For the past three decades philosophical discussions of both
personal autonomy and what it is for a person to “identify”
with her desires have been dominated by the “hierarchical”
analyses of these concepts developed by Gerald Dworkin and Harry
Frankfurt. The longevity of these analyses is owed, in part, to the
intuitive appeal of their shared claim that the concepts of autonomy
and identification are to be analyzed in terms of hierarchies of
desires, such that it is a necessary condition for a person to be
autonomous with respect to (to identify with) a desire that moves
her to act, that she desires that this desire so move her. (Conversely,
on these analyses, a person will not be autonomous with respect to
a desire that she is moved by, she will not identify with it, if she
does not want to be so moved.) Despite the intuitive appeal of these
analyses, however, Irving Thalberg has argued that they should be
rejected. This is because, he argues, a person who is forced to perform
an action by being subjected to duress of a certain degree of harshness
will desire to be moved by her desire to submit. Thus, he continues, the
proponents of hierarchical analyses of autonomy and identification will
be forced to hold that such a person acted willingly, and did not suffer
from any impairment in her autonomy. This, Thalberg concludes, is so
counterintuitive as to justify rejecting hierarchical analyses.