 Reid, however, believed that this package of claims provides a deeply distorted picture of human action. Why did he believe this? In large part because he could not see how it could account for genuinely autonomous human agency in at least two senses of this multivalent term. In the first place, autonomous actions are ones that can be properly ascribed to an agent. But if the System of Necessity were true, Reid claimed, there is no proper sense in which actions that appear to be performed by an agent could justly be attributed to that agent—the human agent being simply a theater in which various drives and impulses vie for dominance. One could, if the System of Necessity were right, attribute actions to mental states such as desires. And this might be adequate to describe the behavior of animals and addicts. But, Reid claims, it is not adequate to describe purposeful human action. For human action, in Reid’s view, must be attributable to the person as a whole, not some force working in or on her (see Korsgaard 2009, xii).