There are fairly obvious reasons that preventing someone from achieving their desires is immoral. But is it also immoral to influence just what those desires are (e.g., through advertising)? Do we have rights, not only to pursue our goals, but to have goals which are autonomous (so to speak) from external influences?

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Perhaps you're thinking that frustrating someone's desires harms them or makes them worse off and is, therefore, always objectionable. Even if that were true, many would think that we should care not just about people's welfare but also about how we treat them. For instance, many would claim that we have a duty to respect others and that part of respecting them is treating them as autonomous agents capable of making their own decisions on most matters. But then manipulating the way others form their preferences in ways that bypass their agency fails to treat them as autonomous and so fails to show proper respect for them. So we might think that we should care not just about other people being able to satisfy their preferences but also that their preferences were formed in the right sort of ways.

Indeed, I'm not sure that preference satisfaction, per se, is important, in part because I doubt that preference satisfaction, per se, contributes to anyone's welfare. I don't think that we should be concerned about preference satisfaction independently of the content of the preferences and the conditions under which they were formed. If Jones only desires to collect lint, I'm not sure I have much reason to care about the satisfaction of her desires. Or if Jones only wants to become a hockey player, because she's been brainwashed by the Toronto Maple Leafs to have this desire, then I'm not sure I should be especially concerned to satisfy it. But then someone like me might think that there is actually more reason to be concerned about whether a person's preferences have been properly formed than with whether their preferences have been satisfied or not, or, more accurately, that our reasons to be concerned about whether someone's preferences have been satisfied depend, in part, on the conditions under which they were formed.

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