 Samuel Scheffler (2004) also attempts to settle the moral significance of the distinction between doing and allowing without offering an account of the distinction. He argues that: “despite the lack of consensus about which candidate is to be preferred, our practice of treating one another as responsible agents requires us to make some distinction of this kind” (Scheffler 2004, 216). Scheffler’s paper is rich and correspondingly difficult to interpret. However, the main argument seems to consist of two parts. In the first part, Scheffler argues that to hold oneself and others to moral requirements, one must already (a) draw a distinction between what one does and what one merely allows (or some other similar distinction) and (b) treat this distinction as morally important. To hold oneself to moral requirements involves seeing oneself as having reason to act in one way rather than another. One must therefore see oneself as an agent who is charged with the task of regulating one’s conduct in accordance with reasons. However, regulating one’s behavior is something one does, not something one merely allows to happen. Thus to hold oneself to a moral requirement is to attach a special importance to, and accept special responsibility for, what one does (Scheffler 2004, 220–227). In the second part, Scheffler argues that this distinction in moral significance needs to be included in the moral requirements themselves: i.e. the set of requirements we hold each other to must draw a distinction between what the agent does and what she merely allows. Scheffler argues that holding oneself to a set of moral requirements which require one to make optimal use of our causal opportunities is unstable. Such a set of moral requirements would require a purely instrumental view of the agency of oneself and others: we assess conduct purely in terms of whether it produces the optimal available outcome. However, holding oneself and others to moral requirements involves adopting a non-instrumental view of agency: (1) The reasons one has to regulate one’s conduct must be non-instrumental; (2) Holding oneself and others to moral requirements involves seeing failure to live up to such requirements as meriting responses such as blame. Because whether blame is merited is not settled by whether it would produce the best outcome, this requires us to recognise non-instrumental reasons (Scheffler 2004,  227–236).[6]