  In killing Desdemona, Othello fails to accomplish his aim of doing what he has good reason to do. But this does not prevent him from being the author of his own actions. Nor would he necessarily have been prevented from governing himself if, given his character and circumstances, he had been unable to “track” the evaluative and nonevaluative facts: he would still have been accountable for what he did if his reason for doing it had been that he was too jealous, or too stubborn, or too vain, or too hot-tempered to be capable of responding to the wide range of reasons against believing that his wife was unfaithful to him—and the wide range of reasons against killing her even if she was  unfaithful.[17]  More carefully, to insist that he would not have been accountable under these circumstances, we must abandon the assumption that autonomous agency is possible even if all actions can, in principle, be explained in terms of deterministic laws of nature. In other words, we must accept the incompatibilist thesis that if a person’s character is the product of forces over which he never had any control, and if his character traits determine his choices, then even if his motives are responsive to reasons, he is not responsible for their motivating force.