The desire to be a self-governing agent plays a causal role even when an agent fails to govern her motives in the minimal way necessary to be accountable for those motives.

As we have seen, no such limitation seems to apply where the mental state at stake is an agent’s highest-order desire, evaluative judgment, or plan, or even an integrated combination of such attitudes. The only attitude from which it seems that no agent can be alienated is the desire to have sufficient power to determine one’s own motives—the desire to be a self-governing agent.[15] Even if, however, we leave to one side the question of whether this desire can really be attributed to every pot