Asher Shang

Sometimes we can influence people's preferences or choices merely by changing how a fixed set of options is presented to them. Some philosophers believe that such interventions, despite being noncoercive, nonetheless offend against the ideal of autonomy. David Enoch, for example, diagnoses the offense in terms of a disruption in the ``appropriate connection'' between one's sovereignty and her nonalienation, in which autonomy partly consists. I argue that this and some other diagnoses generate an unstable asymmetry between intentional and nonintentional types of interventions, when and because they coincide in causal-historical profile. I show that this asymmetry resists any simple justification, and yet doing away with it carries some highly revisionist implications. I then sketch an alternative interpretation of the ``appropriate connection'' that makes no reference to autonomy.