  Even if historical approaches to autonomy can successfully overcome this difficulty, they do nothing to address the fact that coherence is not even necessary for autonomous agency. An agent need not sacrifice her autonomy in order to decide to act contrary to her long-term commitments and concerns; acting “out of character” is not a sufficient condition for failing to govern oneself.  Though a “weak-willed” agent is hardly a paradigm example of someone who governs herself when she acts, she too plays a decisive role in the relative power of her own motives; she authorizes her behavior, even though she believes that she has good reason to act otherwise. It is notoriously difficult to make sense of such an exercise of  authority.[13]  For our purposes here, however, it suffices to note that if weakness of will is a genuine phenomenon, then human agents have the capacity to govern themselves in a way that they themselves take to be unjustified. They can assert an authority over themselves that challenges the authority of their very own reason.