 This very quickly leads to an awkward question, though. Nagel drew his distinction in terms of principles which incorporated his conception of universality. For Nagel’s principles were universally quantified generalizations which held that whenever an agent can promote a certain sort of state of affairs there is reason to do so. So a different way of understanding ‘the general form of a reason’ or as one might prefer to put it, the principle corresponding to the reason, is needed. Fortunately, there is an alternative conception ready to hand. As Sean McKeever and Ridge argue elsewhere (see McKeever and Ridge 2006) there is a species of hedged moral principle which is compatible with the particularist’s holistic conception of reasons. McKeever and Ridge call these ‘default principles’, and they are well situated to make Nagel’s principle-based distinction available even to as hardy a particularist as Jonathan Dancy. As background, recall that on the holistic conception of how reasons work, what is a reason here may be no reason at all or even a reason with the opposite valence elsewhere. So for example, the fact that it would give a father pleasure is a reason for his son to give him a kiss on the cheek but that very same consideration (that it would give him pleasure) may be no reason at all for him to watch a snuff film. Intuitively, the status of the fact that it would give him pleasure as a reason is ‘defeated’ in the latter case by the fact that the pleasure would be sadistic (or an expression of depravity, or whatever). Holists therefore call such facts ‘defeaters’. This is also compatible with what holists call ‘enablers’—facts which are necessary for some other fact to function as a reason. In fact, distinguishing enablers from reasons also arguably helps block another challenge to the distinction between agent-relative reasons and agent-neutral reasons, namely that all reasons must make some reference to the agent because there being a reason implies that the agent is able to perform the action. This objection could be blocked by characterizing this back-reference as trivial, but one might instead insist that the agent’s ability to perform the action is an enabling condition rather than part of the reason itself; see Ronnow-Rasmussen 2009 for an argument along these lines. In any event, with this machinery in hand, default principles can help craft a version of the agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction that everyone (or just about everyone) can live with.