One of my roommates and a good friend came back from Christmas break very quiet. When I asked her about her vacation, she said that she’d spent most of it with her younger cousin, who she hadn’t seen in a few years. It turned out that, somewhere in that time her cousin had gotten into a bad way- bad drugs, bad friends, and no drive to get out- and my friend’s family had asked her to convince her seventeen year old cousin to go to college. The cousin didn’t want to hear anything on the subject. My friend was crushed.

“You can’t change people’s minds for them,” I said, tentatively. “Maybe she just needs a little more time.”

“We’ve started a book club,” my friend replied.

The explanation was this: when it became clear no lecture or advice would be heeded, my friend had lost a great deal of hope. The book club, shared among the similarly aged cousins, was the one good thing her cousin admitted to wanting for herself. It isn’t rehab or college or what the family asked of her, but it was something purely good she could do for cousin and she thought that weighed out the most.

I think is a good example of agent-centered deontology.