Pinocchio turns into a real boy at the story’s end not because he has absorbed some Kantian sense of duty, but because his slow-growing love for the blue-haired fairy and Geppetto compels him to care for them in their sickness and old age. In other words, he learns to obey them because his love for them singles them out as people worth listening to. This is Collodi’s answer to an inescapably human dilemma: to whom do you listen when you are surrounded by warring factions and have not yet developed a will of your own?