 The “impersonal standpoint”, as Nagel conceives it, is a view of the world from outside it, one that deprives one of information about which individual in that world one is. (It is, in the phrase Nagel chose as the title of his 1986 book, The View From Nowhere.) From this perspective, one need not be a utilitarian or consequentialist—one need not maximize the good, but can abide by the constraints of principles of the right. But certain principles are ruled out from the impersonal standpoint: egoism is, as well as any other principle that gives one individual or group a reason not shared by all others. For example, if someone has reason to avoid pain, that must be because pain—anyone’s pain—is to be avoided. So, it cannot be the case that although I have a reason to avoid pain, others are permitted to be indifferent to my plight, as if that pain were not an objectively bad thing, something that gives only the person who feels it a reason to oppose it. Nagel called such reasons “objective”, as contrasted with “subjective”. Parfit, in Reasons and Persons (1984), speaks instead of “agent-relative” and “agent neutral” reasons, and subsequently Nagel himself adopted these terms. The critique of egoism in The Possibility of Altruism rests on the thesis that all genuine reasons are agent neutral.