 In Kant’s famous dictum, “Autonomy of the will is the property the will has of being a law unto itself (independently of every property belonging to the objects of volition)” (Kant 1785, 108). Rational beings make the moral law for themselves and can regard themselves as authors of the law. Thus autonomy is manifested when rational agents “will” the moral law. For Kant the moral law is a categorical, not a hypothetical, imperative. The act of formulating a categorical imperative, and hence the moral law, is an act of a pure autonomous will, because, unlike the formulation of a hypothetical imperative, it is untainted by the influence of the desires and interests that an agent may have relative to a particular situation. (For a more detailed account, see the entry on “Kant’s Account of Reason”.) A contemporary parallel of Kant’s conception of autonomy is John Rawls’s influential notion of free and rational agents formulating principles of justice in the “original position” (Rawls 1971). Rawls argues that rational agents formulate principles of justice from behind a “veil of ignorance”, that is, from a position in which they are making decisions about how a society will function before they know who in this society they will turn out to be. For example, in the original position, agents do not know their social status, natural abilities, or conceptions of the good (Rawls 1971, 12). Such agents, like Kantian agents, are not influenced by the particular desires and preferences that are contingent on being embedded in an actual situation. Because of this, their formulation of the principles of justice is taken to be the product of a “pure” self, and hence genuinely self-originating. (For a more detailed account, see the entry on “Original Position”.)