indirect, nonrational means in
the hope of determining how they govern themselves.

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ARTICLES

Valuing Autonomy and Respecting

Whether we are writing poetry or constructing arguments, playing

Ethics 115 ( January 2005): 195–235

is highly plausible. If we really do have a moral status that distinguishes

tonomy’s moral significance presupposes a special understanding of

themselves without thereby acknowledging that we have certain basic

metaphysical assumptions? One of the implicit morals of this article is

THE AESTHETIC APPRECIATION OF AUTONOMY

5. This is, of course, a very broad, rather indeterminate, conception of autonomy,

laws—is unconditionally good. It is a valuable capacity, independent of

9. Bradley P. Dewey, “Seven Seductions: A Typology of Interpretations of the Aesthetic

moves him, it is, nonetheless, the motivation of a possible aesthete. And

14. Christine Korsgaard, “Kant’s Formula of Humanity,” in Creating the Kingdom of

of all value, an unconditional good, an end in itself. “The unconditional

15. Ibid., p. 123.

say that it is beautiful, or charming, or otherwise interesting, regardless

possibilities—his delight in distancing himself from those aspects of

with Johannes’s treatment of Cordelia. At this point, however, some are

swer—perhaps the most popular—is that treating someone in this way

Again, I have already noted that, in an obvious sense, Cordelia does

treating her as a “rational agent with autonomy.” Moreover: willing to

29. According to Hill, a mode of nonrational influence is morally criticizable if it

no reason to think that it has this effect when it is the product of

31. Korsgaard, “The Right to Lie,” p. 337.

On my own view (which I have defended at length elsewhere) the

If the diagnosis we have been examining is purged of metaphysics,

What Autonomous Agents Can Reasonably Endorse

42. O’Neill, “Between Consenting Adults,” p. 113.

influence. And, as we have already seen, no one can possibly make up

ignorant of her intentions, then we are especially vulnerable to her

47. Ibid., p. 335.

tion of her—she is in no hurry to place him in a position in which he

48. In effect, there is a second possible interpretation of the requirement to “rate”

50. Ibid., p. 202.

to give up hope, a donation to Oxfam, a job offer, an agreement to

55. Scanlon, “The Significance of Choice,” p. 197.

A human life consisting solely of straightforward encounters is likely to

The Moral Significance of Manipulation and Deceit

promoting, or even preserving, her welfare. Again, without any attempt

perspective.”60 As should by now be clear, my disagreement with Hill

60. Hill, “Autonomy and Benevolent Lies,” p. 251.

experience of having too little control over the circumstances of one’s

63. Hill, “Autonomy and Benevolent Lies,” p. 251.

to him. But this is an incomplete diagnosis of Johannes’s moral inad-

Recent articles on Kant’s moral theory have noted that he had

which there is no tension between valuing someone morally and relating

most deceivers and manipulators prevent their victims from governing

understand why, in answering this question, we assume that it is generally

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