 Causal accounts investigate the effects of external “relational” factors on agents’ autonomy; they do not offer an analysis of autonomy using such external factors. On constitutively relational accounts, however, interpersonal or social conditions are part of the “defining conditions” of autonomy (Christman 2004, 147). Suppose, for instance, that an agent is subject to severely constraining external conditions such as slavery. Marina Oshana argues that such external conditions are incompatible with autonomy because autonomy is a temporally extended, “global” condition of agents in which they have “de facto power and authority over choices and actions significant to the direction of [their lives]” (Oshana 2006, 2). Severely constraining external conditions remove the de facto power required for autonomy. Other theorists who adopt constitutive accounts focus rather on local autonomy, namely, what is required for choices, preferences, or desires at particular times to count as autonomous. Suppose, for instance, that autonomous choice at a particular time requires that agents have available to them a “wide enough range of…significant options” at that time (Brison 2000, 285). This account of local autonomy is constitutively relational because no matter how robust an agents’ psychological capacities, if the relevant external conditions do not obtain at a time, it is not possible for the agent’s preference at that time to be autonomous.