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